Last Thursday I did an interview with Dan Grigsby from Mobile Orchard; the interview is now online.
Highlights from this interview include: From UIView to OpenGL: the seven different implementations it took to finalize its unique — and Best App Ever award-nominated — UI. From audio-queues to Remote IO: the four different architectural approaches he tried before finalizing audio subsystems. The travails of trying to implement echo cancelation. The business of making a living off of a $10 app
Listen to it here, or subscribe in iTunes (30 min.)
Hi Michael. Great interview, congrats on the app, it sounds like you put a lot of work into it. I just have one question:
When you said you gave up on UIView rendering because the images were drawing too slowly, did you look into using a CGLayerRef? It's basically an on-graphics-chip cache of, well, anything you'd care to render (image, path, composite etc). More detail from apple at: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/graphicsimaging/Conceptual/drawingwithquartz2d/dq_layers/dq_layers.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30001066-CH219-TPXREF101
I know that article isn't iphone-specific, but I followed the example and got a huuuuuge boost to my UIView iphone app's performance.
Cheers – Rob (@robfe)
Thanks, Rob!
Nope, I didn't try CGLayers! By the time I was aware of them I'd already decided that the masking approach made more sense, and was off on a new tangent.
It does sound like a good thing to try for next time. That said, I'm pretty happy with the OpenGL implementation.