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Quartz Composer
Quartz is a vital graphics service for applications, composed of two main parts:
- The Quartz 2D graphics API
- The Quartz Extreme windowing environment
The Quartz 2D graphics API is based on the Portable Document Format (PDF) and offers professional-grade 2D graphics features. These features include Bezier curves, transformations, and gradients.
Quartz Extreme, on the other hand, acts as an advanced “visual mixing board.” It manages an application’s onscreen presentation and provides responsive, GPU-accelerated window compositing. It also fully supports transparency.