dpwolf/blog

Last year an update to QuickTime meant that Quartz Compositions could no longer access RSS feeds when played within the QuickTime Player application. This change was made to stop maliciously created compositions from sending information to remote sources without the user’s knowledge and was made in the name of security. It was very annoying as I was using Quartz Composer to create ‘network aware’ works which accessed RSS feeds, bringing in text and photos from various sources online.

Now with the latest Mac OS software update another of my favourite features has been taken away from Quartz Composer. With 10.4.7 a Quartz Composition cannot use the ‘Image with movie’ node to nest compositions within compositions. Previously I could create a composition, save it in a .mov wrapper and then import it back into another composition as I would a normal movie file. This would let me quickly build up complex interactive compositions, layer and manipulate them in custom Vidgets.

I came across this problem on the Quartz Composer Developer List a few days ago but it was only when I went to play some of my more recent compositions last night that I realised how much of a problem it is. I had come to rely on this feature.

Pierre-Olivier Latour writes that they had to disable this feature so as to prevent people from creating compositions which reference themselves, crashing the computer (another potential security risk). I understand the need to make the software as stable and secure as possible but it seems like there should be another solution which prevents the crashing without ruling out a whole set of features.

It should also be noted that similar features such as network access (including the parsing of remote XML files) and the nesting of movies within movies have been key features of the QuickTime architecture for years without any such restrictions.