Now this is just plain cool. According to this hint published on MacOSXHints today, Keynote (Apple’s presentation software package) allows you to use Quartz Composer documents as slide elements.
For those unfamiliar with Quartz Composer, it’s essentially a visual programming tool for manipulating data via Core Image, Apple’s graphics processing framework introduced in Mac OS X v10.4. Using Quartz Composer, you can string together filters, graphical elements, and even external data such as XML, and create a standalone graphic library that can be used as a background, a screensaver, or (in this case) as a slide element. A good example of a Quartz Composer application is Apple’s RSS Visualizer screensaver, shown in this engadget post from March. It takes a while to wrap one’s head around the whole concept, but in the right hands it could lead to a number of subtle presentation effects — and quite a few not-so-subtle ones, I’m sure. (For more information about compositions, there’s a web forum up and running at quartzcompositions.com.)
Watch that CPU load, though. Although the Slide.qtz file referenced in the hint ran well enough on my G3 iBook, many of the other examples ran very poorly on the same computer. A G4 or G5, particularly one with a Core Image-compatible video card, would render those same scenes much more effectively. As a processor-independent framework, it will continue to be supported on the Intel Macs as well, of course.
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