вівторок, 29 березня 2011 р.

whiteboard distribution

Having a team of 3 persons currently working on a project from 2 different locations we are using DropBox service heavily for all our images exchange (with source codes stored in SVN). Although there are a lot of free online sketching tools in the market, we opt for a standard office whiteboard you can find in any shop out there. It does cost some money but speeds up drawing and discussion just around it a lot! A single problem with the whiteboard is that you cannot save its state with a single mouse click. The easiest solution for this we found using DropBox iPhone App - 4 taps and the current whiteboard status is saved to the DropBox folder shared to all the team members.

Now the only problems you might face - no version control, if you file system doesn't support it, as well as some non-frequent bugs and lags of the service. No software is ideal unfortunately.

пʼятницю, 25 березня 2011 р.

iOS blocks aka closures

iOS 4 blocks (Apple's closures) are awesome! Much more power for callback code and asynchronous execution. Though blocks require a bit more attention to memory management then function calls due to capturing calling method variables.

On the other hand, my tests with calling UIKit code adding 322 labels of 2 latin alphabet length each to the view controller yielded 3.5 seconds of execution on the main thread. Compare this with about 10 seconds of execution through dispatch_async call on the global queue with HIGH priority having nothing else added to this queue (iPhone 4 device). At his point more information required to compare blocks performance to exclusive thread execution. Or does it have something to do with non-thread-safety of UIKit?