Another OS X Hidden Gem: Quartz Composer
Mac OS X comes with a rich variety of tools, many of them undiscovered by users. Joel pointed out Grapher.app a while ago, but while I was at SIGCSE I ran into Steve Haymen. Steve has always struck me as an excitable guy, but when he showed me Quartz Composer, even his excitement rose beyond what I expected.
Quartz Composer is a graphical programming environment that lets users build applications (screen savers, or other things) that leverage alot of the internals of the Quartz system. The tool opens by asking you what kind of project you want to build, once you select a project you are presented with two windows, a preview window that allows you to see what you're creating as you build it, and a building pane that lists all the objects you have on the left, and a "drawing" pane on the right. You can drag and drop things on the left onto the drawing pane and then connect them together. Each object you put on the pane has a set of parameters, inputs and outputs, these connect together by dragging from the output of one to the input of another.
There are alot of resources beginning to emerge to make using Quartz Composer easier, I'm listing the ones I find interesting here:
- Apples Quartz Composer Introduction
- Quartz Composer Programming Guide
- Great Examples of what can be done by Futurismo Zugakousaku
- A site collecting interesting compositions
There's alot that can be done with Quartz Composer, it'd be interesting to see how it can be leveraged by scientific users. Have a look and reply with ideas!
