New: Quartz Compositions
Friday, November 17, 2006 - Permalink
Today, we are coming out of the closet with something which we have been working on for a couple of months: Quartz Compositions.
Quartz Composer is a great tool by Apple with which you can create nice animations, for example for iTunes visualizers, templates for use with a number of applications, for example ChatFX which is a plug in for iChat, iMovie HD and others. Examples of professional tool are "Quartz Stacker" by bug.tv and Final Cut Pro.
Many people create great screensavers, desktop backgrounds and even games (co-authored by Dominik Wagner of the CodingMonkeys and Achim Breidenbach of Boinx) with Quartz Composer. But we took it a step further and developed templates that can be filled with dynamic data. You can see the work we did in the TV shows of DAF (Deutsches Anleger Fernsehen). (Unfortunately, they stream in Windows Media format so you'll need Flip4Mac installed on your Mac.)
Let's look at some examples:
This is one of the less complicated examples. The data for the ticker at the bottom is provided by an RSS feed which is created by the content management system NCPower by NorCom which drives the whole solution. The editors at DAF can provide the text for the text box on demand. The most challenging part is to get the text to flow into the blue box since Quartz Composer has no flowing text tool.
This chart is the most complicated thing we did, since you can't draw in Quartz Composer nor has it much to offer for reading in data. But the data had to come from a SQL database and be rendered into a chart in real time. If you want to know how we did it, contact us by email.
In the future, we plan to work more with Quartz Composer, publishing a number of Quartz Compositions and Quartz Composer plug-ins. In order to stay tuned, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog, to our newsletter or to the RSS feed of the Quartz Compositions category.
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Gues(t) who is judging
Thursday, September 28, 2006 - Permalink
This week I get to be guest judge on the MyDreamApp contest. My post on the O'Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog brought in the most traffic so I won a spot.
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Welcome to the other side
Saturday, September 09, 2006 - Permalink
Presenting: The new Boinx Chronicles. We are using an interim design because we do not want to spoil the surprise of the new boinx.com ...ups. Well. A couple of housekeeping things to do before we can resume the regular programming: - Find out about RSS feeds for categories - Learn how to redirect the old RSS feeds Onward!
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Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...
Monday, September 04, 2006 - Permalink
I am currently in the process of switching Weblog software to Wordpress. This means for you that we will have much more content because finally everybody will be able to blog. We can bring back Comments and I might finally be able to figure out the Pingback thingy.
So, what is wrong with what we've got? (Which is the most excellent Blojsom.)
We switch to Wordpress because we are switching all of our tools to AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP). I do not have the time any more to keep track of all the other technologies. This move also means we can host the site on our hosted server which means it is going to be much faster and can handle more traffic.
So, farewell, Blojsom, you have been a friendly, reliable and exciting companion over the last two years.
Posting may be very slow while we do this transition.
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Oliver on Inside Mac Radio
Friday, August 25, 2006 - Permalink
While at WWDC in San Francisco, I joined Scott Sheppard, Sam Levin and Brad Wright at the Inside Mac Radio studio to record the August 12th episode. It was great fun. I thought it was a very professional setup. Click here to listen to the episode.
I was talking about FotoMagico 1.7 and the Apple Design Award.
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Not Boinx. No, definitely not.
Friday, August 25, 2006 - Permalink
That's not Boinx. Not even close.
How do people come up with names like that? ;-)
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Planespotting
Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - Permalink
Today, we tested the new Airbus A380 Super-Jet at Boinx Software Headquarters... Pretty impressive.
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Best Mac OS X User Experience Runner-Up: FotoMagico
Wednesday, August 09, 2006 - Permalink
Yeah! The team just accepted the Apple Design Award 2006 Best Mac OS X User Experience Runner-Up for FotoMagico.
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Team at WWDC
Monday, August 07, 2006 - Permalink
Boinx Software is at the Apple WWDC again this year. If you are there, say hello to any of us: Florian, Michael, Achim and Oliver (from left to right). The background of this picture is the "lovely" Fire Watching Tower atop of Mt. Tamalpais.
Lunch with Tony Blair
Tuesday, August 01, 2006 - Permalink
As Boinx Software grows, it becomes more important for us to take an interest in politics. So I enjoyed reading Jonathan Schwartz's account of his lunch with Tony Blair. An important point he makes:
So if you want to attract companies like Sun to your economy, focus on investing in education, in your students, and in your leaders. Focus on educating your policy makers as to why you're committed to education - not to build presitigious institutions, but to invest in progress, academic as well as economic. Focus on the value of broad based talent as a competitive weapon, don't be distracted by cost reducing labor."
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