Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Items tagged iphone in 2009

Filters: Year: 2009 × iphone × Sorted by date


Notes on designing the Guardian iPhone app. By John-Henry Barac, the principal designer of he iPhone application who also previously worked on the Guardian’s print transition to the Berliner format. # 20th December 2009, 12:55 pm

Guardian iPhone app. Released today, ad-free, £2.39 for the application, has an excellent offline mode. I helped build the backend web service, which is a Django app running on EC2. # 14th December 2009, 1:29 pm

Programmers don’t use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.

Paul Graham # 19th November 2009, 10:13 pm

We’re at a critical juncture in the evolution of software. The web is still here and it is still strong. Anyone can still put any information or applications on a web server without asking for permission, and anyone in the world can still access it just by typing a URL. I don’t think I appreciated how important that is until recently. Nobody designs new systems like that anymore, or at least few of them succeed. What an incredible stroke of luck the web was, and what a shame it would be to let that freedom slip away.

Joe Hewitt # 15th November 2009, 8:50 am

This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.

John Gruber # 6th October 2009, 7:33 am

Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash. A brilliant feat of engineering: Adobe worked around Apple’s “no runtime allowed” rules by writing a compiler front end for LLVM that compiles ActionScript 3 to ARM assembly code, and apparently ported the regular Flash drawing APIs as well. # 5th October 2009, 9:15 pm

Gmail for Mobile: Reducing Startup Latency. Cheeky iPhone optimisation trick—parsing 200 KB of JavaScript takes an iPhone 2.2 device 2.6 seconds, so Gmail embeds code components in /* comments */ in a script tag and evals them on demand later on when the features are needed. # 23rd September 2009, 10:29 pm

Developing for the iPhone at the moment is like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.

Tim Bray # 21st September 2009, 5:30 pm

iPlayer usage, for streaming, peaks about 10pm—just a little later from TV. But interestingly, iPlayer on the iPhone peaks at about midnight. So people are clearly going to bed with their iPhone and watching in bed. And we also see on the weekends, there’s a peak of Saturday and Sunday morning usage at about 8 to 10am in the morning on iPhone.

Anthony Rose # 23rd May 2009, 12:42 am

Fake Reviews. Now now kids, play nice... Not at all surprised to hear this—nefarious iPhone app developers (in this case the team behind “London Tube”, an inferior version of Malcolm Barclay’s marvellous “Tube Deluxe”) have been caught leaving fake negative reviews on rival applications in the App Store. This is an excellent argument for adding friends/followers or importing an existing social graph—I’d much rather see reviews from people in my social network than strangers who may turn out to be sock puppets. # 22nd May 2009, 12:49 am

Perhaps it’s just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app.

Garrett Murray # 22nd April 2009, 12:17 pm

The App Store has an inscrutable, time-consuming, whim-dependent approval process. The App Store newsgroup postings are full of angry claims that this is a bug, but I bet it’s a feature. If you can’t get an app approved until it’s working perfectly, and you have to wait a week or two -- or more -- between approval rounds, you’re much more likely to put a lot more effort in up front to get it right.

Marc Hedlund # 12th April 2009, 1:49 pm

Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries. Matt Biddulph collects together some very useful libraries for developers just getting started with Objective-C (though I’m not too keen on the title). # 27th January 2009, 5:50 pm

Apple shows us DRM’s true colors. The EFF reviews the various places that Apple still applies DRM (including locking iPhones to carriers, licensing authentication chips for iPod accessory vendors, preventing OS X from loading on generic PCs) and concludes that “the majority of these DRM efforts do not have even an arguable relation to ’piracy.’” # 18th January 2009, 10:16 am