Reveal App

They mention that on the page, sounds like that was their inspiration:

"Reveal brings the power of tools like Firebug and Web Inspector to iOS developers."

Can anyone think of a time when it's actually useful? I'm having a hard time thinking of any.

I've found FF's 3D view to be very useful for debugging. Perfect for the times when you need to find that one div that is wide enough to cause horizontal scrollbars on your responsive design.

In UIKit it is very easy to create situations where you have subviews with the same frame as their superview, and this can nest a few levels deep. I work on an app that has a very complex view hierarchy and I always find myself in the 3d view because what I need to inspect is rarely the front-most view in the hierarchy.

I find the whole concept of the app questionable in usefulness.

We had actually thought about building something very similar a couple years ago, as at first thought seems like something that would be really useful, but found once we broke it down to the times it would be used it didn't seem as compelling.

There's a bunch of these apps out there now, and most also marry the feature of 'live positioning / updating' , which is still cubersome. It seems like it's actually showing there's probably a much bigger need for a good live themeing solution than anything.

Spark Inspector is another commercial alternative: http://sparkinspector.com/

I'm holding off directly comparing them until Reveal announce their final pricing. They both have pros and cons, I wouldn't right now place one above the other.

There is also XRay Editor (http://mireus.com/xrayeditor/) that comes with an Xcode plugin to relatively easily convert the changes you made into code. It also has an overlay feature to be able to adapt to a mockup.

Then there's http://hierarchydetective.com/ which is OSS, still pretty rough. It support a few different hierarchies like UIKit, CALayer, cocos2d and can supposedly be easily expanded for more view hierarchy types.

Spark Inspector and Reveal are pretty similar at the moment. SI does notification tracking and also live UI updates (and rotating the 3D view in the client by device movement ;) ).

PonyDebugger is the only one that includes network traffic analysis.

I did a talk about these and more at CocoaHeads Dresden this week. Tough it hasn't been recorded and the slides are currently in German. I will translate them and post the link later.

Another alternative is PonyDebugger:

https://github.com/square/PonyDebugger

You can inspect your own apps running on device with Reveal without having to resort to jailbreaking. Just link the library with your app, run it on the device, make sure your device is on the same network, fire up Reveal and choose your app from the drop-down app selector.

We've also had reports of people successfully inspecting the Springboard and Apple's apps using Cycript and other means.

Ryan Petrich integrated Cycript into PonyDebugger, and integrated PonyDebugger into a tweak that can be found here:

https://github.com/rpetrich/CaptainHammer

You don't even need a jailbroken phone, just a provisioning profile. Objective-C is fully dynamic, so you can override UIView/CALayer so that it sends data to a server whenever it changes and is a child view of the key UIWindow.

They don't say it explicitly, but I would be shocked if Reveal does not work the same when testing on a device.

Actually it doesn't. Those who strike gold will always make more than the shovel salesmen, just have much much lower odds. But, when the general population of gold diggers realizes the odds are poor the shovel salesmen will still go out of business.

I've always hated applying this hackneyed phrase to bubble tech, because the meta product makers end up being just as silly looking as the product makers when trends change, and often in a worse position for transition.

I don't think there is -recursiveDescription in NSView or NSObject. I've seen -description and -debugDescription. Correct me if I'm wrong as it sounds useful. :)