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I enjoyed reading this. I knew of quartz composer but I never did anything with it. I love visual tools and I think they are underutilized today. I cut my teet

I enjoyed reading this. I knew of quartz composer but I never did anything with it. I love visual tools and I think they are underutilized today. I cut my teeth in ~2005 with Houdini[0] and Fusion[1] which are both heavily graph / node based (and procedural). Most recently I have been rekindling my love for visual programming and flow based programming and plan to spend some time in January and February doing more research around flow based programming for infrastructure management. I plan to get this sort of info published on my website which I have neglected for half a decade or more but if you are interested in visual programming you might enjoy checking these out: Unit from Samuel Timbó: https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit https://ioun.it/ https://ioun.it/ A video of me exploring what I figured out about it (while also learning to stream) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwknTfGVDq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwknTfGVDq8 Behave-Graph from Ben Houston: https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph And the products I learned so long ago [0] Houdini https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/ https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/ [1] Fusion https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion

vegetablepotpie 4y ago
I played around with Quartz Composer when I had my Macintosh. It was neat finding an obscure app deep in the directory structure that you could use to create interesting visuals. It was like my little secret. I found out you could use it to create screen savers and iMovie effects. It provided a lot of opportunities to tinker. The one thing that was annoying was that it didn’t offer a lot of control over the final visuals. I was used to Flash giving you frame by frame control, which you did not have in Quartz Composer. You could create some cool effects, have some interactivity, but it seemed very limited and niche.
incanus77 4y ago
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.
- appleflaxen 4y ago
  wikipedia says it is deprecated; what was it replaced with?
  - incanus77 4y ago
    Sadly, I know of no replacement.
- incanus77 4y ago
  I completely forgot that I entered a coding contest using QC. Ars Technica write-up: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/11/ic-7/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/11/ic-7/ My page: https://codesorcery.net/tag/ironcoder.html 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.
rzzzt 4y ago
I had a brief encounter with Natron, but could not really understand what is going on in it: https://natrongithub.github.io/#features https://natrongithub.github.io/#features
runlaszlorun 4y ago
Oh cool. Some interesting stuff in there thanks for posting.

vegetablepotpie 4y ago

I played around with Quartz Composer when I had my Macintosh. It was neat finding an obscure app deep in the directory structure that you could use to create interesting visuals. It was like my little secret. I found out you could use it to create screen savers and iMovie effects. It provided a lot of opportunities to tinker. The one thing that was annoying was that it didn’t offer a lot of control over the final visuals. I was used to Flash giving you frame by frame control, which you did not have in Quartz Composer. You could create some cool effects, have some interactivity, but it seemed very limited and niche.

incanus77 4y ago

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.

appleflaxen 4y ago
wikipedia says it is deprecated; what was it replaced with?
- incanus77 4y ago
  Sadly, I know of no replacement.
incanus77 4y ago
I completely forgot that I entered a coding contest using QC. Ars Technica write-up: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/11/ic-7/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/11/ic-7/ My page: https://codesorcery.net/tag/ironcoder.html 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.

rzzzt 4y ago

I had a brief encounter with Natron, but could not really understand what is going on in it: https://natrongithub.github.io/#features https://natrongithub.github.io/#features

runlaszlorun 4y ago

Oh cool. Some interesting stuff in there thanks for posting.