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1. Quartz compositor mac os x#
2. Quartz compositor pdf#
3. Quartz compositor software#
4. Quartz compositor code#

Some folks think this looks like a muddy mess (I personally like seeing the items) and that’s a matter of taste. Behind the inactive window labeled “Creativepro,” you can see the top of a custom and an ordinary folder icon on the desktop and to the right the outlines of several round buttons. As you can see, there’s a drop shadow on the front-most window, adding to its weight on the screen. These graphical layers are also very evident when a window is minimized in slow motion into the Dock.įigure 1: Here’s a screenshot of the overlap of several windows on my desktop. With even a couple of open windows on the screen, it’s easy to see the outlines and shadings of buttons and other window elements through the translucent title bars of inactive windows. The result of Quartz’s window server is obvious after just a few moments looking at OS X’s Aqua interface. Apple calls this a “switch model” because the pixels displayed belong to one window or the desktop and switch immediately when moving from one window to another. These OSes simply track the top-most window and display it to the user.

This approach is much different than the windowing systems of previous Mac OSes, Windows, or Unix, Rosenthol added.

Quartz compositor pdf#

Leonard Rosenthol, chief technology officer of a PDF consultancy called PDF Sages, compared the action of the OS X window server to a painter, who “mixes color on top of color until the one on top wins.” Apple calls this a “video mixer model.” As the windows are layered on the screen, the manager recalculates, or recomposites, each pixel on the screen, still taking into consideration what’s underneath. Some programmers call this the Quartz Compositor, since it takes the information from the rendering component and writes it to the screen.

Quartz compositor software#

A software controller, called a “service” in Unix lingo, tracks the contents of each window on the screen, pixel by pixel, retaining any information about translucency (the good old alpha channel) and anti-aliasing data for text. Quartz handles windows on the screen (please note the lower case “W” here) differently from other computers. Much more technical information can be found in the Graphics and Windowing Environment section of Apple’s developer website. Quartz has two main parts: a Core Graphics Services component that keeps track of each window and its contents, and a Core Graphics Rendering component that decides what goes inside each window. This vector-based architecture provided users with a more accurate relationship between the image on the screen and its eventual transition to the printed page. Later, NeXT licensed Adobe’s Display PostScript interpreter for its OS.

Quartz compositor code#

Until then, applications developers were responsible for providing all of that fundamental code and many of them did things differently.

Long ago, the Mac introduced a then-revolutionary approach to computer graphics: QuickDraw, a set of standard routines that developers could use for their applications to handle text, vector graphics and bitmapped images, and then send them to the screen and output devices. These features echo steps taken by Apple and NeXT in earlier operating systems. Quartz distinguishes itself from Windows computers and even graphics workstations through its handling of layered color information and the internal use of an independent imaging model, in this case, PDF. Here’s a (very) brief discussion of the technology as well as its implications for users and developers of professional graphics creation applications.

We see its graphics bells and whistles reflected in the Aqua interface, but how much do you really know about the fundamental underlying technology in Quartz? For example, did you know that PDF is at the core of Apple’s next-generation operating system? Or that its desktop interface uses layers, just like a photo-editing application? Jaguar, the mind wanders to related subjects, such as Quartz, the imaging model used in OS X.

Quartz compositor mac os x#

Watching the countdown timer in anticipation of this weekend’s release of Apple Mac OS X v10.2 update, a.k.a.