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. Xcode is a full-featured IDE for developing Mac applications and includes a world-class code editor, a graphical debugger, and integrated Objective-C, C, and C++ compilers. Xcode has intimate knowledge of the Cocoa frameworks that power Mac OS X, and it is even able to identify bugs by analyzing the code you write — without running the application. The intuitive development experience makes it easy to get your first application up and running, yet Xcode is so powerful that Mac OS X itself is built using the exact same toolset.
Interface Builder: Create your user interface.
Interface Builder makes it easy to design and test a graphical user interface without writing any code. All the main controls of Mac OS X are provided in a library of parts to be dragged onto the design canvas, arranged with helpful layout guides, and customized with colors, shadows, fonts, and even animations. Interface Builder creates real, live interfaces that are the actual resource the application will load at runtime. This is not brittle code generation. The tight integration with Xcode makes it easy to wire the graphical interface controls to the source code that performs the action. Simply lay out the interface, drag a line from the control to the code, and click the Start button — developing on Mac OS X is that easy to get started.
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. Each tool gave only a piece of the puzzle, and there was no easy way to compare data between tools to see a complete view of the your application’s behavior. 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. If your application crashes or starts to bog down, Instruments can show you where, when, and why with the click of a mouse, jumping straight to the offending line of code.
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 a powerful visual layout design canvas with a code editor, JavaScript 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.
Mac OS X makes it easy to use all the most popular scripting languages right out of the box. Start up a new Mac, launch Terminal.app, and begin working out a new automation script in Python, Ruby, or Perl. Use your favorite shell, such as bash, zsh, or csh, to act as your scripting home. High-level frameworks such as Ruby on Rails are also included. But Mac OS X goes even further by providing native language bridges for Ruby and Python to the system’s Cocoa frameworks. Using these language bridges you can create great Mac applications with the native look, freely mixing in Objective-C where desired.
Learn more about the tools for developing Mac OS X applications
