Cuarzo
Jeff Dlouhy - Friday, June 01, 2007 at 11:25 PM
Today I received Programming with Quartz: 2D and PDF Graphics in Mac OS X from Amazon. Quartz or Core Graphics is the graphics layer introduced in Mac OS X. Quartz allows applications to draw beautiful resolution independent images to the screen or “graphics context.” Don’t let the book’s ugly cover fool you, Quartz is a very attractive technology.
Currently Gecko 1.8.1 still uses QuickDraw which is a graphics layer with ties far back as System 1.0 eek. Soon Gecko will have a new vector graphics library called Cairo (see Cairo beats Safari) which utilizes Quartz. This was a necessary change since QuickDraw was depreciated in 10.4 Tiger and has trouble ahead since Leopard will be resolution independent. QuickDraw definitely held back the adoption of Gecko based browsers on the Mac in the text appearance category. That will soon however change with the advent of Cairo. Text now looks fresh and crisp.
So far Programming With Quartz looks to be a good read. After sitting hunched over at my iMac all day it’s nice to be able to sit back and relax with a good book. This one will definitely help me along they way on my graphics programming adventure.