Apple has finally released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Boinx Software will provide updates of our products over the next couple of days to ensure full compatibility. Here is an overview of the current status and immediate action items:

• General Issues — All products using the built-in Kagi store (iStopMotion 2, FotoMagico 2 and Mouseposé 2) have an issue with printing and saving the receipt for your purchase. We will provide updates as soon as we receive a new module from Kagi. You can purchase licenses and you will receive an email with all relevant purchase data from Kagi.
• iStopMotion 1.x and 2.x — Both iStopMotion 1.10.3 and iStopMotion 2.0 already work nicely on Mac OS X Leopard. A maintenance release (2.0.1) resolving a few minor issues discovered after 2.0 will be out soon. If you are still using one of the FC versions of iStopMotion 2.0, this is the time to update to 2.0 final. Update: We have just identified a problem with printing flip books. Updates will follow.
• FotoMagico — FotoMagico 2.1.3 and up work nicely. If you are using any earlier version you need to update to version 2.1.3 before upgrading to Leopard.
• Mouseposé — Mouseposé 2.5.2 solves a cosmetic issue with the TalkThrough feature.
• iVeZeen — iVeZeen generally works great on Leopard. However, there's one caveat: When you record very short movies (only a few seconds long), it sometimes happens that the files end up being 2 GB large, even though the only should be a few MB. We never saw the problem when recording longer movies with more than 30 seconds. This seems to be a problem rooted in QuickTime and we are working with Apple to resolve it ASAP.

We have also released a number of Quartz Composer Patches. In general, Quartz Composer Patches developed for Tiger do not work on Leopard. This is due to good changes in the Programming Interface that make Quartz Composer Patches on Leopard much better.

• Line — The Line patch is no longer needed as Leopard now comes with an equivalent. Boinx Line 1.0 will remain Tiger only.
• SetStructureMember — SetStructureMember 1.0 is Tiger only. SetStructureMember 2.0 beta should work on Leopard and unless there are issue reports we will soon release it as final.

Those of you working with the current seeds of Leopard and Quartz Composer will enjoy this new version of Set Structure Member.

This is the first of our patches rebuilt from the ground up for Leopard compatibility. Watch for more to come.

Due to a change in Quartz Composer you now have to explicitly set the type of the input you want to modify. Except for that change please refer to the original 1.0 post.

As we can only test our work on beta software, this patch is also considered beta quality. Please give us feedback on usefulness, bugs, ideas, ...

Boinx_SetStructureMember_2.0b1.zip
Zipped Directory, 128 KB - for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

With our largest company booth ever, we will be a the NAB 2007 in Las Vegas, April 16th - 19th. We will be in the vast central hall, on the Bavarian Pavillion, Booth C8828J. We will be showing a preview of iStopMotion 2 and cool things with Quartz Composer. As usual, watch for pictures on our Flickr photostream and for news on this weblog.

Ian Grant, Lecturer in Digital Art at Thames Valley University, has posted a couple of very innovative and interesting Quartz Composer related projects on his website:

• Quartz Composer and the Nintendo Wii Remote - QCWii a demo application (with source) making use of the open source "Darwiin-Remote" framework and a Nintendo Wii controller.
• Digital Puppetry Project Using Quartz Composer - involves chroma keying and other elaborate techniques.
• Movie Time-line Thumbnail Viewer
• Tiger Reflections Patch Version 2 - Can be turned into a Final Cut Pro plugin using FxFactory.
• Iris Transition
• Aqua Style Circle

Very cool stuff!

Set Structure Member is a Quartz Composer modifier patch and can be used to do two things:

1. Create a structure from scratch or
2. Modify an existing structure.

Quite a few built-in patches in Quartz Composer work on structures or deliver structures as output. There are also patches to get data out of structures, e.g., Structure Key Member. However, we felt it a limitation that there is no way to create or (programmatically) modify a structure inside Quartz Composer compositions. This is why we created a custom patch for doing exactly that. Look at the bundled demo composition for a simple example.

Quartz Composer is doing a lot of cool things, but, curiously, it can't draw a simple line. Because we needed it for a project, we created a patch to draw a line. So, with great pleasure, we present you with Boinx Line Patch 1.0. Boinx_Line_1.0.zip
Zipped Directory, 168 KB The Archive includes installation instructions and more info in the Read Me file and a couple of sample Quartz Compositions. You can see demo movies of these here: