Hey folks! Developer of the Spark Inspector here. I've been playing around with Reveal all morning. I think the biggest difference between SI and Reveal is that SI links into your app more extensively. You don't have to click 'Refresh' to make it fetch changes because it swizzles itself into UIKit and NSNotificationCenter. Though method swizzling is somewhat of a dark art, it doesn't really have adverse side-effects if it's done right. I'm curious to know why Reveal takes such a minimally invasive strategy. In my opinion, choosing not to method swizzle will dramatically limit what Reveal can do beyond view hierarchy exploration and maybe logging. There are a lot of other tabs I'd like to add to the Spark Inspector to take it beyond view introspection, and they'll require deep linking into your app!
The Spark Inspector also tries to mirror IB more closely (the sidebar panels have a more familiar feel.) It also allows you to see system views within your view hierarchy, which Reveal might be choosing to hide.
Also, it seems that a lot of the items in the Reveal sidebar are read-only? (Maybe that's just a beta thing…) I do like that it has an "Application" tab in the sidebar for seeing UIApplication properties.
At any rate - I welcome some competition, and it's great to see more tools being created for iOS developers! I'm planning to take the Spark Inspector beyond view introspection and NSNotificationCenter monitoring, and it'll be interesting to see where Reveal goes (and how much it'll cost!)
I'm a current user of Spark Inspector. One of the things I saw in the Reveal demo that's missing in SI is the ability change the 3D Z-Index spacing between the views to make it a little easier to see.
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Hey folks! Developer of the Spark Inspector here. I've been playing around with Reveal all morning. I think the biggest difference between SI and Reveal is that SI links into your app more extensively. You don't have to click 'Refresh' to make it fetch changes because it swizzles itself into UIKit and NSNotificationCenter. Though method swizzling is somewhat of a dark art, it doesn't really have adverse side-effects if it's done right. I'm curious to know why Reveal takes such a minimally invasive strategy. In my opinion, choosing not to method swizzle will dramatically limit what Reveal can do beyond view hierarchy exploration and maybe logging. There are a lot of other tabs I'd like to add to the Spark Inspector to take it beyond view introspection, and they'll require deep linking into your app!
The Spark Inspector also tries to mirror IB more closely (the sidebar panels have a more familiar feel.) It also allows you to see system views within your view hierarchy, which Reveal might be choosing to hide.
Also, it seems that a lot of the items in the Reveal sidebar are read-only? (Maybe that's just a beta thing…) I do like that it has an "Application" tab in the sidebar for seeing UIApplication properties.
At any rate - I welcome some competition, and it's great to see more tools being created for iOS developers! I'm planning to take the Spark Inspector beyond view introspection and NSNotificationCenter monitoring, and it'll be interesting to see where Reveal goes (and how much it'll cost!)
I'm a current user of Spark Inspector. One of the things I saw in the Reveal demo that's missing in SI is the ability change the 3D Z-Index spacing between the views to make it a little easier to see.