Show HN: Spark Inspector, a run-time debugging tool for iOS apps | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Spark Inspector, a run-time debugging tool for iOS apps

static.sparkinspector.com

73 pointsbengotow26 comments

Wow, in about 4 minutes I was able to track down a UI positioning bug with the UINavigationBar that has been nagging us for two months.

Buying 5 copies now.

Nice work, but certainly no replacement for PonyDebugger[0] with SuperDB[1]. Plus, they're both FOSS.

Sure, those don't have support for NSNotifications, but I've found it's best to avoid those as much as possible anyway (essentially like a super GOTO).

[0] https://github.com/square/PonyDebugger [1] http://shopify.github.io/superdb/

I agree—PonyDebugger is great. I think it's less trivial to use, though. My goal with the Spark Inspector (and it's setup assistant, which makes all of the project changes for you) is to bring down the difficulty and provide an experience on par with Apple's built-in developer tools. I'd love to integrate FScript into the app so you can issue SuperDB-style commands. I think I'm gonna try to auto-convert into their NextStep syntax so people don't have to worry about it, though - we'll see how it goes :-)

Author of SuperDB here. I think you should be able to embed most of SuperDB itself directly in Spark Inspector. I'm not sure how you're doing runtime inspection, but SuperDB already has most of the underlying stuff already hooked up. I think they'd make a lovely pair!

Excited to play with this!

JFYI Chrome (26.0.1410.65) is bugging out all over the video element as I scroll: http://bit.ly/19iUieq. Firefox doesn't support the mime type. Safari/Canary etc are fine. I'd suggest just posting the video to YouTube and embedding it using the iframe player, as it's so captivating.

Thanks for the heads up! I'll see what I can do - I noticed that in Chrome but I figured it was just me...

Here's hoping Apple buys these guys soon. Is it really just an inspector or can you get your changes to be reflected in the code?

You can make some display/position changes in the inspector that are reflected live in the Simulator, but I haven't found a way to turn that into any permanent change.

I've been thinking of it as a Firebug-style tool for iOS.

http://mireus.com/xrayeditor/ <- does this

Wow this is great. I will very likely buy the app when the trial is over.

One thing that was strage is the app asked for my contacts. I think it was due to something in the crash reporting. If you want my email address so you can provide support, that is great, but asking for access to my contacts turns a good thing into a bad impression.

@jcampbell - I just installed the app in a new user account and it looks like that is caused by the crash reporter trying to get your email address. Definitely a bad experience - I'll see if I can fix it.

I'd love to try it, but it only runs on OS X 10.8 or later.

Any chance of a port to 10.7? I'd have bought it last week (when I first found it) if it hadn't been 10.8 only.

I'll try to change the deployment target and see if I can make it 10.7 compatible - shouldn't be too hard. I actually went 10.8-only because Apple usually requires the latest version of Mac OS for iOS development, so I figured most developers would be on 10.8!

Excellent, thanks very much. I might be the only laggard left. I'm now following @SparkInspector on twitter to keep an eye out for 10.7 support.

Great job, this is and incredible leap for iOS development. I foresee this becoming an essential tool in a lot of developers workflow.

Looks really nice - I like it. I did have one small issue though: I had Spark Inspector add itself to one of my projects that has two targets, and it added its frameworks to the wrong target. Not a huge issue, but perhaps something for others to be aware of.

This tool is slick! It should be part of Xcode. It lets you peel back every layer of every item in your UI and also monitors the notifications - all in real time.

I heard about this a few days ago on Twitter and immediately purchased it. Absolutely incredible tool, great presentation, and a price I could not resist.

This tool is pretty amazing. I first heard about it last week, bought it after using it for 10 minutes, and now it's a solid part of my workflow.

Does anybody know of a similar tool for Android?

To my knowledge there isn't one. I talked to a friend of mine that works on the Android core, and he said it'd be a challenge to do without continuously polling the entire view stack for changes. Objective-C's runtime makes it easy to hook into methods and watch for changes, but Java isn't so flexible. He said it'd probably require a custom build of the Android OS to do well. But I'd love for both of us to be proven wrong!

Does this exist for HTML?

Not 1:1 but FireFox has a 3D view for its page inspector: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...

Yes, every browser has an inspector that lets you change elements in realtime. Right click somewhere on the page and select "Inspect element".

Sorry, I'm aware of that. Thanks for suggesting it, though. I'm in particular interested in the 3D view.

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