iOS4 on a 3G
Jul 14, 2010 Technology
I had a semi-long post written up about about running iOS4 on an iPhone 3G, talking about the new features that are both present and missing from the 3G model and other performance related issues. However, after spending a few weeks running it I think it’s safe to save myself all the effort and you all the reading and just say that it sucks.
If Apple removes certain features for performance related reasons, I totally believe and support them in doing so because everyone knows they are all about the user experience. If adding a wallpaper to the home screen placed so much of a strain on the hardware that the feature was removed (which is was) then my opinion is that the OS itself is probably too much for the hardware to handle. I have to say that my personal experience confirms this. I’ve loved my 3G from the beginning, but the last few weeks since the upgrade have been nothing but frustration. Everything has a delay, sometimes a LONG delay like 30 seconds or more. Sometimes it just seems to freeze up completely. You thought Notes was bad before? Trying to tweet when you get interrupted by a text message pop-up? Good luck with that. As I said earlier, Apple is all about user experience, and I’m honestly surprised that they approved iOS4 for the 3G because it’s just terrible. I imagine they did it just to avoid the backlash from the angry masses if they hadn’t.
My official conclusion is that I cannot recommend iOS4 in it’s current state (v4.0) for 3G hardware. I think the OS looks great and has tons of welcome new features, but 3G just doesn’t have the guts to run it. I know that the 3G is hardly the target device for iOS4, but hopefully one of the next iterations will include some performance enhancements that will help improve the experience on the 3G.
Tags: iPhone
DragAMouse
Jun 19, 2010 Code, Technology
DragAMouse is my second iPhone App and it went on sale yesterday in the App Store. I got the idea for this app from my 2 year old daughter who could operate the ‘slide to unlock’ function on my phone. She wanted to play the games that the older kids were playing but those games were to complicated for her age. She had fun anyway, but I thought it would be nice if there was a game more on her level. Something that was simple to operate and didn’t involve complex logic or strategy.
This game is intended for toddlers and very young children. I don’t expect that there would be any entertainment value whatsoever for older children or adults, it was just a simple concept designed only to entertain and occupy the little ones.
Computers?!
May 11, 2009 Code, Technology
My wife is always telling me that she doesn’t understand how with computers something can be working fine one day and then the next day it’s broken. Being a developer, I see this kind of thing all the time. “It was working a minute ago!”, or the times when you ask someone to look at something that isn’t working and when you go to show it to them it suddenly starts working perfectly.
Something like this happened to me recently. I was thinking about making some modifications to the iPhone app that I wrote, so I opened up the project and ran it but the audio wasn’t working and it locked up. I thought that was strange since I hadn’t changed anything since I ran it last, and the last time I ran it was when I was getting it ready to submit it to the App Store. I knew that this exact same code was currently for sale, which was a little disconcerting.
After a bit of digging I finally discovered an error that was complaining about a DivX file that couldn’t be found. I remembered installing a DivX codec to try and resolve a video playback issue I was having on my laptop but it doesn’t make any sense to me why that would have any effect on audio playback in the iPhone simulator. The DivX codec had not resolved my video issue, however, so I proceeded to uninstall it and sure enough my code started working again!
So those times when something is working one day and not the next, I’m 100% positive that there is a reason for it, because that’s just how computers work. Whether or not you can find the reason for it, the world may never know.