The Mac has a fabulous development environment. It’s true. No, really.
You only have to go through some of the more hardcore Mac development blogs to see the issues that are presenting themselves. Some of the big names in Cocoa development are technically hobbyists – they have day jobs and yet they can make some fabulous, rich desktop applications in their spare time.
Apple has been steadily modifying the presentation layer of the operating system. We had Quartz Extreme in Jaguar, Quartz Composer in Tiger and we’re about to see Core Animation in Leopard. These technologies allow developers to create some amazingly complex motion graphics with comparstively little work.
Here’s an example (cribbed from TUAW.
Japanese Designer Futurismo Zugakousaku has used Quartz Composer to generate some dazzling motion graphics, which can conveniently be used as screen savers in OS X (place the QTZ files in /Library/Screen Savers/). His Quartz Composer Samples page features 33 QTZ files for download, some of which are simply mesmerizing.
He claims to have made each of these in less than an hour. Zugakousaku says of himself: “I want to make a work like a new surrealist of the new generation.”