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.

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…