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 […]
It occurred to me the other day, that the music industry and software developers are beginning to have a lot in common. The proliferation of digital content, both legal and illegal, has radically changed the way people purchase music. But to those of us who have been distributing our work via the Internet since day […]
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 […]
The iPhone technical specifications mention nothing about how much RAM is included nor how fast the CPU is running. Now that I have a toolchain, it was a simple task to take some code from iPulse to investigate.
Note: Apple has obviously not documented the system level APIs that I’m using to extract this information, so […]
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 […]
If the changes to the Leopard Dock are a good idea, shouldn’t Apple go all the way and do the same thing to the Finder? And then applications, too! Hell, I can totally see these windows flying around with Spaces and Exposé and Core OMFG!
Forget about October, I’m stoked about 10.6! Let’s hope they add […]
If you’re an iPhone owner, you’ve probably encountered a problem with scrolling. For the most part it’s very intuitive, but there are occasions where you can’t get to what you want. The problem is that there aren’t any traditional scroll bars, so it seems like you are stuck. Even very smart engineers who know a […]
Now that the iPhone has given us all a taste of a multi-touch user interface, I have been hearing many people say how cool it would be to have touch-based input on a new line of desktop displays from Apple.
If you’re one of the people who think that a multi-touch monitor is a good idea, […]
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 […]