Today, we are coming out of the closet with something which we have been working on for a couple of months: Quartz Compositions. Quartz Composer is a great tool by Apple with which you can create nice animations, for example for iTunes visualizers, templates for use with a number of applications, for example ChatFX which is a plug in for iChat, iMovie HD and others. Examples of professional tool are "Quartz Stacker" by bug.tv and Final Cut Pro. Many people create great screensavers, desktop backgrounds and even games (co-authored by Dominik Wagner of the CodingMonkeys and Achim Breidenbach of Boinx) with Quartz Composer. But we took it a step further and developed templates that can be filled with dynamic data. You can see the work we did in the TV shows of DAF (Deutsches Anleger Fernsehen). (Unfortunately, they stream in Windows Media format so you'll need Flip4Mac installed on your Mac.) Let's look at some examples: This is one of the less complicated examples. The data for the ticker at the bottom is provided by an RSS feed which is created by the content management system NCPower by NorCom which drives the whole solution. The editors at DAF can provide the text for the text box on demand. The most challenging part is to get the text to flow into the blue box since Quartz Composer has no flowing text tool. This chart is the most complicated thing we did, since you can't draw in Quartz Composer nor has it much to offer for reading in data. But the data had to come from a SQL database and be rendered into a chart in real time. If you want to know how we did it, contact us by email. In the future, we plan to work more with Quartz Composer, publishing a number of Quartz Compositions and Quartz Composer plug-ins. In order to stay tuned, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog, to our newsletter or to the RSS feed of the Quartz Compositions category.

A great product for use with iStopMotion, iVeZeen and a MacBook (Pro): The Huckleberry by Mungai Mirrors in the UK is a sort of periscope for the built-in iSight of the MacBooks. With it you can turn your MacBook into a camera for looking at things other than yourself. It comes bundled with iGlasses, another great product for use with iStopMotion and/or iVeZeen.

Here are a couple of pictures from the Salon Education in Bruxelles.

Customers of German Mac retailer Gravis can now get iStopMotion at a nice discount when they purchase a new Mac at Gravis. iStopMotion is now available in the MacPack.

Rocketboom visited the Children's Museum of the Arts where they use iStopMotion to create cool clay animations. (CMA Website) "We use top of the line Mac Laptops connected to cameras, we use iStopMotion which is just... you set it up and they press one." says Ian Savage in the movie, clearly excited about what his students can do.