OK not so much a discovery, more of a confirmation; I tried using plutil command line utility to change qtz binary plist files into standard xml files, and then editing them in SubEthaEdit (BTW I had to use SEE because with the qtz extension TextWrangler opened them as Movies). I then turned them back into binary plist qtz files and opened them in Quartz Composer - SUCCESS!

On a related note, I also tried opening the ASCII XML file - it opened in Quartz Composer without any complaint (TextWrangler's behaviour gave it away that this might happen.)

So what does this mean? (warning some of this is completely off the top of my head brainstorming and could well mean it's rambling rubbish!)

• Well, first it means that if I need to change the location of any of the hard coded assets, I can do Search and Replace very easily, which is awesomely useful.

• Similarly, I could potentially write a shell script that checked for the existence of the assets required by a quartz composer file.

• Obviously, because the file is loaded into RAM on load, if I open the file simultaneously in SEE and QC, and make changes in SEE, these are not reflected unless I do ‘revert to saved’ in QC (and to that I need to make some change in QC to allow that option to appear); So that's not hugely useful.

• The fact that the XML file seems to open and work just as well as the binary does beg the question, why is Apple using this format?

• There are probably all sorts of parameters and alterations you could make to the files outside of QC; in fact if you were very determined you could probably create whole QC files without even opening the quartz composer application.

• Perhaps in combination with a custom application, that constantly checked the file for updates, it could dynamically reload the content?

• Would it be possible to put the content of QC files into a database for instance; to dynamically generate them on the fly - you could then write a local web application for managing assets (he says as PHP/MYSQL developer - technology I understand!)

I'm sure that there is some mileage in this stuff. Will report more another time.

SteamSHIFT out.