Quartz Composer was IMHO one of the coolest things to come out of Apple ~15 years ago in the early days of their Core Animation layer-based rendering framework. When I was first freelancing, I got a gig working on some displays for a large law firm and chose QC. Was able to do things like fancily display customer testimonials and the like, but have a Mac mini running things which had a shared folder that staff could just drop scans of letters in. It was the best of both worlds — amazing programmatic 3D rendering and Mac ease of use for the non-technical people.
I also used it briefly for some small about box effects in my apps, which allowed me to programmatically insert text or imagery based on the user’s registration or other variable data and just plug it into the inlets in the QC animation that was used.
It was basically a totally programmer-exposed motion graphics package. Too good.
The basic idea was that after launch, the app would use the NSWorkspace API to catch subsequent apps launching and fullscreen your Mac with an animation of the new app playing a guitar on stage, meanwhile the other apps already running had their icons in the crowd, dancing. The more apps you had launched, the rowdier the audience would get.
I used QC to create the animations with the placeholders for app icons and names, and then some variables related to crowd intensity. Then, at runtime, the app could plug in results from the NSWorkspace API to fill out those graphics and dial in the crowd response level.
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Quartz Composer was IMHO one of the coolest things to come out of Apple ~15 years ago in the early days of their Core Animation layer-based rendering framework. When I was first freelancing, I got a gig working on some displays for a large law firm and chose QC. Was able to do things like fancily display customer testimonials and the like, but have a Mac mini running things which had a shared folder that staff could just drop scans of letters in. It was the best of both worlds — amazing programmatic 3D rendering and Mac ease of use for the non-technical people.
I also used it briefly for some small about box effects in my apps, which allowed me to programmatically insert text or imagery based on the user’s registration or other variable data and just plug it into the inlets in the QC animation that was used.
It was basically a totally programmer-exposed motion graphics package. Too good.
I completely forgot that I entered a coding contest using QC.
Ars Technica write-up: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/11/ic-7/
My page: https://codesorcery.net/tag/ironcoder.html
The basic idea was that after launch, the app would use the NSWorkspace API to catch subsequent apps launching and fullscreen your Mac with an animation of the new app playing a guitar on stage, meanwhile the other apps already running had their icons in the crowd, dancing. The more apps you had launched, the rowdier the audience would get.
I used QC to create the animations with the placeholders for app icons and names, and then some variables related to crowd intensity. Then, at runtime, the app could plug in results from the NSWorkspace API to fill out those graphics and dial in the crowd response level.
wikipedia says it is deprecated; what was it replaced with?
Sadly, I know of no replacement.