News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

April 16, 2007

software

The insides of that Developer folder

Posted Apr. 16, ’07, 4:34 PM PT by Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen
Category | Software

developertools.jpg

When you think about software that comes on every Mac, chances are you think about apps like iLife or Safari, but Apple hides a few extra goodies in the boxes that ship out of China with a shiny new computer or a featured-filled OS.

Specifically, I’m talking about the developer tools. If you’ve ever created a piece of Cocoa software, you’ve surely used Xcode, or maybe you played with the Dashcode beta to build a widget. However, there are many more applications, originally designed for developers, that can be found inside the “Developer” folder, located at the root of your hard drive (these tools are also included as extra installs on OS X install disks). Today, MacApper has a great article on a few little apps that live there and what they do.

If you’ve got extra time on your hands, perhaps you can play with Core Image Fun House to apply PhotoBooth-esque effects to existing images. Or you could try to improve OS X’s speech recognition by talking into Repeat After Me. Or, if an application is spending too much time at the beach playing with the dreaded spinning beach ball, Spin Control and Thread Viewer can help you heal the sunburn. Check out the whole list and enjoy your free time.


2 Comments

superdude1000 said:

http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/6443/doherrorsq0.png


I was playing around with the tools, and I got that error message in Shark.

Hooray for senses of humor in developers.

April 16, 2007 7:00 PM
spiderbat said:

Another little gem among the utilities of the Developer folder is "Property List Editor": this application displays property list documents in a hierarchical form and allows to edit them. Since preference files are property lists...

April 17, 2007 7:28 AM

Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: