_ _ _ ___ / _ \ / _ \ / _ \ | _ \ | |_| | | (_| | | |_| | | |_) | |_| |_| \__, | |_| |_| |_| |_| |___/ What is it? ----------- Agar is a type of sugar polymer obtained from seaweed and red algae. Agar becomes gelatinous in water and is primarly used as a culture medium for microbiological work. Agar is also the name of an open source GUI toolkit designed to work in an unobtrusive way, under a great variety of platforms. As of this release, Agar provides rendering backends for SDL and OpenGL. The OpenGL mode is preferred when hardware acceleration is available as it makes efficient use of it. The SDL mode is more efficient when only plain a framebuffer is available. The appearance of the GUI is completely customizable, and Agar's object system simplifies the task of creating new widgets. The Agar-Core library provides a simple object system which allows for a lightweight, consistent and portable form of object-oriented programming under multiple languages (the standard Agar libraries use ANSI C; bindings to Perl and Ada are provided for the Core and GUI libraries). The main features of the object system are inheritance, serialization, virtual functions / events and per-object management of resources such as timers and threads. A number of portability interfaces are also provided. In addition to these two main libraries, this distribution also includes Agar-VG, Agar-RG, Agar-DEV and Agar-MATH (see below). Documentation ------------- API documentation is provided in the form of traditional Unix manual pages and HTML. You can read the manual online or download the pages in HTML or printable format from the Agar website at http://libagar.org/docs/. Availability ------------ Download the most recent Agar version from the Agar home page at: http://libagar.org/download.html. Portability ----------- Agar is portable to many different platforms, including FreeBSD, IRIX, Linux, MacOS Classic, MacOS X, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and Windows. It has even been ported to various consoles such as the GP2x, Nintendo Gamecube/Wii, Sony Playstation2 and Nintendo DS. For the list of official ports, see: http://libagar.org/portable.html. License ------- Agar is freely distributable under the terms the "new" BSD license: http://libagar.org/license.html. How to contribute ----------------- See: http://libagar.org/contribute.html. Other libraries based on Agar ----------------------------- There are a number of useful libraries based on Agar. Some of them are bundled with this source distribution (Agar-VG, etc), but you will need to explicitely link your application against them in order to use them. Agar-MATH General-purpose math library (bundled, use `agar-math-config`) Agar-VG Vector graphics library (bundled, use `agar-vg-config`) Agar-RG Raster graphics library (bundled, use `agar-rg-config`) Agar-DEV Developer/debugging tools (bundled, use `agar-dev-config`) FreeSG 2D/3D graphics engine (http://freesg.org/) Edacious Electronics design (http://edacious.hypertriton.com/) CADTools Computer-aided design (http://cadtools.hypertriton.com/)