Hey iDevBlogADay,

two weeks ago I asked the community for Spy++-like debugging tools for Cocoa. Your replies have been awesome, and I’d like to summarize everything in this post:

UIViews have a built-in tool to print the view hierarchy, [UIView recursiveDescription]. It’s private, so don’t submit the binary to the Appstore(!), but it should work. There is some info here and here

There is f-script, but it’s apparently not for iOS. Still good to play around and investigate Cocoa. A lot of people recommended this, seems like the holy grail for MacOS Cocoa debugging.

Nimbus is an interactive little tool that effectively puts a dashboard on top of your app. It may not work great for games, but seems like a cool think to check out.

ViewHierarchy is again only available for MacOS, but nevertheless a handy tool. I think something like ViewHierarchy that works remotely with iOS would be great.

DCIntrospect is an iOS tool that can help you find issues with your iPhone Cocoa views, and it does some automatic checking which would be nice (like detecting non-integral coordinates). This was recommended by quite a few people.

I’d like to thank everyone on the comment thread for the great feedback!

Despite all this feedback, there still seems to be space for a tool that can remotely inspect the entire view hierarchy, all kv-pairs/properties. Maybe one day… 🙂

Cheers,

Volker