Introduction to Instruments

When writing and debugging code, you can often get caught up in the frustrations of questions like why isn't this working and how can I make this feature more obvious to the user? However, once you've got everything functioning in the way you like, it's time to ask some questions that have less visible and less immediate impact. How can we make our app run faster? Is this function as simple as it needs to be? Are we wasting any processor time?

These are questions of optimization: once our product is functionally complete, we need to go back and make sure we did everything right. Because these questions don't have easily visible answers, we're going to have to use some tools to get the job done. In the case of optimization, that tool is Instruments.

Instruments is an analysis and profiling tool that gives a detailed look at what is going on under the hood of your app. (You may remember that we took a very quick look at it all way back...