Coffee & Cocoa hot bits and bytes

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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…

Some time ago I wrote about the restrictions of bindings and the fact that custom cells often need more than one data element - see Data for a custom cell in a NSTableView. There were some very good comments on the article and also the request for a sample code.

So I took some code from Sofa Control and put together a sample project for download. The project has a class called ImageTextCell that is a subclass of NSCell and draws two text lines and an icon.

It works like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

I attended the WWDC conference the last years. Some things that did not change over the years were the quality of food and the fact that each year more and more enthusiasts came to San Francisco to get news from Apple.

On thursday of the conference week they put the attendees in buses to drive them to the Cupertino Apple campus. 10% of the attendees spent 3 hours to get into the company store to get a cool t-shirt while the rest enjoyed the food and drinks.

On this year’s WWDC it looks like things are changing. On the WWDC Events page you can read the following:

WWDC Bash in San Francisco Thursday, June 14, 2007
You’ve been hard at work all week, and now it’s time to unwind
and have some fun in downtown San Francisco.

Sounds like that the campus in cupertino is too small, or organization to complex for the large number of attendees.

What else could change at this year’s WWDC? The quality of food?

Update: Some thoughts about the change by Scott Stevenson.

There is a MacUpdate sales promotion for Sofa Control ongoing today (Tuesday 24th, April).

If you have a need for a license of Sofa Control for yourself or a friend or family get it today for just $7.99. That’s a 53% saving from the retail price of $14.90!

Use this link to get the special price.