Peter Boctor

Sometimes it’s useful to quickly see all the subviews of an iPhone view.

Perhaps you’re debugging a problem in one of your views or trying to understand the inner workings of one of the built in views.

You can simply iterate over a view’s subviews, but then you won’t see subviews deeper than one level. You need a method that recursively walks the hierarchy.

Luckily Apple has already done this with an undocumented UIDebugging category on UIView that makes this very easy: recursiveDescription

At the gdb prompt in the Xcode debugger you can say:

p [[self view] recursiveDescription]

and instantly see a description of the entire view hierarchy.

Apple released an iPhone app for this year’s WWDC. You can download the app from the WWDC attendee site.

The instructions are to download the zip file, drag the app and the provisioning profile to iTunes then sync your phone.

If you’d like to install the WWDC app on a device that isn’t setup for iTunes syncing, then you can use Xcode instead of iTunes. Here are the steps:

1. Download the zip file. Expand it and you’ll see two files: WWDC09.app and a .mobileprovision file.

2. Launch Xcode and open the Organizer (Window -> Organizer)

3. Select your iPhone/iPod Touch in the organizer window.

4. In the Provisoning section click the + under the list of provision files and select the WWDC app’s provision file you downloaded.

5. In the Applications section click the + under the list of Applications and select the WWDC09.app you downloaded.

When Xcode is done, the WWDC09 app will be installed on your device.

When you show web content in a UIWebView, links that open a popup do nothing.

This makes sense. Since UIWebView is an embedded control in your app, there is no logical default for popups.

So how will users view those pages? The solution is to convert all popups to normal links before displaying the web page:

-(void) webViewDidFinishLoad:(UIWebView *)wv
{
    [wv stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"\
    links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');\
    for (i=0; i<links.length; i++) {\
        links[i].target = ‘_self’;\
    }”];
}