October 27, 2005

AE 7.0 sneak peek

As reported on the AE list, there was a sneak peek of AE 7.0 by product manager Steve Kilisky at the Macromedia MAX show. AE7 is rumored to ship in Q4 2005.

Check out the Flash video linked above, in Day 2 (4th icon).

Silhouette Paint released

Silhouette Paint, a high dynamic range raster paint system, has been released. Silhouette Paint, an add-on to Silhouette Roto, offers non-destructive motion stabilized paint for image restoration, dust busting, and wire and rig removal. The plug-in version is "the first raster paint option for Final Cut Pro and After Effects"...Well except for AE's old Vector Paint filter.

October 17, 2005

What Is Quartz (or Why Can't Windows Do That)

O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter has an article on MacOS X Quartz by Matthew Russell. Here's an excerpt:

Quartz is the heart and soul of Mac OS X's graphics layer, which directly supports the defining features of the Aqua desktop experience. Quartz is largely based upon Adobe's PDF specification, but it has roots tracing all the way back to PostScript. The two defining components of Quartz are Quartz Compositor and Quartz 2D. Quartz Compositor is OS X's powerful window server, and Quartz 2D is the two-dimensional drawing engine that's often referred to as Core Graphics. Although Quartz 2D is accessible through the Application Services umbrella framework, Tiger introduced Quartz Composer: an alternative way to explore the power of Quartz through a powerful visual programming environment.