Dear Steve, I am an iPhone developer. I love Cocoa Touch—it’s an amazing piece of engineering. I’m having great success with the products I’ve written (one of them even won an ADA at this year’s WWDC.) Sales through iTunes are great and well above my expectations. And despite of all this, I’m feeling ambivalent about [...]
Having just presented a talk at C4[2] about the human factors involved in developing touch-based applications, I find it rather ironic to see the Nike + iPod integration move into the latest iPod touch. Why? Because I see some serious problems with how our bodies will interact with this device and its software. Note: These [...]
A major feature of the App Store are the user reviews about the software being offered. There’s just one problem: software is not music. I’ve never had an MP3 crash or lack features. Applications also evolve and improve; I’m pretty sure the Jimi Hendrix track I’m listening to right now is the same one he [...]
It’s pretty clear that the App Store is a huge hit. We’re all loving the ability to customize our iPhones and iPod touches with cool new software! But with any big new release, there are problems that didn’t pop up while beta testing. As iPhone developers, we’re finding ourselves in a position where we can’t [...]
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 [...]
Welcome! Many people arrive at this page while searching for information about developing iPhone applications. The ideas from this article are expanded upon in my book, iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual. As we’re all waiting with bated breath for the release of the iPhone SDK later this month, now would be a good time [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]