"I strongly encourage non-Macintosh programmers to pick up this book and find out for themselves what a truly great development platform we have in the Macintosh. Programmers and software managers at Windows, Linux, and Unix shops should seriously consider the Macintosh as an addition to (or replacement for!) their current stable of platforms. In particular, movie studios, animation houses, and special-effects facilities would do well to consider that with Macintosh, a single platform can provide everything they need"-from the foreword by Philip J. Schneider, R&D Engineer, Industrial Light + Magic
"Finally, the book I've wanted for years is here! As a graphics programmer, I appreciate the clear explanations of how Quartz has packaged the state of the art for mere mortals. As a Cocoa programmer, I appreciate the clear explanation of which facilities of Quartz Cocoa is already leveraging. This will become a well-thumbed resource for all graphics programmers on Mac OS X, whether or not they're using Cocoa, Carbon, or porting code from another platform."-Dr. Michael B. Johnson, Pixar Animation Studios
"I've been using Quartz since the first release of Mac OS X and this book covers it all! Great advice, good sample code-it's the book to have if you want to learn everything about Quartz."-Stephane Marcouiller, SDE, Microsoft Corporation
"Not only do the authors of
Programming with Quartz have a superb understanding of their subject matter, but they have conveyed their knowledge in a clear, concise, and readable manner.
Programming with Quartz has saved me quite a bit of time on my first major Quartz project, and its more general lessons on graphics programming techniques and concepts will prove valuable when using any modern graphics API."-Josh Aas, Software Engineer, Mozilla Corporation
"Even after implementing several features using Quartz, I still learned things from this book that I did not know. For example, the chapter on handling PDF images is very thorough in its descriptions and the issues it raises. I wish I had this chapter when I implemented this feature. The book is very well written and covers many complex topics in 2D graphics clearly and at a level appropriate for all programmers.
Programming with Quartz continues Apple's tradition of producing excellent documentation for its developers."-Ron Ullmann, Macintosh Business Unit, Microsoft Corporation
Customer Reviews & Comments
If you develop for Mac OS X and you do any 2D graphics programming in Quartz 2D or the Cocoa graphics APIs, you need this book. The table of contents isn't available here at the moment but (trust me on this) this book covers it ALL as far as Quartz 2D is concerned. The authors cover everything: basic Quartz 2D drawing (from Carbon, Cocoa, and Python!), the Quartz drawing model (coordinate systems, transforms, paths, color spaces, etc.), drawing images and text, plus drawing and inspecting PDF content. I'll hit a few highlights in my comments below.
Throughout the book, they've made it a point to cover which APIs are available in which versions of Mac OS X, a godsend if you're delivering apps that must support multiple OS versions but you'd still like to take advantage of the latest features when possible. Where the OS allows, they even explain how to emulate some of the new convenience APIs on older OSes.
Each chapter ends with an extensive list of references (sample code, headers, specifications, and more from Apple, Adobe, and others) to help you find further information, in case you need more detail on a particular topic.
For text drawing, an area in which Quartz 2D provides only a low-level API, the authors explain how to properly use the facilities available in the higher-level frameworks (Carbon and Cocoa).
For those of you coming from QuickDraw, there's a short section specifically targetted at replacing CopyBits (in addition to the chapters on image drawing and offscreen caching).
Near the end of the book, there's an invaluable chapter on how to optimize and debug your drawing code.
Finally, for those developers preparing universal binaries of your applications (all of you, I hope), the authors identify several issues (bitmap data format endian issues, etc.) that you'll need to watch out for and explain what to do about them.
A quick additional note: the publisher has the full Table of Contents as well as a sample chapter available for download at books.elsevier.com/us/mk/us/subindex.asp?isbn=0123694736
Disclaimer: I spent 4 years in Apple's Developer Technical Support group supporting Quartz 2D and other topics. This book would have made my job *much* easier, perhaps even unnecessary.
