Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Dan Wood is co-owner of Karelia Software, creating programs for the Macintosh computer. He is the father of two kids, lives in the Bay Area of California USA, and prefers bicycles to cars. This site is his weblog, which mostly covers geeky topics like Macs and Mac Programming.

Useful Tidbits and Egotistical Musings from Dan Wood

Categories: Mac OS X · Cocoa Programming · General · All Categories

Tue, 08 Mar 2005

A Really Cool Core Image Tool

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Yesterday I mentioned we are using Core Data and Core Image in our application in development. As it turns out, Apple posted a new article yesterday about Core Image. I glanced at it briefly, but since we have seeded version of Tiger, I expected nothing new.

But then I noticed a mention of a tool that comes with Tiger at the bottom of that page, called Quartz Composer. It's really cool. Obviously I can't really describe what it's all about, but I can quote Apple's page, and you can look at their screenshot!

coreimage-quartzcomposer.jpg

Another tool for exploring the abilities of Core Image is Quartz Composer, shown to the left. It allows you to combine Core Image filters with a rich set of graphical and nongraphical technologies, such as OpenGL, QuickTime, and RSS. Compositions created with Quartz Composer can be run standalone or can be incorporated into other applications. You can also save Quartz Composer compositions as screen savers.

So you can incorporate the creations you make with Quartz Composer into other applications, really? It turns out that this is exactly what we need for our application. So right now I'm exploring Quartz Composer and trying to figure out how to really make good use of it — it's powerful and since it's more of a developer tool than a user tool, it's not as easy to use as, say, iTunes!

(If there are other Mac developers running Tiger who are also getting up to speed with Quartz Composer, I'd love to hear from you!)