Following the getting started on the Adobe Labs site Marc and I set about trying to setup Alchemy on Linux and OSX respectively. Cue much frustration and cursing! The guide given on the site is actually very straight forward and easy to follow, but (for the moment at least) following the guide will not mean you are ready to start playing with Alchemy.

Unfortunately, the symlinks in the Alchemy bin directory for ‘g++’ and ‘gcc’ ($ALCHEMY/bin/llvm-gcc) will point to the sub-folder ‘llvm-gcc4-ubuntu-install’ in the bin directory ($ALCHEMY/bin/llvm-gcc4-ubuntu-install/bin/llvm-gcc). This may be fine if that happens to be the version you are setting up uses this structure, if not then you could waste a lot of time trying to find out why gcc and g++ silently fail whenever they are run. These symlinks should be changed to match the sub-folder in the bin directory of Alchemy. In the case of gcc this symlink should be changed to:

‘$ALCHEMY/bin/llvm-gcc4-[flavour of os here]-install/bin/gcc

e.g. ‘$ALCHEMY/bin/llvm-gcc4-darwin-install/bin/gcc’, in the case of OSX.

This has been noted (as of 11/20/2008) and the config will be fixed to resolve this issue in the next release. But for now, check your symlinks!

“Quartz Composer is a groundbreaking graphics development environment that allows you to explore the incredible power of the graphics stack of Mac OS X Tiger. With Quartz Composer, you can easily combine the capabilities of Cocoa, Quartz 2D, Core Image, OpenGL, and QuickTime.”

From Apple Developer Connection

A not-so-publicised fact about Tiger and the release of QuickTime 7 is that QuickTime Player can play .qtz files. Upon discovering this, I took the next logical step and discovered that the QuickTime Plugin on Tiger was no different. Since I was writing the file archive section of this site at the time, I put the two things together and am pleased to announce that Tiger users can now view inline previews in the File Archive. Now, if only I could get some file submissions, life would be good.

Update: It seems that QuickTime’s support is limited to files that don’t require user interaction (such as mouse tracking). The files will still display, but will not be interactive.

From Quartz Comps

Can pull RSS directly into the quartz comp (here) from the [tag]flickr[/tag] feed (is it possible to get advanced search results in xml?). Can then create generative art in quartz, and place this as a quicktime plugin into flash. Also possible to render out the final image if the user wishes (here), to then upload / save somewhere in a gallery etc.

Downside of this is it uses quartz core, mac only. Would definitely like this to be multi platform piece for easier accessibility, but does it have to be?