Inspecting the Pasteboard with Drop Inspector

Briksoftware has released Drop Inspector, a development utility that embeds an F-Script environment. Drop Inspector’s job is to let you inspect the contents of the pasteboard, including drag and drop data.

On Mac OS X, the pasteboard is a subsystem that allows sharing data between components or applications:

You typically use pasteboards in copy and paste operations, although pasteboards also provide the basis of system services. NSPasteboard objects transfer data to and from the pasteboard server. The server is shared by all running applications. It contains data that the user has cut or copied, as well as other data that one application wants to transfer to another. [...]

Data can be placed in the pasteboard server in more than one representation. For example, an image might be provided both in Tag Image File Format (TIFF) and as encapsulated PostScript code (EPS). Multiple representations give pasting applications the option of choosing which data type to use. In general, an application taking data from the pasteboard should choose the richest representation it can handle?rich text over plain ASCII, for example. An application putting data in the pasteboard should promise to supply it in as many data types as possible, so that as many different applications as possible can use it. [...]

The pasteboard owner declares the data types it can write. Pasteboard data generally refer to an object instance whether a string, an arbitrarily complex object graph such as a dictionary of arrays, an instance of NSData, or an object wrapper for an arbitrary block of data. You can name your own pasteboard types for special-purpose data types.

Drop Inspector provides access to pasteboards contents from an hexadecimal-view and the embedded F-Script environment. You get the full power of F-Script for inspecting and manipulating objects graphically. Nice!