Here’s a new version of the Xcode Template for Custom Quartz Composer Patches.

Changes:

• Rebuilt from scratch – no longer depends on QCJP’s work – and, by extension, the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” license. My Xcode Template, as of version 0.2, is released into the Public Domain. You are free to use it for whatever – commercial or non-commercial.
• QCJP’s headers were replaced with headers assembled directly from the QuartzComposer framework – now located in the QuartzComposer/ folder of the project. I’ve exported a few more headers than QCJP had constructed, so there’s some added functionality (namely, image input/output ports).
• The project now automatically assigns an icon to the patch bundle, and installs it in /Library/Graphics/Patches/ for you each time you build, for faster edit-build-test workflow.

Download the installer, version 0.2.

See the old version’s blogpost for some additional instructions and user comments.

Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a P5 Glove listed on eBay for $20. It arrived a couple of days later, and I started playing with libp5glove by Jason McMullan, Tim Kreger, and Ross Bencina. I built a very simple Quartz Composer patch around it.

I made a pair of patches to allow Quartz Composer to directly interact with the Phidget InterfaceKit 0/0/4 (relay outputs) and 8/8/8 (digital inputs + analog inputs + digital outputs).

I took Martin Kahr’s Apple Remote Controller Wrapper Class and built a Quartz Composer patch around it.

Get version 0.1 here.

Some notes:

• The events received from the Apple Remote are fairly strange to begin with.. You don’t simply get “key down” / “key up” events as I would have assumed, but instead get cooked events – for many of the buttons, holding the button down generates a different event than tapping it.
• My patch queues events, to ensure that each keypress is visible for at least one frame.

Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.

In addition to writing the inspector panels for custom Quartz Composer patches tutorial, I spent this weekend writing up some advanced custom-patch-development documentation and posted it on QC Wiki:

• QCPatch Configuration
• QCPatch Events
• QCPatch Methods

Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.

…in thirteen easy steps or your money back.

I use PINE as my email client.

“Why are you living in the late 1970s?” you ask.

But I’ll refrain from answering that question for now. And I’ll even refrain from correcting you in that PINE wasn’t available until 1989.

And, so, in fighting the ongoing war against email, I tend to spend a lot of my day interacting with Mac OS X’s Terminal.app. I SSH into one of our Fedora Core Linux servers and run PINE there.

The default keybindings used by Terminal.app leave a bit to be desired, however

Okay, so, now that the Game Research and Immersive Design Lab’s infamous first-responder project is finished, I’m getting back to work on Quartz Composer hackery.

Frustrated with the tedium of going through all the Xcode project files in a text editor and manually replacing all of the identifiers and filenames when creating a new Quartz Composer Patch, I decided to finally figure out how to create a new Xcode template.

Robert and I have been doing some consulting for an out-of-state mid-sized business recently.

We were analyzing the IT budget, and discovered this expenditure:

This was probably a pretty big job, even compared to the task of getting this business’s IT situation under control…

This is the second release of the Kineme Quartz Composer Plugins.

New this time:

• MIDI Global In Note :: This patch observes a specified MIDI Note number on a specified MIDI Channel, and outputs the Velocity and a boolean Gate signal.
• MIDI Global Out Note :: This patch, when Gate is rising true, outputs a MIDI note-on message on a specified MIDI Channel with the specified Velocity. When Gate is falling false, a MIDI note-off message is sent.
• Image With Composition :: This patch loads a Quartz Composer Composition (.qtz) file and renders it to an Image. (This is intended to replace functionality that was removed with the Mac OS X 10.4.7 update, as described by Roger Bolton and David Wolf.)
• File Type :: This patch provides the Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) of the specified file. For example, if the path to a QuickTime movie is specified, File Type outputs “com.apple.quicktime-movie”.

Get them here: http://softpixel.com/~smokris/widgets/quartzComposer/kinemePlugins/

Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.

And a second entry in the exciting-discoveries-late-last-night file:

QCRegisterPrivatePatches

Enables dozens of new CoreImage kernels, the previously-described hidden patches, and a few as-of-yet-unseen patches.

Some further string-hunting in the Quartz Composer framework has revealed an interesting value:

QCShowPrivatePatchSettings

It looks like Quartz Composer is reading a value with this key from the global user defaults repository.

In fact, enabling it by bringing up Terminal and typing

defaults write -g QCShowPrivatePatchSettings 1

causes Quartz Composer to present some additional options for well-known patches.

Tonight we had a short conversation with Laurie Anderson after she performed as Denison University’s 2006 convocation.

Melinda approaches Laurie Anderson.

Laurie Anderson: Hello.

Melinda: Hi! I’m Melinda.

Laurie Anderson shakes Melinda’s hand.

Melinda: And this is Steve.

I wrote a few new patches for Quartz Composer.

MIDI Global Output CC :: This patch, when triggered, outputs a MIDI Custom Controller message on a specified MIDI Channel to all MIDI outputs.

MIDI Global Input CC :: This patch observes a specified MIDI Custom Controller on a specified MIDI Channel, and outputs the Custom Controller Value and a Value-changed trigger. Unlike the “MIDI Controllers” patch that comes with Quartz Composer, this patch doesn’t require the user to manually select the “Observed MIDI Sources” individually for every controller/computer combination - so you’re free to take your composition to a different machine and/or controller and jam without needing to hack the composition.

String With File :: This patch reads a file into a string.

String With URL :: This patch retrieves a URL into a string.

Document Info :: This patch returns some information about the zeroth Cocoa NSDocument.

Get them here: http://softpixel.com/~smokris/widgets/quartzComposer/kinemePlugins/

Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.