Origami - Design prototyping with Quartz Composer | Hacker News Reader

Origami - Design prototyping with Quartz Composer

facebook.github.io

154 pointsvanwilder7717 comments

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).

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

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.)

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

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.

I remember looking at this a few times and always thinking it was super cool. Is there a repository of "conduits" anywhere? I'm looking for a HDR tonemapper running on the GPU that I could use with After Effects or FCP

A repository of effects and collection of tutorials is something that I always wanted to do but never did.

I'm planning to have one for the open source release. I also intend to fix the iOS and Windows/Direct3D ports of Conduit and make some decent example apps (those ports have been done earlier but they're in disrepair, somewhat out of date).

Lastly I'm thinking of renaming the effects core because Conduit is not quite googlable due to other software products with the same name... So there's some work to do. I remember intending to finish this back in June :)

Oh! I remember seeing this and thinking that I could build an awesome video livestream mixer off of it. The paid packages were definitely a speedbump.

There are a lot of opportunities to create great tools for designers – and you're right that QC has an uncertain future. However, QC is a really powerful tool, and shapes the way we design at Facebook. Whatever the future may bring, you can get real value out of this tool right now, and we think that's impactful.

Those lower-level patches can be integrated into your work in cool ways, they're there if you need them but don't get in the way.

A lot of individual parts of QC compositions can be replicated in the browser today, but the overall performance and rendering quality of QC for complex systems is still unmatched. As for universality, today most people designing for iOS and Android use Macs, so that's where we invest the most.

I hope you all give Origami a try :)

I really wish that Facebook (or anybody with Facebook's resources) help drive adoption of a cross platform tool.

I live in a developing country and access to a Mac is very, very hard. Im not advocating for open source, but the Mac lockin makes this extemely difficult to adopt.

Even with Adobe tools, I can buy a legal windows license and a software license and it still would be many X cheaper than buying a Mac.

Of course, there's nothing like true open source (QtComposer,Inkscape, Blender), but the next best thing is Windows.

P.S. checkout Blender Composite Nodes -http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Composite_N...

and

Blender Python Nodes -http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.67...

Oh, I didn't want to imply that Origami was not useful, I should have made clear that I really like that you guys are open sourcing this.

I remember using QC for UI design back in 2009 and struggling with some of the idiosyncrasies (I actually used it as an alternative to Flash since back then the QC plugin ran in Safari, so one could use QC in the same manner as Flash on a website, though there were tons of redraw issues), so this is very welcome. I just wondered whether, with the dormant interest for using QC for UI design, this isn't a market opportunity for a tool that caters specifically to this niche. I.e. something like Fireworks + QC.

Anyway, thanks for open sourcing Origami!

http://vuo.org/ is the emerging successor

more info:

http://vuo.org/qc-remake http://vuo.org/node/64

Here's the pricing, which took a little while to find: https://vuo.org/subscription

Slowly getting there with http://noflojs.org/ but as open source and targeting the universal runtime of the modern web

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.

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.

Thanks for sharing.

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

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