It's funny how people burn out with software; when Konfabulator came out, there was loads of hype about what it could do and what you could achieve, but then interest seemed to wane as most of what came through seemed to end up being variations on a few decent ideas. Obviously this is the same with Dashboard.

Although there is still quite a lot of interest in Quartz Composer, on the surface it seems to be suffering from the same kind of problem, in that most of what I am seeing published, is variations on the RSS reader theme (with a few clocks thrown in for good measure).

Now, I really hope that this doesn't spell a slow down in interest for the application, because I really think it has huge potential for generating interesting graphics

Maybe the question I should be asking is “Is it merely a lack of inspiration on the part of erstwhile developers for it, that causes a piece of software to have a limited life-span, or does it more have to do with fundamental limitations in that software?”

Read on!

In the case of Quartz Composer I suspect that the QC developer community is still pretty small and therefore most of what is being produced is by new people dabbling, and that more serious users are just not publishing at the moment. However, I think there are a few areas that could be an issue down the line (by no means a definitive list and I'm well aware that some of these may be my ignorance rather than a missing or underpowered feature):

• Outputs: I don't think I am the only one who would love to see QC integrate further with other applications. For instance, it would be really good if it could act as a MIDI controller - with MIDI output as well as input.

• And on the topic of outputs, it would be awesome if within the QC app, you could specify where to output to. What I'd love to be able to do (possibly unrealistic but I can wish) is simultaneously output to my monitor AND to the firewire port so I can tape it onto DV or take it into a second Mac without having to go analogue.

• DV-In: this one is a fix request: just seems horribly flakey. I have tried using live video in a performance twice now, and once the camera has switched itself off or the link has been lost for any reason, you have to restart QC. Not an option live! So any way that it could auto re-connect when the feed is there again would be awesome.

• Internet connectivity: or something! Kind of goes with the MIDI out thing. If I want more than one Mac running QC or other apps, I'd like one QC composition to act as the master and the other computers as the slaves. Without decent network connectivity from within QC, it makes it very difficult. Whilst we are at it - how about a Webkit patch (just for fun!)

• Cocoa: It's way too much to expect most QC users to learn how to create a cocoa application to act as a wrapper for their composition, especially as most of the time those wrapper applications will be very straightforward. Perhaps a system where you can create an application from an extensible list of predefined application templates directly from within QC (like creating a projector in Macromedia Director).

• Extensibility and programming: For me, coming from a multimedia background, it is taking me some time to get my head around the way that QC does things. There have been loads of occasions when I have thought, this would have taken me minutes in Director using Lingo. It would be great if the javascript patch could be expanded (and perhaps converted at run time into a faster format?) to include programmatic generation of images, etc.

• Structures: Again from a programming starting point; it seems really difficult to create structures. Perhaps there could be some sort of patch that allowed you to create structures that could be then manipulated by both existing patches and also by javascript (automatically converting them into javascript arrays).

• 3D: Why is there not more of this stuff than there is? There is definitely more 3D stuff in PixelShox (which QC is based on). And I am aware there is a custom patch out there (but it doesn't seem to work hugely well). Just some simple renderers for 3D models in variable modes (flat rendered, wireframe etc.) would be really good. And better than that would be control of individual polygons.

• While we‘re on the topic of 3D, I’d love to see some stuff that makes working in a 3D environment more straightforward. QC seems to have quite a strange metaphor for it's working space - in terms of z depth and layering etc. It may just be me - but I do get very confused at times!

• Lastly, animation: I'd love to see some tools that allowed much greater control over the manipulation of shapes and objects over time.

Now I realise that some of these things might be unrealistic and that we may be getting into Motion territory, but these are just the areas where I have noticed limitations. Obviously limitations can force you to be more creative, but then, they can also stem the flow of creativity if you find you can't do something at all!

Finally, in all this what I would hate to see is anything that limited what you could do ‘live’. For me the ability to change my composition on the fly is what makes QC great!

SteamSHIFT out