Those of you working with the current seeds of Leopard and Quartz Composer will enjoy this new version of Set Structure Member.

This is the first of our patches rebuilt from the ground up for Leopard compatibility. Watch for more to come.

Due to a change in Quartz Composer you now have to explicitly set the type of the input you want to modify. Except for that change please refer to the original 1.0 post.

As we can only test our work on beta software, this patch is also considered beta quality. Please give us feedback on usefulness, bugs, ideas, ...

Boinx_SetStructureMember_2.0b1.zip
Zipped Directory, 128 KB - for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

With our largest company booth ever, we will be a the NAB 2007 in Las Vegas, April 16th - 19th. We will be in the vast central hall, on the Bavarian Pavillion, Booth C8828J. We will be showing a preview of iStopMotion 2 and cool things with Quartz Composer. As usual, watch for pictures on our Flickr photostream and for news on this weblog.

Ian Grant, Lecturer in Digital Art at Thames Valley University, has posted a couple of very innovative and interesting Quartz Composer related projects on his website:

• Quartz Composer and the Nintendo Wii Remote - QCWii a demo application (with source) making use of the open source "Darwiin-Remote" framework and a Nintendo Wii controller.
• Digital Puppetry Project Using Quartz Composer - involves chroma keying and other elaborate techniques.
• Movie Time-line Thumbnail Viewer
• Tiger Reflections Patch Version 2 - Can be turned into a Final Cut Pro plugin using FxFactory.
• Iris Transition
• Aqua Style Circle

Very cool stuff!

Set Structure Member is a Quartz Composer modifier patch and can be used to do two things:

1. Create a structure from scratch or
2. Modify an existing structure.

Quite a few built-in patches in Quartz Composer work on structures or deliver structures as output. There are also patches to get data out of structures, e.g., Structure Key Member. However, we felt it a limitation that there is no way to create or (programmatically) modify a structure inside Quartz Composer compositions. This is why we created a custom patch for doing exactly that. Look at the bundled demo composition for a simple example.

Quartz Composer is doing a lot of cool things, but, curiously, it can't draw a simple line. Because we needed it for a project, we created a patch to draw a line. So, with great pleasure, we present you with Boinx Line Patch 1.0. Boinx_Line_1.0.zip
Zipped Directory, 168 KB The Archive includes installation instructions and more info in the Read Me file and a couple of sample Quartz Compositions. You can see demo movies of these here:

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.