Monitor & Experiment in Real-time
With a three-dimensional view of your app's interface and the ability to change view properties at runtime, Spark can help you craft the best apps on earth. Wiring your app together with notifications? Spark's notification monitor shows you each NSNotification as it's sent, complete with a stack trace, a list of recipients and invoked methods, and more. Understand app structure at a glance and debug smarter.
|Live Mirroring
Connect your app to the Spark Inspector, and you'll see your app's interface front and center. As you interact with your app, the inspector updates in real-time! We monitor every change to your app's view hierarchy so you can always see what's going on.
pExperiment at Runtime
The view of your app you see in Spark isn't just beautiful, it's completely editable. You can modify almost every property of your views, from their class-level attributes to their CALayer transforms. When you make a modification, Spark invokes a method call within your app to directly modify that property.
fUse a Device or Simulator
The Spark Inspector connects to your app over Bonjour, the same networking technology that enables Airdrop. You can connect to the simulator, or to any iOS device on your local network running iOS 5+. The target dropdown in the upper left lets you choose an app on the network to inspect.
See Notifications in Real-time
The Spark Inspector features a groundbreaking Notifications panel that allows you to monitor NSNotificationCenter in real-time. Watch as notifications are sent and observers are registered in the dispatch table. For each notification, you can see the stack trace where it was triggered, the objects that received it, the methods that were invoked, and the attached user info. We've spent weeks developing the notification inspector so you can spend seconds debugging notifications.
sFilter Away
The notification panel is designed to be filtered. Click the arrow beside any notification or object to see similar entries. Find the observers of a particular notification, notifications sent with a particular object parameter, and more.
EUnderstand App Architecture
Many apps are built with notifications at their core. Updates to the model trigger notifications, which in turn trigger changes to app views. Use the notifications panel to watch notification activity and build an understanding an app's architecture quickly.
1Resend Past Notifications
Ever been debugging code and wished you could trigger that notification one more time? Now you can. Select a sent notification and click 'Post Again.' This doesn't always work - if the notification object or user info has been deallocated, you're out of luck. But we wanted it, so we built it. Enjoy!
Xcode Integration
The Spark Inspector works just like Instruments.
The Spark Inspector integrates directly into Xcode, so you don't need to add frameworks or modify your project to inspect your app in the iOS Simulator.
If you're in the middle of a debug session and something unexpected happens, you can attach the Spark Inspector to see what's going on. No restarting your app, no changing your project. All from inside Xcode.
No project modifications required.
Need to use the framework?
The Spark Inspector also includes a framework you can add to your app. This allows you to inspect apps running on devices, start NSNotification monitoring at app launch, and integrate the Spark Inspector into a build configuration. Use Cocoapods? Look no further thanpod 'SparkInspector'.
IN THE NEWS
IN THE WILD
The Spark Inspector is used by great developers at some of our favorite companies:
The Spark Inspector Mac app includes publicly available or open-source code from LBProgressBar, DMTabBar, AMDarkButton, BFColorPickerPopover by Balázs Faludi, SFBPopovers, and JUInspectorView.