Apple Developer Tools

Apple Developer Tools
Developed by	Apple Inc.
Latest release	3.1 (1096) / April 2008
Operating system	Mac OS X
Type	IDE
Website	Apple Developer Connection

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The Apple Developer Tools are a suite of software tools from Apple to aid in making software titles for the Mac OS X platform.

[edit] Applet Launcher

A graphical interface for Sun’s Java Plug-in, which aids developers by demonstrating how Java applets perform on Mac OS X. Provides tools to adjust the performance & behavior applets in development

[edit] Audio Unit Lab

A graphic presentation of audio units helping software developers to examine their results. AU Lab can be used to test audio units, conduct live mixing, and playback of audio content. Audio units are controlled visually with the audio unit’s graphic interface

[edit] Computer Hardware Understanding Development Tools

A set of software tools, collectively Computer Hardware Understanding Development Tools (CHUD Tools) measure software performance on Mac OS X, to aid in optimizing. Also provides hardware system benchmarks

[edit] Core Image Fun House

Used in testing Core Image units, which function similar to Adobe Photoshop filters. Each has a specific action, with parameters customize the action. Showcases Core Image, a technology introduced in Mac OS X v10.4, supported by newer graphic hardware.

[edit] CrashReporterPrefs

A developer utility for setting report parameters for Apple's Crash Reporter application.

Basic: Shows a dialog asking the user what to do.
Developer: Provides additional debug info and automatically shows the mail to Apple window.
Server: Runs silent, but keeps all the logs.

[edit] FileMerge

Similar to NEXTSTEP's Merge utility, it graphically compares and merges two different versions of a file, and is often used to track changes to source code.

A command line version is available through the Terminal application: opendiff.

[edit] Help Indexer

Creates an index file for the Mac OS X built-in Help Viewer.

[edit] icns Browser

Views the resources for an .icns file, displaying the Mini, Small, Large, Huge, Thumbnail & Tile sizes in all bit-depths and masks.

[edit] Icon Composer

Icon Composer is an icon editor that is part of the Apple Developer Tools. It does not have any editing features other than composing Apple Icon Image files. External editors must do all the image manipulation, then the results may be imported into the converter to create the finished icon.

[edit] Instruments

Formerly known as xray

Instruments is a GUI for tracing framework DTrace from Sun's OpenSolaris.

[edit] IORegistryExplorer

Examines the Mac OS X hardware registry and offers a dozen view modes for data: unary, binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal, ASCII, MacRoman, UTF-8 & Unicode; 8, 16, 32 & 64-bit; and big & little endian.

[edit] Jar Bundler

Java tool that aids in packaging an application’s component files into a single double-clickable application. Properties can be modified to optimize the code.

[edit] MallocDebug

Assistance for assessing memory usage and detecting memory leaks in programs.

Assesses an applications memory usage by monitoring a user as they interact with an application, which allows MallocDebug to build a memory profile.

[edit] OpenGL Driver Monitor

Real time access to the inner workings of the graphics processing unit. Runs locally or over a network using Bonjour which is less likely to interfere with the statistics it is gathering.

[edit] OpenGL Profiler

This tool assists developers in debugging and optimizing OpenGL usage under Mac OS X.

Supported features:

Launch or attach to an application
Breakpoints and execution control
Error detection including thread safety checks
Scripts
Buffer views
Resource viewing/editing
Statistics gathering
OpenGL call traces with stack traces and timings

[edit] OpenGL Shader Builder

An integrated environment to develop and debug OpenGL GPU programs (Shaders) under Mac OS X.

Features supported by OpenGL Shader Builder:

Realtime entry
Preview window with shaders applied to a textured plane, sphere or teapot
Example shaders
Syntax checking
Debugging and analysis of vertex / fragment programs
Export to Xcode

One notable feature is 'Export to Xcode'. A sample Xcode project is created with C source code to initialize OpenGL (using the GLUT library) and run the shader program.

Note that this program is no longer recommended for editing GLSL shaders as "GLSLEditorSample," available as an example program, is generally regarded as superior.

[edit] PackageMaker

Creates application .pkg installer bundles for installing applications using the Installer application.

[edit] Pixie

A magnifying glass application for magnifying small sections of the computer's screen, centered around the mouse cursor, giving the user a detailed view of the screen, as well as the pixel coordinates of the mouse. Provides several levels of zoom, "locking" the image under the mouse for closer examination, and saves the magnified image one of several formats. Helps ensure visual elements are aligned precisely.

A substitute for the Pixie app is the built-in zoom function (enabled in the Universal Access pane of System Preferences). This can enlarge the screen up to 20 times. The default way to enlarge the screen is Command-Option-Shift-= (in other words Command-Option-+).

[edit] Property List Editor

Edits application preference plist files.

[edit] Quartz Composer

Main article: Quartz Composer

A visual programming language for processing and rendering data. Using OpenGL, Core Image, Core Video, and other technologies to build an API and serves as a simple visual programming paradigm. Quartz Composer is a core technology of the Mac OS X. Quartz Composer creations work in any QuickTime-aware application (beginning with Mac OS X v10.4), from the Quartz Composer application, or embedded into Cocoa or Carbon applications.

Quartz Composer has many similarities to Max/MSP although its primary usage is for graphical rather than audio processing. Offers the ability to construct interactive video compositions that react to audio or MIDI signals and can be played from any QuickTime aware application.

Pierre-Olivier Latour originally developed the predecessor to Quartz Composer under the name PixelShox Studio.

[edit] Repeat After Me

Optimizes the performance of the built-in text-to-speech software for Mac OS X. Tests the operating system's phonemic translation engine, creates graphs of the generated tone, to visually adjust the intonation, and records samples for reference.

[edit] Script Editor

Included with Mac OS X to write and debug AppleScripts. These can be run alone as applications.

Other AppleScript and OSA language editors include:

Smile (software), from Satimage
Script Debugger, from Late Night Software

[edit] Shark

Used by software developers to optimize software programs on OS X. It samples software at set time intervals taking snapshots of the stack, showing the functions which require more of the application’s resources. Includes tools to analyze the data produced by a sampling run.

[edit] Spin Control

Spin Control is a performance tool used for monitoring hang activity in software programs. The program gets its name from the Spinning wait cursor, which is a "spinning wheel" on OS X.^[1]

[edit] Thread Viewer

Thread Viewer is a performance tool which graphically displays activity across a range of threads. It provides color-coded time-line views of thread activity and can display backtraces of activity at specific points in time.

[edit] References

^ Using Spin Control

[edit] External links

Apple Developer Connection Tools Downloads

[0] Using Spin Control

[1]