Quartz Composer

Thursday May 5th 2005 10:33 PM PST

Late last night Jason IMed me about a little app on Tiger. He just asked if i had played with the Quartz Composer. I had no clue what it was, and realized that i had not fully installed the Tiger dev tools. So he quickly sent me the app and i started playing around. He said I would shit myself, and i have to say that I DID. Now i have to admit i have no clue what i'm talking about here. I don't fully understand the full capabilities of the Quartz Composer. I do however know that from a Patch Library, i can drag drop different controllers that will do just about anything. I started with the real basics. I dragged an image to the editor, then a few Modifiers, then a Renderer. I quickly realized that every patch has parameters that can be linked to just about anything else. So from an image, you connect the image parameter to the input image of a modifier, then the output image to an input image of a renderer. So it doesn't make sense when I write about it, but the interface is so unbelievably simple. So Jason has pointed me in the direction of a few RSS screen-savers and such, and I realized how easy they were to build. Drop a RSS feed source, and type in a source URL. Then link the output to a few modifiers to get the output just right, and then finally to a renderer. I've spent a total of 2 hours playing, and have not really built anything serious, but this weekend i'm going to sit down with this and really dig in.