Dashcode was a software application created by

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

that was included with

Mac OS X Leopard Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth software versioning, major release of macOS, Apple Inc., Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007, as the successor of Mac OS X Ti ...

and facilitates the development of widgets for

Dashboard A dashboard (also called dash, instrument panel or IP, or fascia) is a control panel (engineering), control panel set within the central console of a vehicle, boat, or cockpit of an aircraft or spacecraft. Usually located directly ahead of the ...

. It was first included on new

MacBook MacBook is a type of Mac laptop computer that is developed and marketed by Apple that use Apple's macOS operating system since 2006. The MacBook brand replaced the PowerBook and iBook brands during the Mac transition to Intel processors, ann ...

s shipping around the time of May 24, 2006, as part of the

Xcode Xcode is a suite of developer tools for building apps on Apple devices. It includes an integrated development environment (IDE) of the same name for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. It w ...

developer tools. Dashcode, Version 3.0 (328), was included as part of Apple's Xcode developer tools on the

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Mac OS X Snow Leopard (version 10.6) (also referred to as OS X Snow Leopard) is the seventh major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Snow Leopard was publicly unveiled on June 8, 2009, at A ...

DVD as an optional install. The last iteration of Dashcode, Version 3.0.5 for Xcode 4, is still available to developer account holders as an optional install fro
Downloads for Apple Developers (Apple Developer ID required)

History

WWDC

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder o ...

mentioned Dashcode as a new feature to be included in Leopard during his 2006

WWDC The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is currently held at Apple Park in California. The event is used to showcase new software and technologies in the macO ...

keynote speech. Although not installed by default as part of an Xcode installation, the DVDs handed out at the

did contain a version of Dashcode. Although the version number was in fact lower than that of the "MacBook build", the WWDC build of Dashcode contained several additional templates, as well as some interface and functionality improvements. This WWDC build launched on both Mac OS X v10.4 and the WWDC build of Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard"), but was unusable on 10.4 (crashes soon after startup).

Public beta

On December 20, 2006, Apple released a

public beta The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

of Dashcode. When announcing this release, Apple stated the beta had been "scaled back" for compatibility with Mac OS X v10.4. This beta expired on July 15, 2007.

Dashcode and iOS

Dashcode Version 2.0 (151) is included as part of Apple's

iOS SDK The iOS SDK (iOS Software Development Kit), formerly the iPhone SDK, is a software development kit (SDK) developed by Apple Inc. The kit allows for the development of mobile apps on Apple's iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The iOS SDK is a ...

. This allows for the creation of

Web app A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with World Wide Web, web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to Dynamic web page, dynamically ...

s for the

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

version of

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

. Dashcode Version 3.0.2 (336) is installed with Xcode on OS X Lion. It is not known if this will allow for the local installation of Dashcode-created web apps, as such an ability will allow iOS to run a software layer akin to Mac OS X's Dashboard, which runs on a local installation. Currently, iOS maintains a separation between native code and web code, in that way native applications can access data from the Internet, web content can't be accessed by native applications save for Safari; likewise, web content (including web apps) can be run inside the Safari browser, but cannot have access to the filesystem or other internals of iOS and cannot be installed on the operating system in the same way as native code. Native code software for iOS is currently developed using the

suite, particularly an iPhone-centric version of

Interface Builder Interface Builder is a software development application for Apple's macOS operating system. It is part of Xcode (formerly Project Builder), the Apple Developer developer's toolset. Interface Builder allows Cocoa and Carbon developers to crea ...

packaged with the iOS SDK.

References

External links

Dashcode public beta download
from Apple

from Apple Developer Connection
Dashcode Developer Tips

Dashboard User Tips
{{macOS developer tools MacOS development