Lucinate video synth animates and live-codes visuals on Mac and iOS

From the makers of the utterly indispensable iPad app AUM (among other things), Lucinate is a real-time visual environment for macOS and iOS, based on Apple’s Metal technology. You can approach this as a ready-to-play, Ableton Link and Link Audio-enabled video synth. And when you want to hack or make your own shaders, you can live-code those, too.

ISF’s visual magic for Metal and macOS is now open source

Interactive Shader Format (ISF) code for working with Metal and rendering on macOS, plus an underlying Metal framework that powers live visual app VDMX6, are now free and open source. That’s great news even if you’re just toying around with shaders or working with visuals, as it opens up lots of possibilities to come.

Peter Kirn - March 24, 2025

Macs gain more even footing with Unreal – and about M4 for live visuals

Unreal Engine is looking good enough on macOS that Epic is starting to brag about it. That’ll still depend on which Apple Silicon machine you’ve got, though – which brings us to why the M4 Mac mini is starting to look like a serious live visual machine.

Peter Kirn - February 7, 2025