While watching some ADC TV, I became somewhat enchanted with a Panther feature I previously was largely unaware of — most of the Quartz compositing engine is now available from Python. The problem I had with it, however, was that there didn’t seem to be an awful lot of info available beyond what I said above; its in there somewhere. I only found out about it half a year after the presentation when I watched it on ADC TV, and months after Panther’s release.
So, tonight I idly decide to skim MacDevCenter — host of many
interesting articles, in spite of the fact that I get over there slightly
less often than most people see their Dentist. One of the items that jumped
out at me was Panther, Python and CoreGraphics, complete with an
example featuring the requisite PDF-powered drop-shadow effect. What’s more,
they point out where Apple’s cool sample code is —
/Developer/Examples/Quartz/Python/ — and that some of Panther’s fax
features, including generation of cover sheets for outgoing faxes, are
implemented in CoreGraphics-using Python scripts (see /usr/libexec/fax/).
I should start buying my non-programmer friends (i.e., “I’ve been too busy using \[Mac OS X] to have time to learn how to use it”) Python books whenever a gift occasion pops up. “You already gave me a python book, you know.” “Clearly you need another one!”