
Origami - Design prototyping with Quartz Composer - vanwilder77
http://facebook.github.io/origami/
======
terhechte
Given the little commitment I see from Apple regarding Quartz Composer I
wonder if this isn't an opportunity to build a new, better Quartz Composer
with a stronger focus on UI Design and release it as an app. Actually, given
the current state of what's possible in the browser, I suppose most of that
should even be possible in a browser so that it runs on all platforms.

The things that come to mind that would not work in the browser are also the
things that UI designers hardly need like Midi, OSC, low level IO, Webcam (and
that even kinda works).

~~~
pavlov
I made an app called PixelConduit which is fundamentally a lot like Quartz
Composer, although the specific use cases ended up being rather different:

[http://pixelconduit.com](http://pixelconduit.com)

The app became free last year, and I've also been thinking about open sourcing
most of it, but haven't got around to it... (Well, some of the base libraries
are on Github, but that's as far as I got.)

The code base would probably work nicely for something similar to Origami. If
someone out there happens to be interested in building something new on top of
the PixelConduit code, don't hesitate to get in touch!

(The major reason why I didn't finish opening the code is that some of it is
quite old; there's lots of unused stuff lying around that should be cleaned
out before a public release. But I'd be happy to share the code privately.)

~~~
markkanof
Wow. I don't work in the video production space, but this looks really
powerful. Why did you end up making it free?

~~~
pavlov
Decreasing sales death spiral. There was some good word of mouth happening,
but too little to break the cycle. I wanted to prevent it from becoming
commercial abandonware.

The background story is that I kind of screwed up with v2 of the product. It
took years to develop and tried to answer every need that I had observed among
users... But I didn't quite realize that the answers I came up with were at a
level of abstraction that didn't directly solve those problems. The product
became an abstract toolset that can bend to almost anything, but integrating
it into a workflow requires a certain vision of how to harness those
abstractions.

In other words, I made a visual programming tool for users that were not
really programmers and had other things to do than learn the new stuff. I just
didn't understand the v1 users well enough, and they didn't get excited about
v2, so it lost the important thrust of existing users talking about the
upgrade.

------
9999
In the get started section, the background style you have doesn't seem to work
properly on Firefox (fine on Safari), so it appears as white text with a drop
shadow against an all white background.

Looks like an interesting tool though.

------
fullsailor
Excited to try this out. I showed my designer your blog post on how you used
Quartz Composer to sketch out your iOS app redesign. By itself, the Quartz
Composer is pretty intimidating.

One nitpick, the .pkg isn't signed and Gatekeeper is blocking it from running.

------
ibsathish
Thanks for sharing.

------
sinkasapa
Not knowing what Quartz Composer was, I was really hoping for an origami
design application. It would have been a lot cooler.

