Programming made simple: Quartz Composer

I’ve been messing around with Cocoa for a few weeks now, mostly trying to make an OpenGL program. I’ve been making good progress, but man, it does get tedious. I’m not an OpenGL expert, so I’m constantly needing to look things up to make sure I’m on the right track.

Last week at an Apple ADC Tech Talk I saw an example of Quartz Composer.  I had only vaguely heard of Quartz Composer before and hadn’t really looked into it. It turns out that it is a very useful tool for building a neat GUI quickly, and is available as part of the Xcode tools. After getting home from the talk I played around with it and was able to build lots of cool demo-type apps very quickly.

And then… I discovered that it can be integrated into Cocoa apps very easily. I mean, I found this great tutorial on the Apple Dev site, and within 5 minutes I had a Quartz Composer (QC) window running in my test app along side my OpenGL test window. And not a line of code was written. The absolute bets news is that you can expose the internals of the QC window to the Cocoa framework and then manipulate the QC object from your program!

That just rocks so hard. Now I can focus on the mechanics of my program instead of worrying about the mechanics of OpenGL. Of course, the QC isn’t 100% efficient as hand tuned code, but for most of what I want to do with it, its perfect! Thank you Apple!

As a side note, if you are interested in doing Mac development and you aren’t a member of the ADC (Apple Developer Connection), you really owe it to yourself to go sign up for one of their free accounts and check it out. Its a great resource for all things Mac and OS X.