Absoft Corporation, a leading provider of Fortran tools for Mac OS systems, has announced an Xcode plug-in for Fortran development under Xcode 3.1 on Mac OS/Intel. The plug-in is compatible with Absoft's newly released Pro Fortran v10.2, and will be included free of charge as part of the Pro Fortran distribution. Absoft is releasing the Xcode plug-in as an alternative to their popular and well established multi-platform IDE for Fortran and C++ development. Absoft states that Apple's Xcode is excellent for C/C++, but was not designed as Fortran aware, and therefore limited as a Fortran development environment. Absoft's Fortran Xcode plug-in adds Fortran functionality, which allows Absoft's 32-bit and 64-bit Fortran compilers to be used within Xcode. Access to Absoft's Fx3 debugger, MRWE application framework and third party libraries is also supported. Using Absoft's Xcode plug-in, customers can easily build mixed Fortran or Fortran/C++ programs as MRWE applications, terminal applications or libraries. "Absoft is pleased to add an Xcode plug-in to the Pro Fortran v10.2 tool suite," said Wood Lotz, president of Absoft. "Pro Fortran customers now have the choice of developing under Xcode, or with our traditional IDE. Absoft is a great fan of Xcode, but Fortran imposes special requirements and because we have 100% control over the Absoft IDE, and because it is an integrated environment, it can include additional functionality, which cannot be provided via an Xcode plug-in. One example is our new Fortran module aware, parallel make utility. It is the only parallel make for Mac OS which automatically handles Fortran 90 module dependencies created by module use, thereby eliminating the need to continually hand order and track compilation sequences, as is required when using alternative products. While this make facility cannot be supported in Xcode, we will make tools from our IDE accessible from Xcode where possible. We will continue to offer the Xcode option moving forward, but for the reasons mentioned above, we expect our IDE will remain the premier environment for Fortran and Fortran /C++ development on Mac OS/Intel," continued Lotz. Absoft's new Fortran plug-in for Xcode is available immediately. Compatible with the new Pro Fortran v10.2 for Mac OS/Intel and Xcode 3.1 it is included as part of the product distribution at no additional charge. Complete product details are available at: its Web site.