#SPEED UP COMPOSITION SCREENIUM MAC OS#

However, as the video effects in iChat in upcoming Mac OS releases should be Quartz Composer based and ASCII Projektor is as well, it may be possible to find a way to sneak the ASCII Projektor composition into iChat anyway. It would be awesome if you developed an iChat plugin for video chatting!Īs far as I can tell, Apple doesn’t officially support plugins for iChat. You may actually notice that you benefit of some of the other improvements when running ASCII Projektor in X.5. And Undo definitely is at the top of the list UI-wise. Nice try though.įred: I’ll try to get a bit into QC improvements when the time has come. Is the shot from the last scene in fight club? The Quartz Composer UI has seen considerable changes in 10.5 - it finally supports undo!

#SPEED UP COMPOSITION SCREENIUM LICENSE#

All in all, a great bit of fun if you ask me.įree fake license if you tell me where the shot above came from. It is based on Quartz Composer, it can process film files as well as your computer’s camera stream, it will let you use different fonts for the characters (only works well with monospaced fonts) and, as a bonus, we even threw in a few extra effects if you are so inclined.

So the idea to move ASCII Projektor to this new technology was born rather soon after playing with X.4’s graphics features.īut as things go, it took a while to get a computer that actually runs those things well, even more time to get into the programming language (or rather language subset) needed to write your own image kernels, even more time to actually implement things and finally another year to make a UI for it that doesn’t completely suck.īut we are through all these delays now, and I can present the totally re-vamped ASCII Projektor.

In addition to that it provides a quick graphics engine, QuickTime playback and numerous filters in one place. Despite its shortcomings (the Quartz Composer Application’s UI is PITA in X.4 and the rendering is rather unreliable both in speed and in quality across different machines, particularly with the crappy MacBook graphics chips), it’s still a rather interesting and fun bit of technology which application developers only slowly started to pick up. With Mac OS X.4 Quartz Composer was added to the system.

But it turned out that all the straightforward approaches to this gave us significantly worse performance than what the Terminal did, so we just stuck with the original command line tool for this little toy.

#SPEED UP COMPOSITION SCREENIUM CODE#

We tinkered a bit with Cocoa and hoped to create our own drawing code for this which could then easily use different fonts, allow the use of non-ASCII characters and be generally cooler.

While we made ASCII Projektor, we contemplated not using the Terminal as the Terminal application isn’t exactly made to draw things quickly and the frame rates you get aren’t too impressive. It’s a great toy, and an afternoon of tinkering and playing with AppleScript Studio later we had slightly extended that tool to support different window widths along with a GUI to comfortably play the films. A long time ago Steffen and me were excited to discover Apple’s ASCIIMoviePlayer sample code which produces a command line utility for playing QuickTime films as text in the Terminal.

Speed up composition screenium