ViewCapture dumps are snapshots of a window's view hierarchy at a specific time, including location, size, scale, and visibility. ViewCapture traces, on the other hand, provide a chronological sequence of states, offering insights into how views behave over time. Simply put, ViewCapture captures information about views within a window and their properties, letting you understand the user experience at specific moments and track changes over time. This is useful for troubleshooting issues like my battery icon is missing or my notification flickered.
Winscope's ViewCapture viewer lets you visualize the view state at a moment in time, watch view changes over time, and analyze view hierarchy data for bugs or anomalies. The frame-by-frame visualization makes it easier to inspect view states compared to screen recordings. Collecting view traces is also less CPU-intensive than screen recording, making it easier to enable.
See ViewCapture for more information about trace collection.
Tab structure
The ViewCapture tab is split in three panels: rects view, hierarchy view, and properties view:
Figure 1. ViewCapture trace analysis.
Rects view
The left side of the screen features a 3D view of the view hierarchy. The rects view considers view bounds, z-order, and opacity.
The rects view has a menu at the top that displays all available windows. You can select a specific window or all of them when choosing what to display:
Figure 2. ViewCapture rects view.
Hierarchy view
The tab's central segment shows the view hierarchy. In addition to the parent-child relationships between view, this view also includes the following information:
- V: Identifies visible views.
Properties view
To make debugging easier, the ViewCapture viewer provides a curated list of properties, presenting the information in a more organized format. This list includes the following categories:
- View: View identifier.
- Geometry: Coordinates, size, scale, and other details about the view geometry.
- Effects: Effects and other miscellaneous properties for the views.