Mac OS X Snow Leopard includes a full suite of developer tools that are crafted for one mission: to enable you to create amazing, high-quality applications and widgets more quickly than ever.
Xcode: The centerpiece of developer tools.
The centerpiece of the developer tools included with Mac OS X is the Xcode application, which provides an elegant, powerful user interface for creating and managing software development projects in Mac OS X. Use Xcode to organize and edit your source files, view documentation, build your product, debug your code, and optimize your product’s performance. Xcode in Snow Leopard also helps you program for Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, and other new technologies. Xcode is a highly customizable integrated development environment with features that let you create an easy-to-use, efficient working environment.
Interface Builder: Create your user interface.
Interface Builder helps you design the user interfaces of your applications. With this application, you create your user interface by picking controls from a library of configurable elements and arranging them with the help of layout guides. You can add impressive Core Animation-based behaviors to your application, and you can include transition effects between UI states, or 3D shadows to your controls, by simply clicking a few buttons. In addition, Interface Builder makes it easy to troubleshoot user interfaces, because the difficult task of positioning each control and connecting it to the appropriate methods in your source code is accomplished through an elegant and effective graphical user interface.
Instruments: View the performance of your application.
Performance-monitoring tools have long been an essential part of the developer’s toolset. The limitation of those tools, however, is that they could only give you part of the picture of how your application runs. Selecting the best tool for the job could be tricky, and there was no easy way to compare data between tools to see a complete view of the behavior of your application. Instruments in Mac OS X changes all that. It allows you to see multiple aspects of your application’s performance over time. With time-based graphs, you can monitor CPU usage, disk I/O, and memory usage and see how they interact. This gives you a more complete picture of your application’s behavior.
Dashcode: Widget development made easy.
Dashcode in Snow Leopard lets you quickly and easily build elegant and compelling Dashboard widgets. Created to meet the needs of widget developers, Dashcode combines powerful visual layout tools with a code editor, debugger, and comprehensive package management into a world-class integrated development environment. So you can create powerful and useful widgets for yourself, for your organization, or even for distribution to the world.
Scripting languages: Simplify your programming.
With Snow Leopard, Mac OS X makes it easy to use scripting languages as full application development tools. Snow Leopard ships with support for the RubyCocoa Bridge and the PyObjC bridge. These two bridges give developers access not only to system APIs, but to Cocoa frameworks such as AppKit and Core Data, enabling you to build fully native Mac OS X applications in Ruby or Python. The RubyCocoa and PyObjC bridges allow you to freely mix code written in Objective-C with code written in the scripting language. You can quickly build prototypes and then optimize by implementing performance-critical pieces in Objective-C.
