SubscribeOn a negative front I’m pretty annoyed about Apple’s decision to disable a feature in Quartz Composer silently and with no consultation. In Mac OS X 10.4.7 it’s not possible for a Quartz Composition to load other compositions through an “image with movie” node anymore. This even applies to compositions that have been saved as movie files. On a practical basis this makes it impossible to use Quartonian Mixer to mix different quartz compositions on the fly. Yes I’m pissed off about this, something I have worked on for two years and given away for free so that people can learn from is now significantly less useful that it used to be. The reason given is security…. a quartz composition can crash the host player by attempting to load itself in an infinite loop.
Well, sorry, I don’t believe removing this feature was the only answer. Apple could of, and should of, consulted with developers about how many people use this feature and asked for feedback on solutions before silently removing it.
In the meantime I can crash Quartz Composer by javascript or using core image filter custom kernels. I am tempted to submit bugs showing examples of these so that Apple will be forced to remove the javascript and CI kernel nodes. See the point? QC is a programming language, it’s not possible to remove all possible crash situations without eliminating the usefulness of the language itself.
Some people have disputed this with me, they see a quartz composition as a data file which should never crash the opening application. I disagree, there is a strong history of Visual Programming Languages and when you compare QC to Max/MSP, VVVV or Pd/Gem it’s pretty easy to see it as a language that occupies a very clearly defined niche in computing science.
If you must sandbox QC do it only when a composition is played through the Quicktime API and allow us to live dangerously when a composition is run inside the QC application or embedded in a cocoa application.
My biggest problem with this is the total wall of silence that surrounds Apple. Developers have asked to be given more information about releases and changes in QC in point releases. We are told that Quartz Composer is an “under the radar technology”. I don’t know what that means or why it means we can’t be told when something might break our applications that we’ve spent many many long hours working on.
How about just a little more communication? Please?
This is my blog and I’ll be blunt if I want to 
Technorati Tags: Quartz Composer, Apple Developers, Cocoa
hear, hear. I’m pretty much at the point of dropping QC and learning max/msp or processing or the like, primarily because I have no idea what Apple are going to do with QC and when; will they ever release a plug-in API? What about MIDI-OUT? And so on. I don’t want to develop cocoa applications. And not only are we not moving forward but ehrn you spend time reading the QC list, the answer coming back time and time again is; it’s not possible.
The ability of QC to leverage core-image and so on is awesome; but in order to be really useful for the sorts of things people want to use it for, a little bit of communication (and a plugin api) would go a very long way.
Left by steamshift on August 1st, 2006