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 software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

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. 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 aut ...

and Open Scripting Architecture (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's

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 t ...

Script Editor 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 computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

native debugger for the Perl scripting language. In 2005, the company acquired FaceSpan from Digital Technology International. FaceSpan was a competing product to Apple Computer's AppleScript Studio. This marked Late Night Software's first entry into graphically-based rapid application development 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, 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, Script Tools has been discontinued and is no longer available. ''XML Tools'' brought native XML parsing to AppleScript and other OSA languages. It uses James Clark (XML expert), James Clark's Expat (XML), Expat XML parser. ''XSLT Tools'' brought native XSLT transformations to AppleScript and other OSA languages. It is based on the Apache Software Foundation's Apache Xerces, Xerces-C XML parser Xalan-C XSLT processor. ''List & Record Tools'' allows Set (mathematics), 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 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 that brought scripting support to Illustrator version 7.0. SCRIPZ supported both Visual Basic (classic), Visual Basic/Component Object Model, 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".

References

External links

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