Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Using the Console
The console is a text output terminal, equivalent to UNIX's
stdout
(the standard output file), which is typic-
ally routed to a display rather than written to disk. It displays four kinds of messages:
System generated messages:
Console messages include time stamps and other supporting information
that is generated automatically.
Custom messages, created with
NSLog
or
printf
statements in your code:
Use custom messages to
check program flow, dump information about object properties, and monitor variable values.
System generated warnings:
These are rare. A very small number of Cocoa classes generate text to re-
port errors or warnings. Beta OS versions are more likely to generate warnings than production versions.
Crash dumps:
These are also known as a backtraces and stack dumps, and they list the messages and
events that led to the crash.
You can choose some or all of these messages with the output selection menu at the top left of the console.
These are your options:
All Output:
Displays all messages
Debugger Output:
Displays system messages, crash reports, and error messages
Target Output:
Displays messages from your application
You also can use the Clear button to clear the console of all output.
