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DHH on iPhone 2.0's Glitches
Merlin Mann | Jul 23 2008
iPhone 2.0: The glory wore off in wash - (37signals) [via DF] While acknowledging the complexity of Apple's ambitious launch, David Heinemeier Hansson says iPhone 2.0 wasn't ready for prime time on a number of levels.
David also has a laundry list of complaints on stability and performance. I went through his items and ticked off each of the ones I've also noticed (with a 01-10 for how big a problem it's been for me):
I'll also add a few of my own:
Hm. I hadn't really thought about all these at once, but, yeah. That's a big bunch of broken. Let's hope an update is out soon that addresses some of these. 25 Comments
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 Oh, Come on Guys!Submitted by bensmith on July 23, 2008 - 5:01pm.
So, I will grant you there are some problems with the 2.0 software that Apple can solve: In there own apps. But the problems with speed, or glitchy 3rd party apps is hardly their issue. Let me backup. The iPhone/iPod Touch (the device) has 128MB of RAM. Part of this goes to the system, part of this goes to a fake virtual memory block (that's right boys and girls there is no virtual memory on the device). All told you are looking at about 70MB to play with as a developer. This goes down if the user then tries to play music while using your app. If the device runs out of RAM, it kills the app or in some cases reboots. There is a memory warning system that tries to free up memory by deallocating objects when it is critically low, which is why you sometimes see periods of slowness or stalls. While the device is running OS X, it is NOT a desktop. But the majority of iPhone developers are desktop programmers. The majority of whom I think really understand this distinction. But some don't. First, there is no garbage collection (and shouldn't be - I won't get into why) on the device. But there is on OS X. Secondly, while there is autorealease pools on both, they should be released far sooner on the device then on the desktop (actually you should try to avoid them as much as possible on the device). This is all to say that developing on a mobile device is hard and you are going to see some terrible apps along with a few good ones. None of which is Apple's fault. This (slightly ranty comment) is not directed at the folks who originally wrote this article (because they didn't participate in the media fiesta I'm about to describe), but I've seen this elsewhere on the web, mostly from the media. The same media that lost it's mind when they found out there wouldn't be background apps (now that you've read the above paragraphs, does anyone think that's a good idea?). The same media that bashed them for not having 3rd party apps a year ago. And the same media that (I'll admit, not as much as the first two) who had doubts about the whole App Store thing. This is what happens when people who don't know what they are talking about become the primary commenters on a product. Macworld, Mac blogs and others like them are completely unqualified to say "boo" about an SDK (unless they are a developer), but yet their voice was so loud that (my hunch is) it effected product development. Now their complaining? This is not to say there aren't problems in 2.0 that Apple needs to address; but if your primary problem is crashes. Blame the right people. » POSTED IN:
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