In this election year, there is an issue facing Macintosh developers. Ask yourself the following:
How can you develop new products for Leopard when you need to have Tiger installed for supporting your legacy applications? How easy is it to test a new feature on Mac OS X 10.4.11 when you’re running 10.5? How quickly can […]
Unless you’ve been stranded on a remote Pacific isle, you’re no doubt aware of the current furor over third party iPhone applications not being able to run in the background. To be blunt, I’ve never seen so many experts without a fricken’ clue. If you haven’t written code using the jailbreak tool chain, your opinions […]
The big day has come and passed. And you know what? We’re still in uncharted territory: for most of us Mac developers, the App Store is something new and strange.
Let’s start by looking at Apple’s cut in the deal. Is 30% reasonable?
My first impression was that it seemed a little high, but acceptable. You’re getting […]
As we’re all waiting with bated breath for the release of the iPhone SDK later this month, now would be a good time to pass along some of things I learned while working on MobileTwitterrific. Read this now and you’ll save yourself some headaches when diving into the SDK.
Code reuse
Don’t expect to reuse much of […]
Piracy is a fact of life for software developers. There are always douche-bags who think they should get your hard work for free. Sometimes this takes the form of distributing serial numbers, sometimes it’s kracking the application to eliminate the checks. I’ve come to accept this as part of running a software business.
Recently, however, a […]
slerp
Sometimes it takes awhile to fulfill a promise.
One such pledge was made last century to my good friend Jeffrey (he was only a prince at the time.) I said that I’d love to write something for his fledgling mailing list: A List Apart. This past month, I finally got around to writing that piece: Put […]
There are two things that I really want on my iPhone: Twitterrific and Frenzic. Last week I started taking care of the first one and am happy to announce a proof-of-concept.
Don’t expect much in terms of usability or elegance. The application only initiates a network connection to Twitter, downloads a timeline feed as XML, and […]
It’s no secret that I’ve started hacking on my iPhone.
And what’s the most frequent thing I use in development? SSH2 to copy new builds onto the phone and view NSLog output from the shell.
And is it a pain to enter your password every frickin’ time? And is it slow to connect? Yes and HELL yes.
But […]
Just how fast is the iPhone?
Let’s run some benchmarks comparing the iPhone to my iMac running Safari 3 on a 1.83 Ghz Intel Core Duo processor:
Test
iMac
iPhone
Slower by
100,000 iterations
0.041 secs.
3.209 secs.
78x
10,000 divisions
0.005
0.413
82x
10,000 sin(x) calls
0.009
0.709
79x
10,000 string allocations
0.010
0.777
78x
10,000 function calls
0.010
0.904
90x
This means that Javascript on the iPhone will take about 80 times longer to run than it does on […]