OpenGL or QuartzComposer for creating OS X widgets

Question

I was watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiqgmAYrd3c and was thinking it might be kind of fun to create some NSView/UIView-system compatible widgets that had some of the interactions found in the video. Some of them involve some fluid 3-D animation. Has anyone tried using OpenGL or maybe Quartz Composer to create widgets similar to those found in that video? Does anyone know if it might be possible in Quartz Composer instead of dropping down to the OpenGL level?

Answer 1

You would probably want to use Core Animation to make widgets of those kinds. Core Animation is accelerated using OpenGL, but is much more suitable for animating many 2D layers and interacting with more standard widgets and events than the lower level OpenGL. Quartz Composer is good for doing certain kinds of decorative animations, but that's its primary purpose, not building UIs. Core Animation also has the advantage that if you want to do lower level graphics, or integrate Quartz Composer animations, you can put either of them into a CALayer and so get the advantages of all of the systems. See QCCompositionLayer and CAOpenGLLayer for details.

To see a bit of what Core Animation can do, you should watch Steve Jobs's keynote introducing Core Animation.