blog@cliffdweller

Today I decided to play with Quartz Composer a bit. It's an application that comes with every Mac. It's on the developer disk that's included with Leopard, so it may not be pre-installed on your Macintosh. You do have a copy on a DVD somewhere though, at least you do if you have a Mac.

Quartz Composer does fun things with images and videos, but it's a bear to figure out. Sure, it's easier than programming, but it's still pretty complicated.

That being said, here's a photo of the first Screen Saver that I wrote today in less than 30 minutes – without having a clue how to use the program.

What's so cool about that you ask? This is what's cool: That Xanadu-esque image of me taking a picture of my MacBook was a live video feed from my built in iSight camera on my laptop. Not only that, but it is on a rotating cube full of similarly processed but entirely different videos from the same feed. And it's all overlaid on another psychedelic visual generated from the camera. And now it's my screen saver (at least until I come up with something cooler).

I think that's cool. It's just playing around and not one single line of code or typing. wow. If you want a copy you can download the .zip file here, decompress it by double clicking on it and then drag the .qtz file into the Screen Savers folder inside your Library folder. Once you've done that, you can throw the .zip file in the trash.

Of course, all that's if you're using a Mac. If you're still forcing yourself to use Windows, then the first step, as always, is go here and buy a Mac.