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The Gems of Apple’s Development Tools

macapper.com — Apple makes this very accessible with Xcode and their other development tools freely available to anyone who wants them. But even if you’re not a developer, there are some really cool things buried within the Apple Development Tools. Here are a few of those little gems that I found while poking around the in the Developer directory.

Who dugg this? Made popular Apr 17, 2007

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  • isdereks, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10FileMerge - Excellent time saving tool especially if co-workers send revisions.
  • rodrigo74, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"I had only known basic C syntax and dove into XCode/ObjC and within three weeks had a commercial grade application out."

    Either your application was very simple, or your concept of "commercial grade app" is different from mine..
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I disagree. I had only known basic C syntax and dove into XCode/ObjC and within three weeks had a commercial grade application out. I think people expect to be able to drop a few controls on a form/window and have some amazing application. No, that's not going to happen. You need to jump in and write some code and read some documentation. It takes a lot of work to learn things. I think the younger programmers these days just aren't willing to work at it.
  • d3designs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3http://duggmirror.com/apple/The_Gems_of_Apple_s_Development_Tools/
  • colincornaby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"XCode aside, Cocoa is nice, but then it doesn't help if you want to write portable applications, which is really where everything is going these days. I reckon the Linux folk have it better.."

    What kind of portable applications? I've seen all sorts of plugins for all sorts of build targets out there for XCode. I've even seen a Mono/C# plugin for XCode.
  • lazycoder, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3ObjectiveC is a little hard to wrap your head around. I'm finding that, provided I don't have to dig into any Carbon APIs, that using ObjectiveC with the Cocoa framework is a lot easier than it looks. There are several bridges to scripting languages that you can use to write Cocoa applications. PyObjC, RubyCocoa are two of the more popular ones. The Java Cocoa interface is deprecated though.

    The 950mb download not only contains GCC, but all the libraries, documentation, and tools.
  • Perleeeze, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Prepare to be buried Spamtwat!
  • SVPirate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I wasted many happy evenings tooling with QuartzComposer. It's a kick-ass app.
  • pygmalion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2How on earth can this list exlude Shark ? It's the best profiler on any platform. If you know a thing or two about code optimization, check out the WWDC sessions about Shark on iTunes... it will blow your mind.
  • frebro, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Those are actually some pretty nice tools! Spin Control and File Merge definitely seem useful for all kind of software development.
  • gmillerd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3All the tools looks sexy as hell, but there just is not an beginner entrance into Xcode, a VB as it were. and ObjectiveC is too big of a leap for most people.
  • reverb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Uh, yes there is. AppleScript Studio.
  • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Objective-C however is really simple once you realize it's all built around the concept of sending messages between things, and if you get the message syntax down you are basically just doing C with a special syntax for messages (OK, the object structure is a little different as well but also not hard to understand).
  • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3If you read the article you'd realize the reason it's large is that there are many other tools and utilities in there besides GCC - and a lot of documentation. Profiling, monitoring, debugging, IDE - it's all there.
  • rspeed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@kcorax

    I'm a bit of a geek so I prefer the command-line svn client. Occasionally I'll use svnX for larger operations, which works quite well. Isn't there a project to integrate svn into the Finder?
  • kirakun, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I tried to use Spin Control on Safari when I was loading a Digg story page with at least 300 comments. Safari showed me the spinning beach-ball for over 10 seconds, but Spin Control did not log anything at all.

    Now I know that the ``hang'' is with Digg's server, but I was expecting Spin Control to kick in whenever an application shows the spinning beach-ball.
  • Spuy767, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Agreed, I've used visual basic, and XCode both extensively, and Visual Basic allows you to basically, make mediocre applications for Windows that will likely run very slow and require a massive code library to work. On the other hand, while XCode is not as easy to use, and papa bill isn't coddling your nuts while you're coding, you can make highly optimized applications while still making the GUI, arguably the toughest thing to encode, a lot simpler with the addition of Drag & Drop.
  • SVPirate, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Hmmm... I dig interface builder but I can't for the life of me get my head around Objective-C. I've only ever coded Perl, PHP and Javascript at any serious level and Object Oriented stuff makes my cranium ache at the best of times. Obj-C is a huge leap fro a humble web scripter. It's a shame, because given the powers of Obj-C I could easily put together useful tools for OS X, where I reach the limits of web-based coding.
  • lamda951, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1This is what you are after. After a period of not going anywhere, it looks like some people are putting some life back into this project.
    http://scplugin.tigris.org/
  • frostieDude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0@lazycoder

    I moved from doing mostly Carbon apps (at one time classic MacOS, and then later apps that targetted both 9 and X) to mostly Cocoa apps (when my customers/employers quit caring about MacOS 9). Cocoa is nice, but knowledge of Carbon still comes in handy.
  • frostieDude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0@colincornaby
    By portable applications, we mean that you can write applications that run on more than one platform. For example, using C++ and Qt (Trolltech, not QuickTime), I write applications that run on MacOS X, Win32, and Linux. With Java, you can target even more platforms.

    With Cocoa, you are targetting MacOS X only. Note that XCode != Cocoa and Cocoa != Objective-C.
  • ordminute, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3Yikes XCode is buggy and insanely bloated. What on earth is up with needing a 950Mb download just to upgrade GCC? What's wrong with a little modularity?

    XCode aside, Cocoa is nice, but then it doesn't help if you want to write portable applications, which is really where everything is going these days. I reckon the Linux folk have it better..
  • Heavy, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1@aychamo
    "I think people expect to be able to drop a few controls on a form/window and have some amazing application" Expect? Ever used Visual Studio?
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -10/+2it may be non-notable, but it is something to do with apple, hence it is on the frontpage
  • KCorax, on 10/12/2007, -11/+3This is such a joke. How can one expect to survice without a decent SVN client ? Someone please port Tortoise ASAP !
  • Predater, on 10/12/2007, -12/+2cool... 97 diggs for an article submitted 21hours and 38 minutes ago with just one single comment and it makes it to the front page!

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