The Apple Developer Tools are a suite of software tools from Apple to aid in making software dynamic titles for the macOS and iOS platforms. The developer tools were formerly included on macOS install media, but are now exclusively distributed over the Internet. As of macOS 10.12, Xcode is available as a free download from the Mac App Store.
Applications
Applet Launcher
A graphical interface for JavaScript's Plug-in, which aids developers by demonstrating how Java applets perform on macOS. Provides tools to adjust the performance, behavior and user experience in applets in development.
Audio Unit Lab
A graphic presentation of audio units helping software developers to examine their results in decibels. AU Lab can be used to test audio units, conduct live mixing, and playback of audio content. Audio units are controlled visually with the audio unit’s graphic interface and touch screen.
Computer Hardware Understanding Development Tools
A set of software tools, collectively Computer Hardware Understanding Development Tools (CHUD Tools) measure software performance on macOS, to aid in optimizing. Also provides hardware system benchmarks.
Core Image Fun House
Used in testing Core Image units, which function similar to Adobe Photoshop filters. Each has a specific action, with parameters customize the action. Showcases Core Image, a technology introduced in Mac OS X 10.4, supported by newer graphic hardware.
CrashReporterPrefs
A developer utility for setting report parameters for Apple's Crash Reporter application. 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. None: Disables the dialog prompt. Crash reports are neither displayed nor logged.
FileMerge
A staple of macOS's developer tools since the days of NeXTSTEP, FileMerge graphically compares two or more versions of a file. True to its name, FileMerge allows the user to easily merge the two or more versions into one file. The utility is often used to track changes to source code.
macOS's command provides the ability to launch FileMerge from the command line. The parameter can be used for three-way merging.
Help Indexer
Creates an index file for the macOS built-in Help Viewer.
icns Browser
Views the resources for an .icns file, displaying the Mini, Small, Large, Huge, Thumbnail & Tile sizes in all color depths and masks.
Icon Composer
Icon Composer was an icon editor that does not have any editing features other than composing Apple Icon Image files and Windows ICO files. External editors must do all the image manipulation, then the results may be imported into the converter to create the finished icon. As of Xcode 8.2, Icon Composer is no longer available in Additional Tools, as it cannot create high resolution icons. Apple recommends using the command-line utility iconutil, which ships with macOS.
Instruments
Instruments is a GUI for tracing framework DTrace from Sun's OpenSolaris. It is used to profile time usage, memory allocations, system activity, call trace analysis, GPU performance analysis, energy logging (on iOS devices) etc.
Jar Bundler
Java tool that aids in packaging an application’s component files into a single double-clickable application. Properties can be modified to optimize the code.
MallocDebug
Assistance for assessing memory usage and detecting memory leaks in programs.
Assesses an application's memory usage by monitoring a user as they interact with an application, which allows MallocDebug to build a memory profile that unfortunately is limited in size.
OpenGL Driver Monitor
Real time access to the inner workings of the graphics processing unit. Runs locally or over a network using Bonjour which is less likely to interfere with the statistics it is gathering with the exception of some disk fragmentation devices.
OpenGL Profiler
This tool assists developers in debugging and optimizing OpenGL usage under macOS.
Supported 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
An integrated environment to develop and debug OpenGL GPU programs (Shaders) under macOS.