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Inspect — Inspect and debug your web apps on iOS & Android devices
Inspect is a new developer tool for macOS and Windows to inspect and debug your web apps and websites on iOS & Android devices.
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@ckor Two things stand out today:
1. Brings Safari + webview debugging for iOS to Windows users. They don't have a way to do this today.
2. Brings the Chrome DevTools UI to all platforms, so you can use one DevTool UI to debug both iOS and Android. Today you have to use Safari Web Inspector which isn't loved my many, doesn't work on Windows and doesn't have React DevTools.
Hi all,
Builds of Inspect are now available. Get them at http://inspect.dev
/k
Hi Hunters! 👋
After working on developer tools like Visual Studio Code and browser DevTools in the past, it's clear that our browser DevTools haven't evolved into a mobile-first world, so that's what I'm taking a stab at with Inspect.
I've started by enabling iOS web debugging on both macOS and Windows. Windows is particularly important as most front-end devs are (still) on Windows, and Apple doesn't provide a way to do this officially. Next is Android to enable one-unified DevTool for mobile devices. The idea is to provide a DevTool that will compliment your editor, enable productive workflows with Inspect, while keeping your of choice editor focused on code.
It's early days, but I'm launching Inspect to get the word out and validate the the concept. I already have working MVP builds that will be shared to testers soon, so signup if you are interested.
I'm curious to get your feedback. What would you like to see in Inspect?
/k
Great to see more progress in this space!
Is there a reason you're doing Windows & Mac but not Linux though?
For typical consumer products it's not a big market, but for dev tools I think you'll find there's a meaningful percentage of the audience there (from my own dev users, it's about 45/40/15% Windows/Mac/Linux). If you're using some cross-platform framework already, it should be fairly easy to hit all 3!
@pimterry Great question!
Yes, Inspect is using the iOS driver provided by Apple via iTunes, which is only officially provided for Windows and macOS. There's an OSS variant called https://libimobiledevice.org/, which I might be able to use, but I haven't validated that I can enable all features with out. Linux is very top of mind me, but as a validation point I've started with Windows and macOS.
@swyx Thanks! Which tools would you like to see on your Android? Phone or tablet?
@swyx Inspect is not like that if I understand correctly; you still need to debug on a desktop. On a phone there are some devtools functionalities that might make sense: inspect an element, provide a console, view status of networking, etc, or get lighthouse hints. But the overall experience might be hard to get right. Happy if proved wrong.
You could talk about the advantages of using this product instead of the device views available in standard browser dev tools?
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en...
- https://developers.google.com/we...
@steveruizok Inspect enables real device debugging. You debug the browser instance on the actual device. Not an emulated viewport running locally.
Vowel