Snow day with Quartz

So what did I do on my first ever snow day? Well… made a snow man, went to the pub and found Quartz Composer on my new installation of OS X Leopard. 

Quartz Composer allows you to make things such as screen savers and visualizers for iTunes etc. The first thing I started off doing was following a really cool tutorial here that shows you how to create a slideshow based around an image you upload to it. It then shows you how to link the movement of your mouse to the image allowing you to move the image around when you move the mouse. This was pretty cool and only took me 10 minutes max!

So, my own project. Well I decided to go it alone, fly without a wingman, push the boat out and make an iTunes visualizer. I liked the audio inputs to shapes on the screen which would then move and changed color based on the beat and EQ of the music. Something that I thought was going to take me at least an hour or so again took only 15 minutes to get something that looked reasonably good on screen. The other thing that I really liked about this was that I could open the visualization straight away in iTunes and admire my handy work.

It’s an interesting concept because its almost a visual programming language. You move these ‘items’ around your palette, connecting their outputs to another’s inputs. This is like passing values or references between methods. You can then change the ‘item’s’ properties which is the same as variable manipulation. I do suppose that under the hood this is all it is, but it does allow the inexperienced user to produce something that is visually pleasing without an intimate knowledge of a programming language and it’s front end capabilities. 

It’s due to snow again tomorrow so who knows what I’ll find on my laptop to do then…

~ by jamssn on February 2, 2009.