Late Night Software Ltd., is a privately held Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 software company that has produced several applications

Application software

Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...

, utilities, and developer's tools for the Macintosh computer platform. The company was established in 1995. Its president is Mark Alldritt.

Applications

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

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...

. At the time, there were several competing AppleScript

AppleScript

AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. and built into Macintosh operating systems since System 7. The term "AppleScript" may refer to the scripting system itself, or to particular scripts that are written in the AppleScript language....

 and Open Scripting Architecture (OSA) language source code editor

Source code editor

A source code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs by programmers. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment ....

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

Smile (software)

Smile is a Macintosh computer programming and working environment based on AppleScript. It features a number of production technologies and a natural fashion of having them work together...

 remain the only competitors to Apple Computer

Apple Computer

Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...

's freeware

Freeware

Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...

 Script Editor application.

In 2004, the company released Affrus, a Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

 native debugger for the Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

 scripting language.

In 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

Rapid application development

Rapid application development is a software development methodology that uses minimal planning in favor of rapid prototyping. The "planning" of software developed using RAD is interleaved with writing the software itself...

 tools.

Scripting Additions

Early in the history of the AppleScript

AppleScript

AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. and built into Macintosh operating systems since System 7. The term "AppleScript" may refer to the scripting system itself, or to particular scripts that are written in the AppleScript language....

 scripting language

Scripting language

A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...

, Mark Alldritt produced a freeware

Freeware

Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...

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

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

, Script Tools has been discontinued and is no longer available.

XML Tools brought native XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 parsing to AppleScript and other OSA languages. It uses James Clark

James Clark (XML expert)

James Clark, is the author of groff and expat and has done much work with open-source software and XML. Born in London, and educated at Charterhouse and Merton College, Oxford, Clark has lived in Bangkok, Thailand since 1995, and is now a permanent resident...

's Expat XML parser

Expat (XML)

In computing, Expat is a stream-oriented XML 1.0 parser library, written in C. As one of the first available open-source XML parsers, Expat has found a place in many open-source projects. Such projects include the Apache HTTP Server, Mozilla, Perl, Python and PHP...

.

XSLT Tools brought native XSLT

XSLT

XSLT is a declarative, XML-based language used for the transformation of XML documents. The original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one. The new document may be serialized by the processor in standard XML syntax or in another format,...

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

Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF was formed from the Apache Group and incorporated in Delaware, U.S., in June 1999.The Apache Software Foundation is a decentralized community of developers...

's Xerces

Xerces

Xerces is a collection of software libraries for parsing, validating, serializing and manipulating XML. The library implements a number of standard APIs for XML parsing, including DOM, SAX and SAX2. The implementation is available in Java, C++ and Perl programming languages.-External...

-C XML parser Xalan

Xalan

Xalan is a popular open source software library from the Apache Software Foundation, originally created by IBM under the name LotusXSL, 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 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

JavaScript OSA

JavaScript OSA, , is a freeware inter-process communication scripting language for the Macintosh computer....

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

SpiderMonkey

SpiderMonkey is the code name for the first-ever JavaScript engine, written by Brendan Eich at Netscape Communications, later released as open source and now maintained by the Mozilla Foundation.-History:Eich "wrote JavaScript in ten days" in 1995,...

 engine, intended as an alternative to AppleScript.

OSA for Dreamweaver allows Macromedia Dreamweaver

Macromedia Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver is a proprietary web development application originally created by Macromedia, and is now developed by Adobe Systems, which acquired Macromedia in 2005....

 to be scripted via AppleScript and other OSA languages.

OSAXen Fixer is a utility that allows REALbasic

REALbasic

Realbasic is the object-oriented dialect of the BASIC programming language used in Real Studio, a programming environment, developed and commercially marketed by Real Software, Inc of Austin, Texas for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, 32-bit x86 Linux and the web.- Language features :RB is a strongly...

 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

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Adobe Systems. Illustrator is similar in scope, intended market, and functionality to its competitors, CorelDraw, Xara Designer Pro and Macromedia FreeHand....

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

Visual Basic

Visual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...

/COM

Component Object Model

Component Object Model is a binary-interface standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993. It is used to enable interprocess communication and dynamic object creation in a large range of programming languages...

 on Windows and AppleScript/Apple events

Apple events

Apple events are the canonical message-based interprocess communication mechanism in Mac OS, first appearing in System 7 and supported by every version since then, including Mac OS X. Apple events describe "high-level" events such as "open document" or "print file", whereas earlier OS's had...

 on the Macintosh. In 1998, SCRIPZ was acquired by Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

. SCRIPZ functionality was natively incorporated into Illustrator version 9.0.

Tag-On was an Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is a software application produced by Adobe Systems. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers and books. In conjunction with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite InDesign can publish content suitable for tablet devices...

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

QuarkXPress

QuarkXPress is a computer application for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG environment. It runs on Mac OS X and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc...

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