iPhone developer Pádraig Kennedy sent us news of this jewel of a tool: iPhone Backup Extractor, a way to read the backups that iTunes automatically makes for your iPhone or iPod touch using the Finder.

Kennedy already had a command-line tool to do this, but he wrapped an easy-to-use GUI around the whole process. Just select a backup, select an application, and away you go.

What makes this useful, writes ADC award-winning iPhone developer Craig Hockenberry, is that it allows developers to track down customer bugs that they can't reproduce themselves.

"You can instruct your customer to download the application, sync their device with iTunes and then have them select the latest backup and your application within that backup. ... Getting this information into your development environment is then just a matter of hacking around with the Simulator folder structure."

"The bug won't stand a chance at this point."

iPhone Backup Extractor is donationware, Leopard-only, and available directly from Kennedy's site (which has the best URL ever, incidentally).