Caleb C. Cannon

I recently started playing around with Quartz Composer. Holy shit! This is an amazing application. After a few hours of messing around I’ve already managed to create some rather impressive screen savers. This application makes creating screen savers like these so easy that I can already see the overload of beautiful screen savers that’s going to flood the OS X screen space. So I’m not even going to bother trying to name them - I’m only going to give them descriptions. If you want to use these as screen savers drop them in your screen saver directory (OS X only)

• Black particle system on white bg with fade ( QTZ | MOV )
• Two particles with accumulated zoom blur ( QTZ | MOV )
• Fish in textured water (QTZ | MOV )

The last one is actually an experimental composition I created to see how easy it would be to create a cartoon with Quartz. As it turns out, it’s very easy. I am surprised a how small the community surrounding this application seems to be. A few google searches turned up a Wiki, a discussion board, the Apple documentation for QC, a developer (very good stuff here), and several blogs. That’s about it. The major users seem to be raver video jockeys of all things. This application could be used for all sorts of things though since, among other features, you can “publish” the inputs of the objects you render meaning you could design the entire graphics engine for a game using QC and program the game logic by hand. Now that I consider it, it would probably be *easy* to write a fairly advanced 3d engine using Quartz. I highly encourage any Mac developers out there to give it a whorl.