Open Radar

 
Summary: I would like to see encrypted Quartz Composer files that any relevant QC aware OS X application can make use of but which will only open in the QC Editor Application with a licence certificate in a folder or a password.

Apps like Keynote, iMovie, iChat and others make use of .qtz filters, effects and transitions but there is no way of protecting ones programming efforts from a competitor if one was to release a suite of effects for iMovie or Themes of animated backgrounds for KN (.qtz is preferable to a QT rendered movie in file size and several other respects).

Also the aspect of easy "polite thievery" amongst users is there since it's so easy to copy a folder of QC files from one machine to another. If QC file encryption was same as some FxPlugin encryption functionality, files could be encrypted to Mac addresses as well, thereby making them more protected from unlicensed distribution.

I don't pretend to understand the complexities of encryption and what is possible, and indeed desirable, in a detailed sense. Stopping someone from opening my hard work in QC editor and reproducing for themselves a very similar product and selling it against my product is my main concern. Apps are protected from that to a large extent with binary compiles. I have no such option. Unlicensed user distribution (eg. tpb) is less of a concern as long as the file cannot be 'can-opened' with some trick of Xcoding.


Extra:
Better integration of QC framework into Keynote would also be desirable to me as a theme designer. Particularly passing Apple Events (keystrokes, mouse events, touch etc) and uploading RSS etc. Binding to published values from within Keynote is the holy grail from a killer tag team of apps as far as I am concerned.