MacTricksAndTips.com

As a new series that will take place over the next coming months, I am going to post tutorials on Quartz Composer. They are designed to be simple and easy to follow, and over the coming months they will get more and more complex. We will start easy and gradually get harder and harder to produce cooler effects. If you haven’t already, I would suggest you look through An Introduction To Quartz Composer, it will show you all of the basic principles to quartz, including how things work. If you haven’t already guessed this project will show you how to create a fading gradient reflection. It is very basic but it will show you the ropes. An example of what we will be creating is shown below. You can click on any of the images for larger version with more detail. All connections between Patches use double arrows, for example height on one Patch would connect to Crop on another Patch would be represented like this. Height >> Crop.

I came across this really funny bug within Preview. Basically I was trying to resize a 128 x 128 pixel png with transparency down to 75 pixels square. This was done through Tools > Adjust Size within Preview. The problem that arose was the final image being 904,074.7 TB in size. Thats Terrabytes. The next step up from Gigabytes. I did manage to get is up to 1 exabyte but I can’t remember how exactly I did it. That size by the way is probably all the information on every computer in world. Its massive.

This is a cool little trick to help you create small 4 frame animated gif’s in Photo Booth. Its great fun and great for a simple webpage or to impress your friends. All it needs is an iSight or similar web cam, and Photo Booth. I will take you the steps.