Quartz Composer is a development tool provided with Mac OS X Tiger (as part of the Development Tools package) for processing and rendering graphical data.
It was formerly known as PixelShox Studio, and there's a Yahoo! Group for it.
It is also the one thing that beats super glue for keeping eye candy nuts stuck to a Mac for hours on end.
Resources:
- Working With Quartz Composer
- Sam Kass's Blog has a number of interesting examples.
- More examples
- Quartzcompositions.com
- B-L-A-C-K-O-P - all sorts of useful image transformation kernels.
Tools:
- qtzrendang, an app for rendering compositions to movie files.
- qtzplayer, a command-line player to run compositions full screen.
- qtzplugin, a way to send inputs to a composition over the network.
- quartzcomposer-exporter, a way to record QT movies without dropped frames.
- rdqutils, a set of useful patches to import all sorts of data.
Notes:
I keep forgetting that plugins in Snow Leopard have to go into the ~/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Plug-Ins.