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Mac OS X has a number of APIs to create stunning real-time graphics. There is OpenGL, Core Video and Core Image to name some of them. These APIs help you to get the most out of todays machines and graphics cards.

With Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Apple introduced the Quartz Composer technology.

Wikipedia says about Quartz Composer:

Quartz Composer is a node based visual programming language provided as part of the Xcode development environment in Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger” for processing and rendering graphical data.

With Quartz Composer one can create incredible real-time graphics without the burden to learn all those graphics APIs. You arrange and connect elements with your mouse - it’s visual programming. Another bonus of Quartz Composer is the fact that they run on any mac without the need to install software.

But where there is light there is shadow.

Quartz Composition represents a very low layer over the mentioned graphic APIs. The good thing about that is that you could build nearly everything at this layer. The bad thing is that it becomes incredibly complex if you want to do more than just showing some text on the screen. Debugging or finding a missing connection can cost you a lot of time. (more…)

Steve Mokris has developed a Quartz Composer patch to use the Apple Remote Control. Very cool.

Today one has to hack Quartz Composer to find out how to develop patches. But let’s hope that the development of QC patches becomes much easier with an official API in the near future (autumn).

More exciting Quartz Composer news in a couple of days…