In case you missed it, Apple has quietly released a new build for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 update to developers during the recent Macworld Expo. Actually, it's quite understandable if this was overshadowed due to the several other bombs dropped by the Steve Jobs-led company at the time.

But now that the event has come and gone, we have for you now the massive complete list of changes for the said update. See them all by clicking the "read more" link below.

If you have a strange gut feeling that your boyfriend or girlfriend is cheating on you, but you can't just find any proof, then maybe this little trick using Quartz Composer will be of some assistance. It only works if you have Tiger and an iSight or another webcam.

Quartz Composer is a development tool provided with Mac OS X v10.4 for processing and rendering graphical data. There are only two components to this trick - the video input and the billboard to render it. Now what you do is drag a line from the video's input "Image" on to the Billboard's "Image" input. After that, use the inspector to set the width to two.Export this to a QuickTime movie, 320x240. Since only one application can use your camera at a time, you'll have to close Quartz Composer for QuickTime to play the video. When you like what you have done, just embed it in HTML. I'm sure he/she will make a confession in no time.

    

Looks like chatting isn't what it used to be. Before all it took was a webcam, a face and things to say, but that's not good enough anymore. Hot on the heels of Logitech's hugely successful video cam effects, Chatfx presents visual effects for iChat using QuickTime, Quartz and Quartz Composer (provided by Apple to developers in Mac OS 10.4).

According to Chatfx "Normal teleconferences are plain. Talking and seeing people in offices and cubicles is ordinary." Why settle for "normal" and "plain" when you can get insane and creepy with special effects like those seen in movies and PhotoShop.

Included in its bluescreen lib are twirl, comic book, alien, interrogation, pencil, vortex, dent, bump, bodyart, facepaint, fisheye, gloom, mercury, on fire, ogre, sepia, sorbel, xray, thermal, and an infinite number of additional special video effects that can be created by using Quartz Composer.

Anyone can do it, according to the company. "Like the special effects in movies anything is now possible to add to iChat," they claim. For example you can make your normally filthy room look like it has been straigthened by the Queer guys. Or make your shoebox office look more Trump-esque.  Or you can make it look like you're on mars, the moon, inside a rainforest, or under the sea.

"Keep video conferences interesting by simulating TV news and weather reports." Weather reports are interesting? There is a practical side to this fun little program. Although Chatfx didn't name even one. Going back to the keeping conferences interesting using visual sfx... whatever happened to smart and witty conversations?