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 […]
Yeah, I see a lot of icons in my business. I often get asked what makes for a successful desktop icon. And I’ve answered many times—but never in public. This essay also gives me a chance to write about something other than the iPhone :-)
Let me begin with this disclaimer: this discussion is directed at […]
Want to make your site look better on the iPhone with one line of HTML?
It’s easy—just add a <meta> tag that lets the iPhone know how wide to display the initial page. I added the following code to the <head> in my template yesterday:
<meta name=“viewport” content=“width=808″ />
Every browser besides MobileSafari will ignore this information. But […]
Even if everything isn’t copacetic in the land of “sweet”, at least Javascript and Quartz are getting along.
Thanks to Apple’s contribution to the WHATWG’s HTML 5 specification, it’s pretty easy to use Quartz graphics technology in an iPhone application. Together with MobileSafari’s event handling, you can start to do some fairly sophisticated drawing using a […]
Take a look at every application on the iPhone: what do they have in common?
The answer is a navigation bar at the top and a toolbar at the bottom. The navigation bar at the top gives the user a well known location for “backing up”, starting an editing session, and canceling operations. The toolbar provides […]