Why Android's UI Is Laggy Compared to iOS and Windows Phone | Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball Linked List: Why Android's UI Is Laggy Compared to iOS and Windows Phone

Interesting technical look at the design of Android’s graphics and event processing by Andrew Munn, trying to explain why it feels so laggy compared to iOS and Windows Phone:

Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:

• UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
• UI rendering has normal priority

[…] This is the same reason why Windows Mobile 6.5, Blackberry OS, and Symbian have terrible touch screen performance. Like Android, they were not designed to prioritize UI rendering. Since the iPhone’s release, RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia have abandoned their mobile OS’s and started from scratch. Android is the only mobile OS left that existed pre-iPhone.

Juicy Bits | Daring Fireball

Juicy Bits

Fun story by Mike Swanson, on how he left his job as a developer evangelist at Microsoft to be a full-time iOS app developer.

The Unfamiliar | Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball Linked List: The Unfamiliar

Objective-C is different than C++ or Java. Xcode is different than Visual Studio or Eclipse, and Xcode 4 is very different from previous versions of Xcode. Baxter-Reynolds certainly wouldn’t be alone in saying that he doesn’t like these differences. But it’s curious to argue Apple developer tools and frameworks are deficient due to a lack of time put into them. In numerous ways, both linguistically and tools-wise, Xcode, Objective-C, and Cocoa/Cocoa Touch are the evolutionary descendants of the NeXT developer platform from 1989.

iBoost Your iOS Code Part 1: Introduction and Macros | Rapture In Venice

iBoost Your iOS Code Part 1: Introduction and Macros | Rapture In Venice

Over the course of developing many iOS-based apps for a variety of customers such as Sports Authority, Navy Federal Credit Union, Fuzz Alert, Map My Fitness, and more, you begin to sense a pattern with how you use the iOS SDK and what your coding practices are in Objective-C. An overwhelming sensation that you’re doing a lot of the same things over and over again — in about the most verbose way possible. Let’s face it, Objective-C is not only an ugly language, but the SDK is missing a lot of very basic functionality to get your job done more concisely.
That’s why I built and maintain the iBoost Library. It’s a small module that serves as a sidekick of sorts to your normal development.

Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple - Andy Greenberg - The Firewall - Forbes

Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple - Andy Greenberg - The Firewall - Forbes

“I didn’t think anyone would be able to do what he’s done for years,” says Charlie Miller, a former network exploitation analyst for the National Security Agency who first hacked the iPhone in 2007. “Now it’s been done by some kid we had never even heard of. He’s totally blown me away.”

Nick Farina - An iOS Developer Takes on Android

Nick Farina - An iOS Developer Takes on Android

Recently, we released the Android version of Meridian, our platform for building location-based apps.
We didn’t use one of these “Cross Platform!” tools like Titanium. We wrote it, from scratch, in Java, like you do in Android.

Apple WWDC: iOS 5, Lion, iCloud - Slashdot

Apple WWDC: iOS 5, Lion, iCloud - Slashdot

Steve Jobs was on hand today to kick off Apple's WWDC keynote. Lion took the lead, with no surprises except a $29.99 pricetag and a July ship date. iOS is getting a new "Notification Center"; Twitter is being integrated; he announced a split thumbable keyboard for iPads; wireless syncing; and a native IM system for iOS devices, shipping in the Fall. iCloud will be free, syncing apps (Mail, Calendar, Contacts and iWork apps) across devices. Photostream is iCloud for pictures. iTunes iCloud will let you re-download your tracks at last, and iTunes Match will let you match your ripped CDs to Apple's copies.

Nilay Patel • The Android multitouch story gets even murkier

Nilay Patel • The Android multitouch story gets even murkier

There’s been a lot of chatter these past few weeks about Steven Levy’s new Google book In the Plex, and particularly some revelations in the book about Steve Jobs — specifically, that Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted him to be the first CEO of Google, and that Jobs mentored the two founders until he later saw pinch-to-zoom in Android and everything went to hell. The acrimony was so deep, we’re told, that Jobs kept the iPad a secret from Eric Schmidt even though Schmidt was still on Apple’s board of directors while it was being developed. (Schmidt would later step down, of course.) It’s juicy stuff, and it nicely feeds right into the current iOS vs. Android narrative of the day.

Daring Fireball: Cutting That Cord

Daring Fireball: Cutting That Cord

After Apple’s iPad 2 introduction event last month, I ran into Josh Topolsky, and, of course, we talked about what we thought of it. Topolsky made an interesting observation: that the iPad 2 epitomized how Apple seems to be a generation ahead of its competitors on the device side — both hardware and software — but a generation behind on the cloud side.

I’ve been thinking about the iPad in this context ever since, and I think it’s a perfect synopsis of the state of iOS. There will be no tablet this year from any competitor that matches the iPad 2 in terms of elegance, battery life, or build quality. No competing OS will match iOS in terms of on-the-device user experience.