Tweetsville Update

Just wanted to post an update as to what was happening with Tweetsville, my iPhone Twitter app.

First, it’s been approved for sale! But I haven’t seen it show up and sadly I don’t have a link to it. Read on for why.

The main reason the app was delayed so long coming out is because I had been been trying to figure out exactly what to do with it. I might be in a situation soon that will actually prevent me from being able to maintain the application, so I wanted to see if I could find a good stewart for my baby. I’ve chosen to hand the application over to Tapulous, maker of Tap Tap Revenge, Twinkle, FriendBook, Fortune and Collage, with whom I have a good working relation.

I think this is going to be great for Tweetsville, as they have better resources at their disposal to help support and grow the application. I also think they have some technology which can help Tweetsville be even better than it is. At the same time, there’s some stuff I did for my app that I believe will benefit Tapulous.

There is no plan to have Twinkle and Tweetsville merge. They are to be separate applications with separate audiences. Twinkle is about locality and the Tapulous network, and Tweetsville is purely a Twitter application.

One of the advantages here for users is that there will be choice. There will ultimately be two versions of Tweetsville. The first will be a paid version currently slated for $3.99. The second will come a few weeks later and will be a free ad-supported version.

I’m confident this will move is the best thing for the Tweetsville app as well as users in the long run. You’ll get more choices and better support than I would have been able to provide on my own. I feel the app is in good hands, as I have a great working relationship with Tapulous (I’m actually doing a little work on Twinkle 1.3 these days too).

So look for it to appear in the App Store on Monday the 10th of November!

Update Actually the date is apparently going to be the 12th.

The Simple Beauty of clearColor

I’ve recently discovered the simple beauty of [UIColor clearColor] used for a background color. Previously I had been doing stuff like:

self.opaque = NO;
self.backgroundColor = nil;
self.clearsContextBeforeDrawing = YES;

But all I really needed to do was:

self.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];

Same transparency, and I’m guessing (hoping?) that it might be a bit more efficient (unless of course, the innards look for clear color and effectively do what I used to).

Hey, even if it’s not more efficient, it’s certainly simpler to type and it seems to have the same effect!

Sadly, this is one thing I didn’t figure out on my own, but rather spied in some other sources, but I wanted to throw it out there for ‘all uh yous’.

Recursive Locks Will Kill You!

A while back, at Adobe, I ran into a most evil bug that took me hours to track down. In the end, it was the end results of people violating what (to me) are the three tenets of threaded programming. This post is what I ended up establishing as the thread safety guidelines for our project.

Before digging into it, I should say this: threads are evil. If you don’t believe this, then I believe you are made of living tissue over metal endoskeleton. You should endeavor to avoid threads at all cost. In most cases, timers are your best friend. Know them. Love them.

Of course, there are times when you need to use threads. I needed to add a few threaded operations to my iPhone application to make sure the UI stayed responsive. On the project at Adobe, we were doing thumbnailing of images, definitely something you don’t want happening on the main thread. (more…)

Tweetsville

Well, it’s been about two months since I left Yahoo! and I’ve been spending pretty much literally all my time working on an iPhone application. It’s nothing super flashy, mind you, but I feel it is the best app of its kind. I had been really disappointed with all the Twitter apps for the iPhone. Either they were too slow, or scrolling was poor, or it just didn’t work the way I did. So I set out to write the version I’d want to use. I ended up with an application called Tweetsville. I’ve been putting together a small site for it here, so you can check out the features there. I also have set up a Twitter user you can follow if you care.

I had three goals in mind, in this order:

• Totally responsive, with glassy scrolling.
• Embrace the natural aesthetics of the iPhone user experience.
• Use the full power of the Twitter API.

It’s definitely fast and smooth (though admittedly it could be tweaked a bit more), and it looks like a real honest-to-goodness iPhone application. For whatever reason, I thought it would be ideal to do this app using as many standard (or standard-looking) controls as I could. The less custom stuff the better.

But the real beauty is the fact that I cache as much of your Twitter stream as I can get from the API, coupled with the depth of what you can do with this application. You can see your timeline, do direct messaging, see your favorites, history, and replies. You can also see the latest trends and do searches, including advanced searches. It is without a doubt the most powerful Twitter iPhone application I’ve seen to date. Of course, I’ve had my head in the sand for the past 8 weeks!

Will this application change the world? Hell, no. But I think it will definitely make a dent in the Twitter space. And it was fun, which was really my whole main point of writing it. It’s been a long while since coding was fun.

Even with all it does, there is still other things I’d like to do to it to improve the functionality and ease of use beyond what’s there, but there are only so many hours in the day, and I’m burnt out from coding so much. I need a vacation from my vacation!

The real question is: should I even charge for it? I’m currently thinking no, but man, it might really take off, and then I’ll be missing out. If I don’t charge for it, I will likely make the source publicly available. I’ve already got a subversion repository set up and ready for some sources if I do. Or there’s always code.google.com.

I’m hoping this will get submitted very very soon. My last build seems to be pretty stable, and I’m too paranoid to make any real changes now.

Wow, this would be the first thing I’ve ever written and released like this since… Aaron (if anyone remembers that). Again, wow.

A Small Trick for Provisioning Profiles

As most iPhone developers know, dealing with provisioning files is a bit of a pain. Even more of a pain can be altering your profile and trying to use the altered one.

Well yesterday, after having to do that two or three times, I finally figured out a bit of a clue. I was having trouble making xcode see the profile. Turns out, you need to have the current target configuration set to the config you are modifying in the info panel or else it just won’t show up. Made all the difference in the world.

And of course I always restart xcode after installing any profiles. Install, restart xcode, then ensure your target is set to the right config, then edit the config. Booyah!

More Glassy Scrolling with UITableView

A few days ago I wrote about how to help make your table views scroll more smoothly. The tips and tricks in there definitely work, but I’ve just added another layer of smoothness on top of that. It’s rather heavy-handed, but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway.

It starts much the same, use a single view for your cell and do all your own drawing. The ultimate solution presented here though is to cache the whole damned view contents. Revolutionary? No. Extreme? Yes. But it’s the smoothest I’ve been able to get it for my situation. I’m not yet 100% sure I’ll ship with this thing turned on, but I think it’s a valid approach for you to explore for your own project.

In my case I’m slowed down a bit by database fetches, text layout, and rounded images with shadows. By only following the techniques in my last blog post on this topic it’s actually not too bad. But with this addition it’s a lot better.

It should be noted this should really only be used as a last resort due to the increase in memory required.

In order to use this method, you need to be able to uniquely identify a cell by some sort of ID (in my case it’s an NSNumber).

- (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect
{
    if ( !_item )
        return;

    UIImage* cached = [sImageCache objectForKey:_item.identifier];
    if ( cached == nil )
    {
        CGRect    bounds = self.bounds;

        UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(
             CGSizeMake( bounds.size.width, bounds.size.height ) );

        // DRAW CONTENT HERE

        cached = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
        UIGraphicsEndImageContext();

        if ( sImageCache == nil )
             sImageCache = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc]
            initWithCapacity:1];

        [sImageCache setObject:cached forKey:_item.identifier];
    }

    [cached drawAtPoint:CGPointMake(0,0)];
}

This is actually more expensive to draw in two ways:

1. It means you are drawing and then blitting, instead of just drawing.
2. The table view caches the contents of cells itself, so technically we’re buffering yet again.

But the advantage is that we have the caches around for more than just the visible cells (which is all UITableView cares about). So when things scroll back into view, they’re absolutely smooth as silk.

This does mean that as views first load in they will be less smooth than the next time they roll into view. If the user typically only scrolls in one direction, you might not see a lot of benefit. So you could decide instead to pre-cache items ahead of where the user is. So perhaps you precache the first 20 items and after that let it cache as they are encountered.

When To Dump the Cache

Obviously, memory-wise this is not cheap. How much should you save? When should you flush it?

There are many ways to deal with this:

1. Let the system tell you when to flush. If you get a didReceiveMemoryWarning call, just flush the image cache completely.
2. Cap the cache at some number of items and flush it when it gets to that size.
3. Cap the cache at some number of items and drop the oldest item when a new item needs to be added (Least Recently Used).

I’m actually trying out #1 believe it or not. I also flush the cache when the view has its viewWillDisappear method called. Why keep it around if you’re not actively flushing.

Another trick is to use a timed cache. Wait for the table view to stop scrolling (possibly by listening for the scrollViewDidEndScrollingAnimation delegate method to be called. When called, start a 10 second timer. If the view starts scrolling again, clear the timer. This way, after 10 seconds of real non-interaction, you’ll get the chance to flush the cache. No point holding them around.

A timed cache was what we used in Mac OS X for menus. One of the old stand-bys for measuring ‘performance’ was how fast the menus dropped down as you dragged back and forth in the menu bar. So we used the same basic method: on first appearance, cache the image, and from then on use the cache. And then we’d set a 20 second timer to flush the buffers so we didn’t waste memory. Since then I’ve used this technique a number of times.

Here’s a quick boilerplate for how you could use a timer:

- (void)scrollViewWillBeginDragging:(UIScrollView *)scrollView
{
    // the user is scrolling/dragging, we WANT the cache, don't clear it!
    [self.timer invalidate];
    self.timer = nil;
}

- (void)scrollViewDidEndDragging:(UIScrollView *)scrollView
                  willDecelerate:(BOOL)decelerate;
{
     // if decelerating, wait until it stops first, else start the timer now.
    if ( !decelerate )
    {
        self.timer = [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:10.0
                         target:self
                         selector:@selector(flushCaches:)
                         userInfo:nil
                         repeats:NO];
    }
}

- (void)scrollViewDidEndDecelerating:(UIScrollView*)scrollView
{
    // We know for sure we're done, start the timer.
    self.timer = [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:10.0
                       target:self
                       selector:@selector(flushCaches:)
                       userInfo:nil repeats:NO];
}

- (void)flushCaches:(NSTimer*)timer
{
    // FINALLY. Flush it.
    [MyFancyCellView flushCaches];
    self.timer = nil;
}

Anyway, there you have it. Probably the most extreme method to get ultra-smooth scrolling while still using UITableView. Use it wisely.

Dealing With Memory Warnings in View Controllers

When the iPhone decides you are consuming too much memory (and I’m not sure what the deciding factors are), it calls your application and ultimately your view controllers’ didReceiveMemoryWarning method. In here you’re supposed to clean any caches, etc. But there’s a small wrinkle in how you need to handle this in a view controller.

Is My View Still There?

Basically, there’s a comment in the template code that says something like:

    // Releases the view if it doesn't have a superview 

This is on the line to [super didReceiveMemoryWarning];. Well, this news about your view being released is good, because it means that you can undo what you might have set up in viewDidLoad, your go-to place to know your view is there and ready for use. In fact, I always try to do the minimum in any init method and save it all for viewDidLoad.

The problem is that you don’t really know if it threw the view out. You can’t just test self.view as this will recreate the view! So I’ve been using a little trick to help me out:

- (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning
{
    UIView* superview = self.view.superview;

    // Releases the view if it doesn't have a superview
    [super didReceiveMemoryWarning];

    if ( superview == nil )
    {
        // OK. NOW we can assume view is gone.
     }

     // Destroy any caches regardless here
}

Essentially I see if the superview was nil before calling the super method. If superview was nil, the view really does go away (unless you have a reference to it of course, in which case things get much more complicated). If the view didn’t go away, you still might want to destroy any caches anyway, as shown above.

When we know the view is gone, I usually unregister any observers I might have installed, since they tend to operate on the view, which will just bring it back into being, which is bad. If the view is hidden, why bring it back into existence if no one can see it? Plus, aren’t we trying to use less memory? It should stay dormant until it’s brought back into the visible world.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve learned to do to ensure that my view is gone and I can tear down virtually everything, as if the controller just got initialized. It sure would be nice if we had a viewWillUnload method to catch this for realz instead of what amounts to a best guess.

Other Considerations

Even if the approach above worked like a charm, you might have other reasons to keep some data around. I had a situation where I had a view pushed onto a navigation controller that referenced the view underneath. Basically an iterator of the list below it, ala Mail. So I couldn’t throw away all my data structures like I otherwise might have when the view disappeared. So I ended up employing this:

// We can only safely purge the world if we are on top.
BOOL isOnTop = ([self.navigationController topViewController] == self);

And inside the if (superview == nil) condition I also checked isOnTop. If not, I can’t destroy everything.

Keep in mind that isOnTop can be true even the view was not visible. In a tab bar it might be the top controller on the non-selected tab, for example. In any case, if you’re on top you can safely dispose of all of your data structures, as you know there’s no controllers above you.

So there’s two ways I cope with memory warnings. As mentioned, they probably won’t solve 100% of the needs out there, but it might give you some ideas for you own applications.

Glassy Scrolling with UITableView

Now that the veil of secrecy has been lifted, I think it’s time to share at least one bit of information that I’ve gleaned whilst writing my new iPhone application: how to do fast tables.

NOTE: If you’re not already familiar with how UITableView works, the rest of this might just sound like jibberish. But I think there’s still valid life advice in here, so please read on!

In fact, one of the reasons I even started to write my app was to prove that I could write an app that does super-fast tables. And in my app (which, yes, is still not-to-be-named), I even do my own rich text layout for every cell. And every cell is a different height. Even I was skeptical that I’d be able to pull of fast tables, but it worked out. Phew!

How did I accomplish this? Well, by applying a lot of what I’ve learned over the years. And learning a bit about how UIView performs.

Use Views Sparingly

I’m not quite sure what’s going on in UIView. Maybe it’s that all views are backed by Core Animation layers, but drawing using a bunch of views is a sure-fire way to slow yourself down for straight on scrolling performance.

For simple table views (settings, or profiles, etc.) you probably can get away with using views with subviews. But we want smoothness as the user is scrolling through hundreds of items. In these cases, if you need to write a custom cell, you should use one view that draws everything directly.

Use Opaque Views

If you have a transparent cell, this can slow you down. If a view is marked opaque, the view system knows it doesn’t have to render the area behind it and blend your view onto it. This seems to make a marked difference at times. I just ran into this myself and switched to filling the view with the background color of the table and it is noticeably smoother now.

Note that this can work against you if you want to use standard cell highlighting, as your item won’t turn blue since the standard highlighting relies on transparency. But it does work great for instances where the items aren’t clickable. In my case, it was a message view modeled after the SMS application.

Be Lazy and Cache Often

Quite simply: don’t do anything until you don’t need to do it. And when you do need to do it, try to do it only once.

As I mentioned I render rich text. Sadly, there’s no built-in way to do this at present, so I have to lay the text out myself. This is not really cheap. So I have a layout object that lays itself out and then I keep that object around all pre-calculated. This is very much the way you’d use something like ATSUI or NSLayoutManager. You do the hard work once, then store it off for later. Then when I draw the cell, I just run along the lines of text and render them. I also calculate the rectangles of everything I will draw ahead of time. Then rendering is just a quick operation.

If you are drawing images, try to cache them at the size you’ll render them. If you are resizing them every time you draw them, you’re in for a world of hurt. In my situation, they weren’t too much bigger than my target size and they’re never bigger than a certain size, so I didn’t even bother. But if the images could be any size, it’d be really important to resize and cache them someplace.

Another thing I needed to do was cache the heights of the cells. If you have a table with variable-height cells, the table view will run through every item in the table and ask it how high it is before it renders anything. In my situation, with all the layout I do, that is pretty costly (it can actually take up to 2 seconds on the device). So I cache the heights. As new items come in and go out of my list, I only need to calc the new items, so after the first reload, all subsequent reloads are really fast since I already have the values.

Another cache I use is for the background for my cells for one of my ‘looks’. In this case, I use [UIImage stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:topCapHeight:] to give me an image I can stretch across the background. BTW, this is one of the most useful image functions in there. It basically takes an image and separates into a piece that acts as an end cap and a stretchable part. There’s effectively a one-pixel band that gets repeated as it stretches. But I digress…

What I ended up doing was taking these images and, because my cells could only be certain heights, as I knew I was using one font size and the cells would be based on the number of lines, there were only a finite number of heights I’d need (I believe 5). So as I encountered the heights, I created a cached version of the stretched image using code like:

UIImage* background = [[self balloonImage] stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:0
                                           topCapHeight:35];
UIGraphicsBeginImageContext( CGSizeMake( rect.size.width, rect.size.height ) );

rect.origin.x = rect.origin.y = 0;
[background drawInRect:rect];

image = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();

UIGraphicsEndImageContext(); 

And then I just take that image and store it in the cache. Very simple. I also stored that as the class level so all views can use the cache.

Nothing’s ever free, of course, so keep in mind that if you cache too much, you might find yourself running out of memory. Be prepared to listen to memory warnings via the didReceiveMemoryWarning method and dump your cache if needed.

And finally, also keep in mind that the table view only keeps the visible cells around. Every time a cell comes into view, it asks you for a new cell. You can reuse cells, but even that only will get you so much. So don’t assume that once your list has completely been scrolled through that everything is loaded. You cannot rely on such behavior. This piece of information caused me to change my strategy a bit until I arrived at what I am describing here.

How Do You Know What To Cache?

Fortunately, I’ve done this for a while, and I know a lot of the gotchas. But no matter how much you know or think you know, the best way to get real answers is to use a tool like Instruments. It is indispensable for finding bottlenecks in your code. For my app, I just kept sampling my application and finding things I should work on. If you aren’t using sampler or something similar, you really should.

Again: indispensable.

What’s Next

Next time I might cover performance in general. How to make your applications fast and not impede the user-experience. I’ll also talk about how to handle low-memory. This can be a bit tricky at times.

Until then!

UPDATE: Since writing this I’ve sped things up a little bit by going one step further.

Software Development Meme

I’ve been tagged by Seldo, a former colleague from Yahoo!

How old were you when you first started programming?

I believe I was probably 16 or so. I was in high school and we started learning on Radio Shack TRS-80s and Apple IIe’s. It was in high school when I saw what the Mac was and desperately wanted one. But hell, they were pretty expensive. It would be a few years before ever getting one.

What was your first language?

BASIC, on the aforementioned platforms. GOSUB FTW!!

What was the first real program you wrote?

The first real program that I wrote and ever sent out into the wild was called DoubleScroll. It was an extension for Mac OS that would give your scroll bars two arrows at each end. It wasn’t the first of it’s kind, but my version worked with System 7 as well as 6. It took a lot of sitting in Macsbug to figure out that the System 7 scroll bars got a new, undocumented call to allow them to draw the scroll box outline. Bastages!

What languages have you used since you started programming?

In no particular order: Basic, Pascal, Cobol, DBase, Perl, Java, shell scripting, C/C++, Objective-C, PHP, SQL.

The most interesting fact is that when I was working during college, I worked at a store that did all their database stuff in Basic as well.

C I learned completely on my own trying to learn Mac coding. This was just as C was becoming popular. I didn’t have the cash to dish out for MPW and all that fancy stuff at the time, so I got Think C.

I know C/C++/Objective-C best and probably PHP second best. But it’s far second.

What was your first professional programming gig?

This was at a company called Charles River Analytics. They worked on a piece of Mac software called Open Sesame. It watched what you did and used real honest-to-goodness AI to find patterns and offer to automate certain sequences. I came on to work on the monitoring piece, since by that time I had a decent amount of experience patching the OS with INITs. By the end of my time there, we had Undo working in the Finder. Yes, it was a flying hack, but it worked!

Of course, after I got to Apple, my viewpoint of patching the OS changed dramastically(tm).

One of the cool things about being there at the time was a) it was when the Internet opened up and b) we got to visit Taligent. It was from Taligent’s use of C++ that we learned a lot. It really opened our eyes as to how it could really be used. They had actual real templates back then. Like, our compilers couldn’t even compile stuff they did. Of course, it was the slowest OS I’ve ever seen, so it didn’t completely sell us.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Oh hell yes. It’s one of those really addictive things that sucks me right in. It’s just too cool to be able to code something up and show others. Especially these days with the stuff I’ve learned over the years.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Wow, only one? Well I’m giving you three!

1. Don’t do ‘surface coding’. Always strive to understand what’s really going on underneath some APIs if you can. I find that it really helps me get my head around the way a frameworks, etc. is put together. Sometimes, when I see something odd, I’ll write little tests to kind of see what it’s really doing. Sort of a black box model, I guess.
2. Never assume you know how things are going to perform, or what’s slow and what’s not. You’d be surprised.
3. Be lazy. Don’t do anything in your code that you don’t need to do. This was a huge thing we learned at Apple, and it made huge differences in performance (and perceived performance). I swear I could write a book from all the things I learned while there.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

I’ve had many fun times, I enjoyed doing that first DoubleScroll extension as it was such a learning experience both in terms of tech as well as dealing with customers, etc. It was also exciting to be sent a book with a check or the software from Michael Crichton.

My time as Apple was very fun, as was some parts of my Yahoo! experience (the Atlantis – Konfabulator 4.0 project).

But I have to say, the iPhone app I’m working on now has been a lot of fun. Probably the most fun I’ve had coding in a long long time.

Who’s next?

This is a tough question, actually. I think I’m going to tag Daniel Jalkut next! Since I wrote this in MarsEdit, I felt it was fitting

CoreGraphics is Right After All

A while back I wrote about a potential issue with compositing using Quartz. I’m happy to finally conclude that there in fact is no issue. Yes, Quartz does behave differently than Cairo, but I believe Quartz has the more consistent behavior throughout all its modes. I came to this realization after talking to the engineer who does the compositing work in Quartz.

The main difference is that Quartz will only ever touch pixels within the ‘clip’ of an object, whereas it seems that Cairo will touch pixels outside of it. After thinking about it for a bit this makes much more sense, and seems to be a much simpler thing to implement as well, so I’m not sure why Cairo seems to take the tack they do.

So for example, if you fill a circle in Quartz, only the pixels inside the realm of influence (the circular path itself) will have the Porter-Duff blending applied. This is why things look different in Safari and Firefox when using these modes in a canvas object.

I reported in my prior post that I thought that it should affect pixels outside the circle, but this no longer makes sense to me after talking with that engineer. Now, if you were to blit an image of the circle, the area of influence would be the image rect (intersected with any clip, obviously). Then you’d get results more like what you’d expect. So basically, once you know that fact, you can likely still do most of the things you’d want to do using these blend modes.

So in the end it just seems like limiting the blending to the effective clip area is the better method. It’s far simpler to implement, since much like painting the circle in say, source over, you only affect pixels inside the circle. Ever. And that is a constant through all composition modes. This makes it consistent and predictable.

So in the end, it’s right, as far as I’m concerned (and Apple, of course)!