For me, the coolest new feature of Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” is an application called Quartz Composer included with ‘Developers Tools’. It allows the user/developer to create patches for the real time generation and manipulation of images using the new Core Image engine via a visual patch based interface.
Quartz Composer shares much of its interface style and function with its predecessor PixelShox, an OpenGL based real time video application a mate of mine Khalid has been using for vj work for a while now. While it is no longer being actively developed (its developer has taken a full time position in the computer graphics field *cough* at apple *cough*), it’s worth a look if you have a Mac and have not moved to 10.4 yet.
Like PixelShox, Quartz Composer has a wide array of live inputs such as mouse and keyboard tracking, MIDI, audio and video inputs. One new input featured in Quartz Composer which has caught my eye is RSS processing using the new Safari RSS engine. While a more generic XML parser would have been preferable I’m sure I can have a lot of fun with RSS alone 
Quartz compositions may be incorporated in ‘real’ programs with Cocoa bindings and interfaces built with the ‘inteface builder’ application, used as screen savers (one of the default screen savers included with 10.4 displays the current Apple News RSS feed in an ‘eye candy’ 3d flythrough) and, drumroll…. played in QuickTime Player in 10.4!
QuartzComps has popped up as a blog for sharing and discussing Quartz Composer patches, as has the Apple Quartzcomposer-dev Info Page mail list (see the Mailing List Archives too).
For more info on Core Image, Core Video and Quicktime 7 see this page of ArsTechnica’s excellent and in-depth review of 10.4 – Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger : Page 16
0 Responses to “Quartz Composer”