Window layout

psonice's picture

I have just one really big annoyance with QC lately - the window layout. I have 2 decent sized screens here, and I can have the viewer, patch creator, inspector and colour palette open on one, and the editor maximised on the other (and I still can't see the whole composition most of the time ;)

All well and good, but every time I open QC, the windows are all squashed up on one screen, and the viewer is always behind the editor!

Is there any way of saving the window layout?

cwright's picture
h4x0r t3h plist!11! ;)

The window positions are stored in the plist (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.QuartzComposer.editor.plist, or something similar). You could start there to see if it works. If so, there you go. If not... I don't know if there's an easy way to do it.

I've found (not to 'toot my own horn') that using the transparency/floating stuff with kinemeCore helps a lot with layout, especially on this small MB screen.

Do you disconnect the monitor between restarts (I'm guessing no...) -- not sure why it would clear the settings though.

psonice's picture
Tearing hair out...

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll have a mess with that a bit later.

For now, I think I need a strong drink - I spent the last hour trying to figure out a bug with the xml loader. It would load an xml file from / or from a path relative to / or ~ but not relative to the composition file, which I need it to do. I got an answer in the end though - of course, the composition doesn't have a path until you save it for the first time!

Hopefully that will save somebody else a bald patch :)

cwright's picture
interesting case

I don't think I've tested that case with Composition-Relative Addressing.... thanks for the tip, hopefully there aren't a bunch of bugs to fix with that...

psonice's picture
See my reply on the 'open

See my reply on the 'open file window patch' page for reasons why.. I'm including patches as plugins, with the idea that I can distribute the whole thing as a zip and it'll still work wherever it's saved.

I just found another 'bug' that wasn't too - be careful with the copy + paste keys! If you duplicate a macro patch, but accidentally paste twice, you end up with a duplicate on top of the original that you don't know about. And if you try to edit that patch, nothing seems to work.

And why do apple make it so hard to handle text nicely? To move text in a circle on screen, it's necessary to split it into letters, then use the iterator to animate it.