Perl Made Easy with Affrus 1.0 -- Late Night Software has a history of picking up where Apple leaves off. Mac OS X includes AppleScript, but Apple's own Script Editor isn't all that great as an editing environment, and it can't debug at all. Late Night's Script Debugger makes up for this, making AppleScript easily editable and debuggable. Late Night Software has continued in the same vein with the announcement of Affrus, which does the same for Perl. (Conflict of interest disclaimer: I wrote the manuals for both programs.)

Perl is a popular Unix scripting language; Mac OS X includes Perl, but has no native application for easy editing and debugging of Perl scripts. Affrus meets this need. You can step through Perl scripts, or run to breakpoints that you set, evaluating expressions and examining variables in their runtime context. Syntax coloring clarifies the script's meaning; a pop-up menu lets you navigate to a subroutine's definition, even if it's in an external module. Affrus costs $100 and requires Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar or higher; a 30-day demo is available as a 4.9 MB download. [MAN]

<http://www.latenightsw.com/affrus/>