Wednesday September 05, 2012

AXElements - Like UI Automation For OS X

The team at Marketcircle have been quietly developing what looks like UI Automation for OS X. In case you didn’t know, UI Automation is a very slick user interface testing tool for iOS that Apple built into Instruments. Alas, this doesn’t work for Mac OS X apps.

AXElements tries to bring the same ease to the desktop. Your application is exposed to your test script as seen through the eyes of the accessibility framework. You can view the state of the interface, trigger events, and check the results against your expectations. You’ll need to install some dependencies and learn Ruby, but it could be a really useful tool to smoke out those integration bugs. As I get more into OS X development, I’m going to keep this in mind.