Comment by donatj
1 day ago
Quartz Composer - Apple's "patch-based" visual programming environment. Drag out a bunch of nodes, wire them together, build a neat little GUI.
10+ years ago I'd regularly build all sorts of little utilities with it. It was surprisingly easy to use it to tap into things that are otherwise a lot more work. For instance I used it to monitor the data coming from a USB device. Like 3 nodes and 3 patches to make all of that work. Working little GUI app in seconds.
Apple hasn't touched it since 2016, I kind of hope it makes a comeback given Blender and more so Unreal Engine giving people a taste of the node based visual programming life.
You can still download it from Apple, and it still technically works but a lot of the most powerful nodes are broken in the newer OS's. I'd love to see the whole thing revitalized.
I loved quartz composer. It made it really easy to build all sorts of motion graphics. I’d see it used a lot at gigs to create audio-driven visuals. There was even a pretty cool VJ app built on it.
I’ve tried things like Touch Designer and Max MSP but they’re too heavy to just pick up and play with. QC was the right balance between simplicity and power.
> Quartz Composer
Have you looked at https://vvvv.org/ ? Maybe it's still comparatively too heavy but imho it's not that heavy (cf. touch designer and the likes). I want to play with it some more myself...