Apple has been busily working to 64-bit-ify all of the frameworks they plan to continue supporting into the future (Snow Leopard and beyond). However, QuickTime is scheduled for some nice Cocoaification, so it didn’t get much 64-bit love. QTKit, the 64-bit impostor, pretends to be the 64-bit way forward, but unfortunately this is far from useful.

QuickTime is all C function stuff, rather verbose and boring. It’s also 32-bit only. The 64-bit front end on it is a framework called QTKit. However, 64-bit QTKit is little more than an impostor that secretly makes things messier during the 32-to-64-bit transition. (more…)

Cocoa’s NSSound provides a blindingly simple way to play back audio asynchronously, and even provides some metadata and control over how the audio is played back.

It uses the default sound device, by default. It gives you the ability to change the output device.

According to the documentation:

- (void)setPlaybackDeviceIdentifier:(NSString *)playbackDeviceIdentifier
	
Specifies the receiver’s output device.
	
playbackDeviceIdentifier
    Unique identifier of a sound output device.

That’s it. What is the “Unique identifier of a sound output device”? What format is this “Unique identifier”? How do I get a list of the “Unique identifiers” of the available output devices on my system? (more…)

In the wee small hours of this morning, Kineme Interactive Media released its first commercial product, QuartzCrystal.

QuartzCrystal is an offline renderer that turns Quartz Compositions into portable QuickTime movies. It supports 3rd party plugins, as well as patches that do not work in safe-mode-only environments (such as QuickTime Pro). It also supports software scene antialiasing, so if you have a Mac with plenty of RAM and a hard-core video card, you can make spectacularly beautiful renderings of your plugins, effects, and compositions.

Beside QuartzCrystal, the only other product that renders and encodes compositions to movies is Apple’s own QuickTime Pro, which doesn’t support plugins, unsafe patches, or antialiasing.

Lately I’ve been working on integrating (or, more accurately, attempting to integrate) the Python scripting language into some plugins for an application we develop plugins for. We’ve wrapped many libraries with varying levels of success, so this one wasn’t going to be much different. Or, so we thought. (more…)

The Kineme Quartz Composer patches now have a proper home at http://kineme.net/, including forums, bug reports, comments, and feature requests — complete with voting!

Along with the new site, a few new patches are available as well based on requests from users.

Making pop-up menus in custom Quartz Composer patches is actually surprisingly easy.

This release is only compatible with Tiger (10.4).
Please see kineme.net for Leopard-specific informations.

1. Set up a QCIndexPort input. QCIndexPorts provide values from 0 to whatever max you specify using - (void)setMaxIndexValue:(unsigned int)max;.
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