We’re proud to announce we’ve released appledoc 2.0! It took several months of efforts, but the result is stable and easily extendable platform - what we envisioned for appledoc to be in the first place!

Appledoc 2.0 is a complete rewrite and is no longer relying on doxygen for parsing source code. This makes the tool much more flexible. It keeps doxygen documentation syle as much as possible, so it’s more or less compatible with previous version, but it deviates when it comes to formatting. Instead of using doxygen like tags such as @c and similar, which we find ackward, it uses syntax similar to Markdown. This makes the comments much more readable.

With 2.0 release, we’ve also changed license to modified BSD! What this means? First: don’t worry, appledoc is still free and will remain so, you can still use it, modify it as well as use generated documentation etc. for any kind of projects - free or commercial!

A bit longer explanation: we’re primarily developers by heart, not layers, so we didn’t take much time to consider this part before. We always wanted to contribute to the community and open the tool to anybody with minimal constraints and will continue to do so in the future. But to prevent potential misuse in today’s crazy money-oriented-regardless-of-consequences world :) we took some time to go through at least basic considerations of the way we want to see appledoc go in the future. After all the time we’ve invested in the tool, this seemed proper to do…

That being said, the main reason for switching from MIT to BSD is clearer message in BSD (in our eyes at least - it has nice bullet points, so it better suits our developer eyes ;) But generally both licenses are practically the same and are among most liberal open source licenses. We added one additional requirement to the license and that is to attribute appledoc in generated documentation, your website or similar. We think this is sensible and shouldn’t interfere with open source-ness of the tool a bit. Read the whole license at the bottom of the readme file on GitHub.

If for whatever reason you cannot agree to the license, but want to use appledoc or documentation it generates, feel free to contact us through our contact form on about page and we’ll do our best to help you out and find a workable solution!

More information at appledoc home page. See how generated documentation looks like. There’s also short online documentation to get you started. And most of all - enjoy!