Application Enhancer (APE) is a system used in our and third-party products that helps them to enhance and redefine various applications behavior running on your system.
What exactly is Application Enhancer? It is a combination of a Framework and a system daemon. Application Enhancer performs its task by loading plugins (Application Enhancer modules) containing executable code into the Running Applications. Once loaded, the APE module performs the needed modifications (such as redefining the minimize window action, or customizing the standard Apple menu) on the launched application memory space, never touching any files on disk, utilizing set of functions defined in the Application Enhancer framework. To help the APE modules to be loaded into newly launched applications, the Application Enhancer daemon (aped) is used.
Why? First of all, to reuse code. This helps us and other developers to save time, disk space and network bandwidth by including a set of commonly used methods in one place, which can be easily upgraded. Second, to preserve compatibility - every now and then a need for one or another product with the functionality Application Enhancer provides arises. To avoid the unnecessary clutter on your system (various approaches to do the same thing all running at the same time incur potential problems) there is now Application Enhancer along with the Software Development Kit available for any developers interested in the technology at reasonable price, or completely free, depending on the type of the project. Third - to allow the APE modules to initialize before the application launched is actually started executing its code, allowing the Application Enhancer module to do the proper setup.
