Late Night Software Ltd., is a privately held

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

company that has produced several

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

, utilities, and developer's tools for the

Macintosh computer The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

platform. The company was established in 1995. Its president is Mark Alldritt.

Software

Applications

In 1995, Late Night Software released what is now their main product,

Script Debugger Script Debugger is a Macintosh computer source code editor and debugging environment for the AppleScript programming language, and other languages based on Apple Inc.'s Open Scripting Architecture. It is a product of Late Night Software. History ...

. At the time, there were several competing

AppleScript AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system automa ...

and

Open Scripting Architecture AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system automa ...

(OSA) language

source code editor A source-code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment (IDE) or web browser. Source-code ed ...

s, including ''ScriptWizard'' and Main Event Software's Scripter. As of May, 2005, Script Debugger and

Smile A smile is a facial expression formed primarily by flexing the muscles at the sides of the mouth. Some smiles include a contraction of the muscles at the corner of the eyes, an action known as a Duchenne smile. Among humans, a smile expresses ...

remain the only competitors to

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

Script Editor A script editor is a member of the production team of scripted television and radio programmes, usually dramas and comedies. The script editor has many responsibilities including finding new script writers, developing storyline and series ideas wi ...

application. In 2004, the company released Affrus, a

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

native debugger for the

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

scripting language. In 2005, the company acquired

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

from Digital Technology International. FaceSpan was a competing product to Apple Computer's

AppleScript Studio AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system automa ...

. This marked Late Night Software's first entry into graphically-based

rapid application development Rapid application development (RAD), also called rapid application building (RAB), is both a general term for adaptive software development approaches, and the name for James Martin's method of rapid development. In general, RAD approaches to ...

tools. On May 5, 2009, after over 2 years of development on FaceSpan 5, Alldritt announced in the company's blog that development had been suspendedLateNite SW blog post announcing suspension of FaceSpan 5 development
/ref> because "in the time it has taken me to do this work, the world has moved on and AppleScript-based UIs are not going to be relevant in the marketplace."

Scripting Additions

Early in the history of the

scripting language A scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled. A scripting ...

, Mark Alldritt produced a

Scripting Addition called ''Script Tools''. This was later repackaged as a commercial product, ''LNS Scripting Additions''. Owing to changes in the Macintosh

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

, Script Tools has been discontinued and is no longer available. ''XML Tools'' brought native

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

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

XSLT XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subseque ...

transformations to AppleScript and other OSA languages. It is based on the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the A ...

's Xerces-C XML parser

Xalan Xalan is a popular open source software library from the Apache Software Foundation, that implements the XSLT 1.0 XML transformation language and the XPath 1.0 language. The Xalan XSLT processor is available for both the Java and C++ programming ...

-C XSLT processor. ''List & Record Tools'' allows

set Set, The Set, SET or SETS may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Mathematics *Set (mathematics), a collection of elements *Category of sets, the category whose objects and morphisms are sets and total functions, respectively Electro ...

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 In the macOS, iOS, NeXTSTEP, and GNUstep programming frameworks, property list files are files that store serialized objects. Property list files use the filename extension .plist, and thus are often referred to as p-list files. Property list ...

file type (".plist" files).

Utilities and Plugins

JavaScript OSA JavaScript OSA, (originally ''JavaScript for OSA'', abbreviated as ''JSOSA''), is a freeware inter-process communication scripting language for the Macintosh computer. JavaScript OSA uses the "core language" of the Mozilla implementation of the Ja ...

is an Open Scripting Architecture scripting language. It is a system-level scripting language, based on the

SpiderMonkey SpiderMonkey is the first JavaScript engine, written by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications, later released as open source and currently maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. It is used in the Firefox web browser. History Eich "wrote Jav ...

engine, intended as an alternative to AppleScript. ''OSA for Dreamweaver'' allows

Macromedia Dreamweaver Adobe Dreamweaver is a Proprietary software, proprietary web development tool from Adobe Inc. It was created by Macromedia in 1997 and developed by them until Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2005. Adobe Dreamweaver is available for t ...

to be scripted via AppleScript and other OSA languages. ''OSAXen Fixer'' is a utility that allows

REALbasic The Xojo programming environment and programming language is developed and commercially marketed by Xojo, Inc. of Austin, Texas for software development targeting macOS, Microsoft Windows, Linux, iOS, the Web and Raspberry Pi. Xojo uses a proprie ...

to directly call on Scripting Additions without going through AppleScript. ''Scheduler'' was a 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 Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...

that brought scripting support to Illustrator version 7.0. SCRIPZ supported both

Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to: * Visual Basic .NET (now simply referred to as "Visual Basic"), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET * Visual Basic (cl ...

COM Com or COM may refer to: Computing * COM (hardware interface), a serial port interface on IBM PC-compatible computers * COM file, or .com file, short for "command", a file extension for an executable file in MS-DOS * .com, an Internet top-level d ...

on Windows and AppleScript/

Apple events Apple events are the message-based interprocess communication mechanism in Mac OS, first making an appearance in System 7 and supported by every version of the classic Mac OS since then and by macOS. Apple events describe "high-level" events suc ...

on the Macintosh. In 1998, SCRIPZ was acquired by

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

. SCRIPZ functionality was natively incorporated into Illustrator version 9.0. ''Tag-On'' was an

Adobe InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, ...

plug-in, which provided the ability to import text formatted using

QuarkXPress QuarkXPress is a desktop publishing software for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. It runs on macOS and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc. in 1987 and is still owned and ...

XPress Tags into InDesign. The product was never updated to work with "InDesign CS".

References

External links

*{{Official website, www.latenightsw.com Software companies of Canada Macintosh software companies