I’ve recently updated my new blog’s layout to support mobile phones, iPhone in particular (since that’s what I’m using ;). Here’s how it looks now:
I decided to use the same HTML for both versions, and use CSS media queries to define how the mobile version differs from the main one – I thought this was the cleanest and simplest solution in this case. For more complex sites, it probably makes more sense to have the two versions completely separated.
Surprisingly, it was quite easy to do once I figured out what exactly I needed to do. Turns out, the hardest part is apparently knowing what to put in your header and what media queries to use. Here are some tips and suggestions if you want to make a mobile version of your site too:
Last week John Engelhart commented on that post, mentioning his own JSON library JSONKit, claiming that it’s really fast. Of course I had to check if that was true :)
Ever since I started coding in Cocoa, I’ve been wondering what might be the longest name used for any function or constant in the entire API. Cocoa names can get quite long in general, so the longest one should be really ridiculously long… Of course I couldn’t leave it like this and I had to find out what it was :)
I ran a search for *.h files on the whole disk, and I determined that the interesting stuff was either in /Developer or in /System/Library/Frameworks, so I limited the search to these directories only. I passed the list of all header files through a Ruby script that looked for the really long ones and sorted them by length, and then I analyzed the results to find the winners (I decided to divide them into a few categories).
Update: A new post from December 2010 with updated stats is available here.
For a few weeks I’ve been working on a new iPhone application.
Like most of other Cocoaapps I’ve written so far, this app also includes a JSON parser to load some kind of data from a server. The first thing the application does when it starts is connect to the JSON API, download a data file (about 100 KB) and parse it. This used to take about 10-15 seconds on the device, and I thought it was reasonable until I noticed that the HTTP response actually arrives after a second or so. So what was it doing for the rest of the time? I had to find out.
So I did some debugging, and it turned out that the 10 seconds are spent just on parsing the downloaded JSON file. That’s pretty bad… Like in all previous apps, I used an open source library BSJSONAdditions, which I knew wasn’t the fastest one available, but I never had any major problems with it before. On the other hand, I never tested it on a 100 KB file…
I knew there were a few other JSON parser libraries in ObjC, so I decided to make a small benchmark and see how well they all compared to the one I used. The other libraries I tried were: JSON Framework, TouchJSON and YAJL.
Yeah, I know that there’s already about 5.4 gazillions of such posts on the web. So what :) I believe that cool apps – especially cool free apps – deserve promotion like this; and although some of the apps listed here are rather well known and popular, some are not.
Most of these apps are free; it’s not like I can’t afford 0.79 €, but I’ve been a Linux user for a few years and I got used to the “free / open source = good, paid = evil” way of thinking. It’s slowly changing, but I still prefer a good free app to a great paid app – unless there aren’t any good free apps available.
I haven’t included any games here – the reason is that I don’t play them a lot on my iPhone; I just don’t have time for that. The only times when I want to play games on it are when I have a bit of time and completely nothing else to do – but in such cases simple logic or board games are enough for me.
As I’ve promised in the previous post, I’ve started working on my first iPhone application, the Blip.pl client, which I’ve given an extremely creative name, xBlip :) (why “x”? that’s simple, because “i”, “m” and “a” were taken, “i” even twice :).
For the last few months, I’ve been spending a lot of time learning how to create apps for the Mac. Since I’m slowly starting to run out of new tutorials to read, I’ve decided to find myself something new to learn ;) Well, not completely new, actually, as a lot of that knowledge about Cocoa is going to be very useful.
I’m talking about iPhone development, of course. I bought an ebook about iPhone SDK from Pragmatic Programmers some time ago, which looks very promising, but I didn’t really start learning, because I wanted to get the iPhone development certificate first, and that took some time. You see, Apple’s platform is so damn open that to install even a “Hello world” on your own phone, you have to have a set of certificates from Apple, which they give you only after you register for an “iPhone developer program” which costs 100$. Really, guys, this is not how you attract developers to a platform… :\
Anyway, I got the certificates now, so I was finally able to run the “Hello world” on my phone :) Here’s a proof:
Apples & Rubies
