Late Night Software

Late Night Software Ltd., is a privately held Canadian software company that has produced several award winning applications, utilities, and developer's tools for the Macintosh computer platform. The company was established in 1995. Its president is Mark Alldritt.

Software

Applications

In 1995, Late Night Software released what is now referred to as their flagship product, the multiple award winning Script Debugger. At the time, there were several competing AppleScript and Open Scripting Architecture (OSA) language source code editors, including "ScriptWizard" and Main Event Software's Scripter. As of May, 2005, Script Debugger and Smile remain the only competitors to Apple Computer's freeware Script Editor application.

Script Debugger has since won many awards and review accolades in the Macintosh scripting community. Version 1 received "5 mice" from MacUser and 4 stars from MacWEEK. Version 2 received the 2000 MacWorld Eddy for "Best Development Software", and received "4.5 mice" from both MacUser and MacWorld.

In 2004, the company released Affrus, a Mac OS X native debugger for the Perl scripting language.

On July 29, 2005, the company acquired FaceSpan from Digital Technology International. FaceSpan is a competing product to Apple Computer's AppleScript Studio. This will mark Late Night Software's first entry into graphically-based rapid application development tools.

On February 9, 2006, the company released the long awaited 4.0 version of Script Debugger.

Scripting Additions

Early in the history of the AppleScript scripting language, Mark Alldritt produced a popular freeware Scripting Addition called "Script Tools". This was later repackaged as a commercial product, "LNS Scripting Additions". Owing to changes in the Macintosh operating system, Script Tools has been discontinued and is no longer available.

"XML Tools" brings native XML parsing to AppleScript and other OSA languages. It uses James Clark's Expat XML parser.

"XSLT Tools" brings native XSLT transformations to AppleScript and other OSA languages. It is based on the Apache Software Foundation's Xerces-C XML parser Xalan-C XSLT processor.

"List & Record Tools" allows set logic commands to be performed on AppleScript lists, and dynamic property access to AppleScript records.

"Property List Tools" allows native AppleScript parsing of the Mac OS X Property Lists file type (".plist" files).

Utilities and Plugins

JavaScript OSA is an Open Scripting Architecture scripting language. It is a system-level scripting language, based on the SpiderMonkey engine, intended as an alternative to AppleScript.

"OSA for Dreamweaver" allows Macromedia Dreamweaver to be scripted via AppleScript and other OSA languages.

"OSAXen Fixer" is a utility that allows REALbasic to directly call on Scripting Additions without going through AppleScript.

"Scheduler" was an easy to use utility that allowed the scheduled launching of applications and the opening of documents, in response to various events. It was fully scriptable and script-attachable via AppleScript and other OSA languages. Scheduler has been discontinued and is no longer available.

"SCRIPZ" was a product for Adobe Illustrator that brought scripting support to Illustrator version 7.0. SCRIPZ supported both Visual Basic/COM on Windows and AppleScript/Apple events on the Macintosh. In 1998, SCRIPZ was acquired by Adobe Systems. SCRIPZ functionality was natively incorporated into Illustrator version 9.0.

"Tag-On" was an Adobe InDesign plug-in, which provided the ability to import text formatted using QuarkXPress XPress Tags into InDesign. The product was never updated to work with "InDesign CS".

External links

* [http://www.latenightsw.com Late Night Software]