Apple has hired Christopher Wright of Kineme Interactive Media, the creator of a variety of Quartz Composer applications and plugins and a consultant for Quartz Composer development, "AppleInsider" (http://www.appleinsider.com) reports.

The hiring is an apparent effort to expand the utility of Apple's Quartz Composer, which is a free graphical development tool for building interactive visuals called Quartz Compositions, the article adds. According to Apple, Quartz Composer is a groundbreaking graphics development environment that allows you to explore the incredible power of the graphics stack of Mac OS X.

With Quartz Composer, you can combine the capabilities of Cocoa, Quartz 2D, Core Image, OpenGL, and QuickTime, all using an approachable visual programming paradigm. Developers can use Quartz Composer to prototype Core Image filters, build engaging screen savers, create custom user-interface widgets, make data-driven visual effects, and even perform live performance animations.

Quartz 2D is an advanced, two-dimensional drawing engine available for iPhone application development and to all Mac OS X application environments outside of the kernel. Quartz 2D provides low-level, lightweight 2D rendering with unmatched output fidelity regardless of display or printing device. Quartz 2D is resolution- and device-independent; you don’t need to think about the final destination when you use the Quartz 2D application programming interface (API) for drawing.