Fabric Wants to Bring Back the Magic of Quartz Composer
If you've ever mourned the loss of Apple's Quartz Composer, you're not alone. That visual, node-based approach to building interactive graphics was something special—and nothing quite filled the gap after Apple deprecated it. Fabric is a new open-source project that's trying to do exactly that, rebuilt from the ground up on Swift and Metal.
What It Does
Fabric is a creative code and rapid prototyping environment focused on interactive visuals, image and video processing and analysis, and 3D content authoring. It's inspired by Quartz Composer's design philosophy, and it brings back the visual node-based authoring model you might remember—but running on modern Apple rendering tech.
The project is built around a few core pieces. There's the visual node-based content authoring environment itself, an SDK for loading a common interchange file format (so documents can be shared and reused), and a plugin architecture that lets you extend Fabric by creating custom nodes. Under the hood, it's built on Satin, a 3D rendering engine, and it leans on Lygia for shader work.
Fabric is designed to serve a few different audiences at once. It's meant to work as a creative coding tool for people with little to no programming experience, as a pro tool for building reusable documents—similar to Quartz Composer compositions—that can be loaded into the Fabric runtime and embedded in third-party apps, and as a developer environment for procedural, high-fidelity visual output using modern rendering techniques.
Why It's Cool
-
It's an actual spiritual successor, not a loose homage. The README is upfront that Fabric is inspired by Quartz Composer and its design philosophy. That matters, because the node-based workflow was the whole point—not just the rendering. If you missed composing visuals by wiring nodes together, this is aimed squarely at you.
-
The rendering feature list is genuinely deep. Thanks to Satin and Lygia, Fabric supports physically based rendering, scene graphs, lighting and shadow casting, image-based lighting, a material system, and 3D model loading. That's a serious modern rendering stack, not a toy.
-
Realtime shader editing is built in. Live coding and hot reloading for shaders means you can iterate on visuals without a rebuild cycle. Combined with GPU compute support, that opens up some interesting workflows for procedural and generative work.
-
It goes beyond pure graphics. Fabric also supports ML-based realtime segmentation and keypoint detection, shader-based image processing and mixing, and even local LLM calling. That's a broader definition of "creative coding" than you'd usually see—it treats analysis and interaction as first-class parts of the toolkit.
-
The embedding story is deliberate. Because Fabric documents can be loaded into the runtime and embedded into third-party applications, this isn't just a standalone playground. It's infrastructure you could build products on top of.
-
The performance bar is high. The README shows an early alpha of Satin rendering instances of a sphere geometry with an HDRI environment and a PBR shader at 120Hz. That's a real-time target that suggests the rendering path is taken seriously.
The combination is interesting: a low-barrier visual authoring tool that also exposes a plugin architecture and an embeddable runtime. That's a hard balance to strike, and the Quartz Composer lineage is a reasonable blueprint for how to do it.
How to Try It
Fabric is under active development, and the README describes it as an early alpha. The best place to start is the repository itself, plus the companion samples repo, which shows off what the tool can do.
- Head to the main repo: https://github.com/fabric-project/fabric
- Browse the sample documents to get a feel for the node-based authoring model: Fabric-Samples
- If you want to dig into the rendering layer, check out the Satin engine that Fabric is built on: Satin rendering engine
- There's also a Discord community linked from the README if you want to follow along or ask questions.
Since this is early alpha software, expect rough edges. If you're planning to build on it, keep an eye on the repo for updates and API changes.
Final Thoughts
Fabric is an ambitious attempt to revive a workflow a lot of people still miss, and it's doing it with a modern rendering foundation rather than nostalgia alone. The feature list—PBR, scene graphs, GPU compute, ML segmentation, local LLM calls—suggests the author isn't just rebuilding Quartz Composer but extending its ideas into territory that didn't exist when the original shipped.
It's early, so it's not something you'd drop into a production pipeline today without caution. But if you're a creative coder, a graphics developer on Apple platforms, or someone who never quite got over Quartz Composer's deprecation, this is worth watching closely—and worth poking at now while the design is still taking shape.
Follow @githubprojects for more developer tools and open source projects.