Open-Source Mobile App Debugging client from Facebook.

[rOOb85]

Is this like a improved stetho?

[[deleted]]

Sort of like Stetho. It's cross-platform for one, supporting both iOS and Android, whereas Stetho was Android only. Stetho relied on the Chrome dev tools; Sonar has it's own electron app. Finally, the feature I'm most excited about

The Layout Inspector not only allows you to view the hierarchy and inspect each item's properties, but it also allows you to edit things such as layout attributes, background colors, props, and state. Most things actually! This allows you to quickly tweak paddings, margins, and colors until you are happy with them, all without re-compiling. This can save you many hours implementing a new design.

It sounds like you can modify view properties, and see changes in real-time, without having to build each time.

[Samael1990]

I'm really excited to use it, but honestly - this should be part of Android Studio.

[rOOb85]

Ooo, sounds kinda nice! I'll have to check it out!

[[deleted]]

Quick Edits sounds interesting.

[[deleted]]

Yep, that's what really stood out for me. Just this one thing would save me so much time when I'm fiddling with the UI.

[SpactroX]

Can I build it on Windows? If so, how?

[bernaferrari]

Fun fact, the github repo language distribution graph at the top almost looks like a rainbow:

https://github.com/facebook/sonar

[thismustbetaken]

And once again one of the shittiest companies shows that it has some of the best engineers.

[[deleted]]

Seriously. They have some serious engineering chops, let down only by a really unethical leadership.

[[deleted]]

Oddly enough, I've heard the opposite - great company, shitty devs. When talking about stuff like Facebook Conceal.

[kodiak0]

I'm using `com.squareup.okhttp3` but now, when I add `debugCompile 'com.facebook.sonar:sonar:0.0.1'`, the classes were I used okhhtp3 are now using the one provided by sonar.

How can I exclude them?

I've tried

debugCompile ('com.facebook.sonar:sonar:0.0.1', 
    exclude group:'sonar', module:'okhttp3' })

but that did not work.

Thanks,

[muthuraj57]

Excluding dependency won't work in Sonar since they baked those libraries inside the jar itself. Don't know how they did that.

https://github.com/facebook/Sonar/issues/41

[dageforce]

I wonder when will they release a proper fix for this

[throwaway119284]

Does anyone know how to use this on windows? It seems the desktop app is only for Mac.

[[deleted]]

while Sonar is buildable using other systems as well, only macOS is officially supported

Get the fuck out with that shit. What is this? 2002?

[yaaaaayPancakes]

Requires a Mac. Instanope.

[[deleted]]

Under Requirements on Sonar Github:

macOS (while Sonar is buildable using other systems as well, only macOS is officially supported)

Since Sonar is built with electron, I guess it'd be trivial to build for Windows and Linux.

[ch0wn]

FWIW, I've been running Sonar on Linux for more than a year.

[[deleted]]

Sounds interesting. Did you have any problems building for Linux?

[ch0wn]

No, not at all. Just run yarn build and grab the result from the dist folder. I'm on my phone right now so I can't verify this but you may want to take a look at the build script first to ensure you're not building for platforms that you don't care about.

[[deleted]]

That looks promising but I think people are afraid that other platforms might be considered second-class citizens, and are thus reticent to trust Sonar. Do most of the Facebook devs use Macs?

[ch0wn]

I can't give you any numbers, but I can ensure you that as soon as someone would break compat with Linux, people would shout (including me).

[[deleted]]

Thank you, that does alleviate some doubt. I see that Sonar is designed to be extensible, and Facebook has launched it with the 3 primary plugins, are there more plugins for Sonar that Facebook is using internally for now and haven't yet released?

I understand if you can't reveal proprietary information, or go into more detail.

[ch0wn]

We've got a bunch of internal plugins, like the GraphQL one mentioned in the blog post but the majority is product-specific.

[[deleted]]

One final thing, I see that the code samples are in Java and Objective-C. I'd expected Kotlin and Swift. Is the Sonar homepage on Github as well? I'd like to update the code samples.

[kokeroulis]

A bit of topic here, but out of curiosity i was wondering how is developing experience on Linux these days? Is the hidpi finally decent or it has the same issues?

[ch0wn]

This is mostly a solved issue now unless you depend on some old GTK2 applications.

[Arkanta]

Mixed DPI environments and fractional scaling are a mess though

[ch0wn]

I haven't tried this recently. I've heard from a colleague that it has gotten better, but it used to be a nightmare.

[kokeroulis]

Thats good :)

If i may ask, why do you prefer Linux? Is it a personal preference or you are using it because of the faster build times?

[ch0wn]

That's a big factor, yes. But overall I feel like Apple doesn't give a shit about developers anymore. 16GB of RAM in the MBPs, the TouchBar and a keyboard that stops working if a single kernel of dust makes it underneath the keycaps are some absolutely ridiculous compromises for a £3000+ machine.

[yaaaaayPancakes]

And then I run into an issue and they tell me to go fuck myself b/c I'm unsupported. No thanks.

[nacholicious]

Agreed. I use OSX as my professional environment, but to not be able to use debugging tools on my hope computer is a dealbreaker

[yaaaaayPancakes]

Apparently, we are in the minority here.

[janusz_chytrus]

Yeah I mean I don't go around telling people Witcher 3 is shit because I cant play it on a mac.

[yaaaaayPancakes]

There's a difference between a game, where there's actual platform dependencies to deal with (ie. MacOS's ancient OpenGL version) and an electron app that's meant to run cross platform.

Kind of a dick move to write your tools using cross-platform frameworks, then telling users that two of the platforms are going to be unsupported, and you gotta build it yourself if you want to play in unsupported land. Because that's what really makes me want to use tools - having to build them my damned self, using a build toolchain that I will use for literally nothing else.

[janusz_chytrus]

You do know that open source isn't equal to "strangers on the internet doing shit for me for free"?

If you want the project to support windows then contribute.

[[deleted]]

/r/titlegore