mac
I swear I'll stop posting, I just had these three things and I didn't want to group them into one. With our Mac Mini still exhibiting that new car smell, I have been poking around at stuff here and there. I downloaded the current Developer Tools so that I can eventually pick up on one of my old projects and found something called Quartz Composer. Basically this thing allows you to make Quartz animations. Quartz is part of Apple's big graphics engine and is in many ways a major part of the core of it. One of the example projects is a screensaver. It even automatically saves it to your screensavers directory so that you can use the thing. This totally kicks ass!
Here's some background: I have, for a long while now, wanted to build a system whereby you could link modules together by inputs and outputs. These would basically just work on streams of data. You could have modules that would read files and modules that would read that data as say, an image, or as a sound, or whatever. That data could then be pushed through a module that would increase the volume of the sound or make an image monochrome. Lastly a module could write the resulting data to another file. This system would basically be a way to link filters together for any data type. Well, Quartz Composer comes really damned close to this. Plus their UI is sweet. Quartz Composer is basically just for graphics and provides all of the information that Quartz needs to run an animation. But it has potential - there are inputs for things like MIDI devices and you can write new modules. It's a short hop-skip-and-a-jump a way to having full audio input or you know, generic input. Sweet!
Here's some background: I have, for a long while now, wanted to build a system whereby you could link modules together by inputs and outputs. These would basically just work on streams of data. You could have modules that would read files and modules that would read that data as say, an image, or as a sound, or whatever. That data could then be pushed through a module that would increase the volume of the sound or make an image monochrome. Lastly a module could write the resulting data to another file. This system would basically be a way to link filters together for any data type. Well, Quartz Composer comes really damned close to this. Plus their UI is sweet. Quartz Composer is basically just for graphics and provides all of the information that Quartz needs to run an animation. But it has potential - there are inputs for things like MIDI devices and you can write new modules. It's a short hop-skip-and-a-jump a way to having full audio input or you know, generic input. Sweet!