Mac OS X Hacks

Introducing and Installing the Mac OS X Developer Tools

The Mac OS X Developer Tools are a treasure trove of developer applications, utilities, tools, and scripts vital to both developing for OS X and building open source applications from source.

Mac development has taken a quantum leap forward, thanks to the Mac OS X Developer Tools (http://developer.apple.com/tools/). Originally written for the NeXT operating system, they’ve been ported across to OS X. The major bundled components are: Project Builder for managing application development, writing code, and building apps and Interface Builder, a marvelous application for designing user interfaces and binding their components to application code.

So why, you may ask, should you care? After all, you’re not a developer (maybe you are) and are just after a few hacks for your Mac. Alongside the main tools for building applications on Macintosh are a host of Unix commands and utilities vital for configuring, compiling, and deploying a plethora of applications and services — most open source and free for the taking. You’ll need the Developer Tools installed to follow along with some of the hacks in this book, especially in the Unix, Terminal, Mail, and web sections.

Getting the Developer Tools

You may already have the Developer Tools installed (check for the /Developer folder on your hard drive), not yet installed but on your hard drive as a package (check Applications/Installers/Developer Tools), or on CD in the box your Mac arrived ...