a screenrunner client wanted an animating tiled layout. it’s surprisingly non-trivial to code, at least if you want to go beyond hard-coding a few grid layouts. thankfully, the problem is academically interesting too, and lo! there’s a paper on spatial packing of rectangles, complete with MaxBinRectPack algorithm and c++ implementation. respect to jukka jylänki.
getting this working for me was time worth investing, and i’ve released the results: a quartz composer patch and animation technique. it’s up on github, and is something best seen in action, so check the quick demo video on vimeo.