APPLE DEVELOPER TOOLS

'Apple Developer Tools' is a software suite provided by Apple, composed of a number of tools (most famously Xcode and Interface Builder) that aid software developers in creating applications for the Macintosh platform.

Contents

Applet Launcher

AU Lab

CHUD Tools

Core Image Fun House

CrashReporterPrefs

FileMerge

Help Indexer

icns Browser

Icon Composer

IORegistryExplorer

Jar Bundler

MallocDebug

OpenGL Driver Monitor

OpenGL Profiler

OpenGL Shader Builder

PackageMaker

Pixie

Property List Editor

Quartz Composer

Repeat After Me

Script Editor

Shark

Spin Control

Thread Viewer

Xray

External links

Applet Launcher

'Applet Launcher' is a Java tool included in Xcode developer tools that runs local and online Java applets outside of a web browser.

AU Lab

'AU Lab' is a digital mixer application which hosts audio unit plugins and is used to investigate audio units. It is bundled with the Xcode Tools and is used to build custom mixers with inputs, outputs, instruments, effects, and busses; it records and receives midi, generates midi clock, and meters performance.

CHUD Tools

The 'Computer Hardware Understanding Developer Tools' (CHUD Tools) are a suite of applications developed by Apple Computer for software and hardware developers for measuring and optimizing the performance of Macintosh systems running their products under Mac OS X. The CHUD Tools can be installed separately or with Xcode.
CHUD Tools include Shark (a code profiler that also generates advice for code optimization), MONster and PMC Index (tools for working with the internal performance counters), Saturn (another profiler), and command-line simulators for the PowerPC G4 and G5 processors.

Core Image Fun House

'Core Image Fun House' is a graphics application included with the Mac OS X Developer tools for testing Core Image image units. These image units are similar to Adobe Photoshop filters, in that they have a specified action, but use parameters to modify that action slightly.
Core Image Fun House is meant to showcase the power of Core Image, a technology introduced in Mac OS X v10.4. It is meant to be able to apply image units to images very quickly, by using the graphics processing unit as the workload for the image units. As such, not all Macintosh computers will support Core Image, such as those with graphics cards that do not support shaders.
It can be found in the /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools directory when the Developer tools have been installed from the Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger installation discs.

CrashReporterPrefs

'CrashReporterPrefs' is a Mac OS X developer utility by Apple that determines how application crash reports are handled by Crash Reporter.

★ 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.
One can also change the settings in the Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType [basic|developer|server]

FileMerge

'FileMerge' is a graphical file comparison application included with the Mac OS X Developer Tools. A descendant of NEXTSTEP's Merge utility, it is used to compare and merge different versions of a file. This program offers automatic file merging, but it is most useful as a simple but powerful manual merge tool for text based files. FileMerge expects Unix style newlines and the Mac OS Roman text encoding.
FileMerge can be found in the /Developer/Applications/Utilities directory when the Developer Tools have been installed from the Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger installation discs, or from the Apple Developer Connection website.
FileMerge can be launched from the terminal with the command opendiff.

Help Indexer

'Help Indexer' is a utility that creates an index file for Help Viewer to use. Help Indexer may be run in command line mode as well by invoking /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Help Indexer.app/Contents/MacOS/Help Indexer on the command line with its flags. Help Indexer ignores files listed in its Stopwords.plist file.

icns Browser

'icns Browser' is a utility by Apple for viewing all of the resources in an .icns file. It displays the Mini, Small, Large, Huge, Thumbnail & Tile sizes in all available bit-depths and masks for each.

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.

IORegistryExplorer

'IORegistryExplorer' (Input Output Registry Explorer) is a developer tool by Apple that allows the user to examine the hardware registry in Mac OS X. The utility has over a dozen view modes for the data: unary, binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal, ASCII, MacRoman, UTF-8 & Unicode; 8, 16, 32 & 64-bit; and big & little endian.

Jar Bundler

'Jar Bundler', developed by Apple, is a Java tool that allows developers to package their program's files into a single double-clickable application. Further, Jar Bundler lets you modify certain properties, making your application run better on Mac OS X. It is included in the Xcode developer suite.

MallocDebug

'MallocDebug', developed by Apple, provides assistance for assessing memory usage and detecting memory leaks in programs running on Mac OS X. It is included in the Xcode developer suite.
To assess an applications memory usage, create a new window and select the executable file. The user then interacts with the application as they normally would, while MallocDebug builds a memory profile. Selecting “Leaks” from the analysis popup menu will then provide relevant information on where and how much memory your application is leaking.

OpenGL Driver Monitor

'OpenGL Driver Monitor', developed by Apple, provides real time access to the inner workings of the graphics processing unit on Mac OS X. It can be run locally or over a network using Bonjour such that it doesn't interfere with the statistics it is gathering.

OpenGL Profiler

'OpenGL Profiler', developed by Apple, is a best of class tool to assist developers in debugging and optimizing OpenGL usage under Mac OS X.
OpenGL Profiler supports the following 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

OpenGL Shader Builder

'OpenGL Shader Builder', developed by Apple, provides an integrated environment to develop and debug OpenGL GPU programs (Shaders) under Mac OS X.
OpenGL Shader Builder supports the following features:

★ 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.

PackageMaker

'PackageMaker' is a Mac OS X application created by Apple. It is part of the Mac OS X developer tools that come free with every copy of the operating system, and can be used to create .pkg installer bundles. These packages can subsequently install files via the Installer application. Software installation configurations can be saved as .pmproj files. The default installation of PackageMaker places it in the path /Developer/Applications/Utilities/PackageMaker.app.

Pixie

'Pixie' is a software application on Apple's Mac OS X operating system. It is part of Xcode, the Apple Developer Connection's developer toolset.
Pixie is a magnifying glass application. Its purpose is to magnify a small section of the computer's screen, centered around the mouse cursor. This gives the user a detailed view of the screen, as well as the pixel coordinates of the mouse. Pixie allows several levels of zoom, "locking" the image under the mouse for closer examination, and saving the magnified image in several formats.
Pixie's features are useful for detailed examination of an interface, such as determining if GUI elements are aligned precisely. It can also be used to obtain magnified screenshots.

Property List Editor

'Property List Editor' an application included in the Apple Developer Tools for editing plist files. It can be found at /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Property List Editor.app. Property List Editor only edits plist files, not any other XML format.

Quartz Composer

:''See main article at Quartz Composer''


'Quartz Composer' is a node based visual programming language provided as part of the Xcode development environment in Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger" for processing and rendering graphical data.
Quartz Composer uses OpenGL, Core Image, Core Video, and other technologies to build an API and a developer tool around a simple visual programming paradigm. Apple has embedded Quartz Composer deeply into the operating system. Compositions created in Quartz Composer can be played standalone in any QuickTime-aware application (although only on Mac OS X v10.4), from inside the Quartz Composer application or can be embedded into a Cocoa or Carbon application. Because Quartz Composer makes extensive usage of hardware acceleration and pixel shaders, it is recommended to have a recent graphics card with at least 32MB of VRAM.
Quartz Composer has many similarities to Max/MSP although its primary usage is for graphical rather than audio processing. The ability to construct interactive video compositions that react to audio or MIDI signals but which can be played from any QuickTime aware application has caused a great deal of interest in Quartz Composer from VJs.
Pierre-Olivier Latour originally developed the predecessor to Quartz Composer under the name PixelShox Studio.

★ Quartz Composer Programming Guide from Apple Computer

Repeat After Me

'Repeat After Me' is a tool by Apple designed to adjust the performance of their text-to-speech software. It allows developers to test the operating system's phonemic translation engine, view graphs of the automatically generated tone, graphically adjust the intonation, and record samples for reference.

Script Editor

'Script Editor' is a program included with the standard installation Mac OS and Mac OS X that allows AppleScripts to be written, debugged and run.
The program can also be used to save scripts as stand-alone applications that can be run without using the Script Editor program.
Other AppleScript and OSA language editors include:

★ Smile (software), from Satimage

★ Script Debugger, from Late Night Software

Shark

'Shark' is an application developed by Apple and bundled as a tool with Xcode for the Mac OS X operating system. Shark is used by software developers to optimize their software programs on OS X. It is a sampler, interrupting user programs at regular time intervals and taking snapshots of the stack, thus discovering the functions in which the program tends to spend most of its time. Shark also includes data mining tools to help users sort through the data produced by a sampling run.

Spin Control

'Spin Control' is an application bundled as a performance tool with Xcode for the Mac OS X operating system. Spin Control is used for monitoring hang activity in software programs.

Thread Viewer

'Thread Viewer' is a performance tool bundled with Xcode for the Mac OS X operating system 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.

Xray

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

External links

★ Apple Developer Connection Tools Downloads