Friday, July 25, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
The Instruments tool that Apple ships with XCode, Interface Builder, etc. is simply amazing.
I've been developing some 2D Quartz stuff this afternoon, learning how things hook up to one another, etc. and then I thought that I would try running Instruments on my new Cocoa application.
The amount of time, effort & love that went into this debugging tool is incredible. Above is a screenshot of a simple "run" browser - collections of recorded UI interactions that you can record and playback. You can't see the whole thing at all, but they cover flow the runs for browsing.
Sure they have the code for that ready like water in a squirt gun, but this simple fact should show you how rich and engaging this tool is. And deep... I keep discovering cool features and ways to use this thing. The iTunes timer UI doesn't hurt in making it seem like fun either.
XCode is impressive for all it offers, and this thing is no slouch in comparison itself.
When a debugging tool is fun to use and nice to look at, you're prone to using it more often. I'm not a hard core Obj-C developer by any means, at all, by any stretch of the imagination, on any planet, anywhere... and not for a long, long time. But I can already see great benefits of using this tool to spot threads, what is being accessed in chronological order, what processes are being consumed, how much memory is being used, etc.
It's like the Flex Debugger after 80 red bulls, a quick full encyclopedia consumption, ten years of weight lifting, and a trip to the spa for a week of beauty.
1 Comments:
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“I totally agree with you. What amaze me is that the very same tool is also used for debugging iPhone applications, it is a completely different planet from anything I used in the past 7 years (mostly Symbian but also Windows Mobile). Instruments and XCode is how tools should be conceived and implemented!”
