I recentely stumbled across the Quartz Composer which happens to be a visual animation tool that comes with the free XCode Devkit for Mac OS. So I don’t really know how long it has been included in the Develepoment Kit but I’m quite impressed by its features and its concepts.
How does it feel?
It follows a visual programming paradigm like vvvv, so you drag nodes onto your screen and connect the different inputs and outputs together. The interface therefore looks like a combination of vvvv and Yahoo! Pipes.
What is it capable of?
It uses the power of the Core Services of Mac OSX for Animation and Image Manipulation. You can do timeline animation which is really a cool feature because you can design your Tweens as a graph. Then yout just plug the output of your Tweens to your sprites. Very simple!
What can you do with it?
One of the weak points of Quartz is the export features. As the Composer was intended to create sketches that can be included in Mac Applications you cannot really deploy your applications standalone. But you can use it to produce some interresting stuff:
- Live Visualizations
- Export Visualisation or Animations as Quicktime Movie
- Use it for Rapid Interface Prototyping to test Transitions and Animations
- Create Screensavers, iChat Filters, …
Did it…
I’v plugged together an Intuity screensaver to see how things can be achieved with Quartz. The sketch downloads the RSS Feed of this blog and animates the articles one by one on my desktop while my Mac is sleeping. You can use Quartz Sketches as Screensavers just by moving them into Library > Screen Savers. Feel free to download, use and remix it:
Conclusion
Quartz may be a good tool for visualization in the future depending on how Apple will continue to improve it. Right now it is a good starting point for creating animations on the Mac.
The Interweb is your friend – related stuff…
Zugakousaku – Very cool compositions (Good starting point)