Quartz Composer is a groundbreaking visual development tool that allows you to harness the power of the graphics stack in Mac OS X. Quartz Composer brings together a rich set of graphical and nongraphical technologies, including Quartz 2D, Core Image, Core Video, OpenGL, QuickTime, XML, RSS, MIDI and more.

The Quartz Composer Editor allows users to create motion graphics compositions without having to write code. Developers can use the Quartz Composer API to create plug-ins and to programmatically interact with compositions. Use Quartz Composer to prototype Core Image filters, build engaging screen savers, create custom user-interface widgets, make data-driven visual effects, and even drive live performance animations.

Articles

Working with Quartz Composer
Quartz Composer brings together a rich set of technologies for building powerful motion graphics compositions without having to write code. Read this article to build a sample composition.

Enhance Your Dashboard Widgets with Quartz Composer Compositions
With Quartz Composer you can produce rich animations for your Dashboard widget. This article shows you how to create a composition, and embed it easily in your widgets.

Documentation

Quartz Composer Leopard Release Notes

Summarizes changes to Quartz Composer for Mac OS X Leopard.

Quartz Composer User Guide

A guide to the Quartz Composer development tool. By reading this guide, you'll get an introduction to using the Quartz Composer editor and find out how to use it to create a composition.

Quartz Composer Programming Guide

A guide for developers on how to load, play, and control compositions programmatically from a Cocoa application. Describes how to use the QCView and QCRenderer classes, and how to include compositions in webpages and widgets.

Quartz Composer Custom Patch Programming Guide

Shows how to create custom patches and package them as Quartz Composer plug-ins. Includes examples of a variety of patches, from a simple string-processing patch to one that renders using OpenGL.

Quartz Composer Reference Collection

The Quartz Composer Reference Collection contains the User Guide and Programming References, Tech Notes, Q&As, and Sample Code to speed your development with Quartz Composer.

Technical Notes

Making the most of Cocoa bindings in Quartz Composer

The published inputs and outputs of a composition can be bound to UI controls, enabling user actions to automatically modify the inputs of a composition or for Quartz Composer to automatically update state in your application.

Getting images in and out from Quartz Composer compositions

Compositions can input and output numerical values, text strings or even images. This tech note describes how to send and retrieve images to & from a composition.

Efficiently using Quartz Composer compositions with QuickTime

QuickTime 7 natively supports Quartz Composition ".qtz" files, which means that any application that supports QuickTime movies could potentially handle Quartz Composer compositions.

Related Links

QuartzCompositions.com

A user community where authors can share compositions, tips and announcements related to Quartz Composer.

Mac OS X System Architecture

See how the graphics layer relates to other technologies in the Mac OS X System Architecture diagram.

Graphics & Imaging Topics
Core Animation Core Image Image Kit OpenGL Quartz Quartz Composer

Graphics & Imaging Downloads

Graphics & Imaging Headlines Technical Q&As: Driving OpenGL Rendering Loops 2008-12-23 Reference: Core Image Kernel Language Reference 2008-06-09 Guides: OpenGL Programming Guide for Mac OS X 2008-06-09 Sample Code: QTCoreVideo102 2008-06-06 Sample Code: QTCoreVideo103 2008-06-06

Graphics & Imaging Quartz Composer Reference Library Documentation Sample Code Technical Notes Technical Q&As

Quartz Composer Mailing List Discussion list for users of Quartz Composer.