Welcome to Learning Quartz Composer! We guarantee this will be the most fun geek book you have read, and by the end your digital world will be a better-looking place. Whether you dream of live visuals, interactive installations, Cocoa apps, dashboard widgets, or extra awesomeness for your film and motion graphics projects, Quartz Composer will enable you to develop beautiful solutions in amazingly short periods of time.
With the introduction of Quartz Composer in Mac OS X Tiger, Apple delivered a very powerful and unique tool, and with each operating system upgrade it becomes better and better. Quartz Composer is like your graphics card’s special sauce; hidden away on your Developer Tools disk, it’s your Mac’s best kept secret.
Creating with Quartz Composer is superfast because it is a live, constantly rendering environment. Thus, if you make a change, you will see the result immediately, rather than having to wait for RAM previews or long renders. In performance environments, a Quartz Composer file can take live inputs from music or cameras, allowing for unique interaction and improvisation. Another massive advantage is that you don’t ever have to define your project dimensions, so you can work on them freely and later choose to output a video file to devices ranging from a tiny phone screen to a high-definition video editing program.
So if Quartz Composer is so great, why isn’t everyone using it? Well, there is a little bit more to the story. Quartz Composer is a graphical programming environment, which sounds scary enough to make most creative types run for the hills. When you add in an unusual (though highly usable) interface, you can see why it has remained in the dark. Fear not—we will break it all down into plain English and give you the confidence to do anything you want with this handy tool.
This book launches you directly into building and manipulating beautiful compositions. Each concept is introduced as part of a hands-on project, with video tutorial, steadily building your “qc-fu” and demonstrating/encouraging experimentation every step of the way. The projects start out very simple, and the first focus is always on beautiful visual feedback, so you know why you are learning what you are learning and want to explore the systems they are creating.