I had been trying to work on a command line interface for the App Store for awhile. I learned a lot while doing so, but was never actually able to do more than associate AppleIDs here and there. One of the things I was able to use during my attempts (other than a disassembler) was the Element Inspector for the App Store. The Element Inspector allows you to view the raw source code of the pages being displayed in the App Store. This thing could be pretty handy if you were interested in embedding aspects of the App Store in other items, such as apps or a command line tool (if you could build one). The Element Inspector also gives you the ability to track resource utilization, monitor network connections, check variable contents, see the scripts running in the background and more.
To enable the Element Inspector, send a boolean WebKitDeveloperExtras key into the com.apple.appstore defaults domain:
defaults write com.apple.appstore WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool TRUE
Because it’s no fun to give up half the real estate in the App Store, you can go ahead and quit the App Store, run the following command and reopen to disable the Element Inspector:
defaults write com.apple.appstore WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool FALSE
