Professional iOS Database Application Programming, 2nd Edition

Appendix A

Tools for Troubleshooting Your Applications

In this book, I have covered various topics related to building data-centric iOS applications. Because most readers are already familiar with iOS software development, this book does not include in-depth coverage of the tools that experienced developers may already know about, such as Instruments and the Static Analyzer.

This appendix covers the other tools that can be invaluable when troubleshooting your applications. The techniques that you learn in this appendix are general. You should be able to use these techniques as-is with the current version of Instruments and apply the same principles to future versions of the tool. If you already know about these tools, perhaps you will learn a new tip or trick. If you have never used these tools, you will learn how to use them to effectively track down problems in your code.

INSTRUMENTS

Instruments is a graphical tool that helps you gather information about your application at runtime. You can then use this information to help track down difficult bugs such as memory leaks and network communication issues. Instruments is also valuable in profiling the performance of your application and helping you track down and fix bottlenecks. If your application is graphically intensive, you can use Instruments to measure graphics performance with the Core Animation or OpenGL tools. Many different tools are available in the Instruments application to help you troubleshoot a variety of application ...