Tag Archives: speed

Mike Rundle on mobile apps for iOS »

June 27th, 2012

Mike Rundle on Twitter:

And to everyone trying to build great mobile-web-in-a-native-shell iPhone apps, give up. Facebook couldn’t do it, and neither can you.

I agree with Mike. Mobile web applications that perform as fast or faster than native / compiled applications on iOS is simply not on the horizon. Could it happen? Could Webkit or another engine get so fast and efficient to make it plausible to build entire applications for mobile devices like phones and tablets? I think so. I just don’t see it happening in the next few years. Native applications are simply the best bang for the current buck.

Side note: Man I miss working with Mike. Hi Mike!

A new Facebook for iOS coming next month »

June 27th, 2012

Remember when Facebook’s iOS application was used during an Apple keynote to show how great an app could be built by third parties? In fact, when Apple only allowed mobile web applications on the iPhone and when they began allowing native applications Facebook was used as a shining example for both ways of building an app for iOS.

Fast-forward to today where 21,000 out of 38,000 app reviews for Facebook for iOS are one star due to how slow the application has become.

Nick Bilton:

Thankfully that’s all going to change next month. According to two Facebook engineers who asked not be named because they are not authorized to speak about unreleased products, Facebook has completely rebuilt its iOS application to optimize for one thing: speed.

Thank goodness. Finally.

How to speed up Mail.app just a bit

January 11th, 2012

This isn’t anything new and it has been covered elsewhere in much more detail. However, there are a few ways to speed up Mail. I’ve tried two. One I highly recommend, the other is up to you because I don’t want to be responsible for any problems that may arise as a result of you mucking about with parts of Mail.app that even I don’t fully understand.

First, move older email messages out of your Inbox and into an Archive folder. You should have no trouble doing this. It may take a little while for Mail.app to move all of the messages. If you’re the type of person that has several folders (or Mailboxes) for message categories like family, friends, work, etc. etc. then you may not benefit from this tip. But, if you’re like me, and you leave every single message in your Inbox then you definitely will.

What I’ve done is move every message in my Inbox dated prior to December 1, 2011 into an Archive folder that is locally here on my Mac. This way when I go into my Inbox it is only loading a few months of email. I may do this again in June or wait an entire year if I don’t see much of a slow down. But just doing this has sped up Mail.app a lot.

Second, you could strip the bloat from Mail.app’s Envelope Index. What does this mean? I don’t really know but the layman’s explanation might be this; Mail.app keeps a database and sometimes it gets a little out of control. You can run a few commands via Terminal and it will clean up that mess. Again, do this at your own risk.

Your mileage may vary but with these two tips Mail.app should get just a bit snappier. It has for me.

New Browser releases make me nauseous

March 23rd, 2011

You know that feeling you get when two of your friends ask you to do something different on the same day? That feeling in your stomach when you don’t know which one to let down? You sit there agonizing over the choice between two friends, two things great things to do!

Firefox 4 was released today and once again I’m made to feel this same nauseating feeling. Every single time a new Browser is released, well Safari, Chrome, or Firefox (we’ll leave Internet Explorer, Opera and others out of this), I’m torn between making the jump from one browser to the other.

I’ve jumped around a lot over the years. And it always comes back to one thing that determines whether or not I use a Browser every day; speed. I don’t use many extensions, themes, or add-ons in any Browser. I had used Safari before it even supported such things. Speed, however, keeps me loyal to a Browser until – inevitably – the next-fastest Browser released pulls me away.

On the outset Firefox 4 feels very snappy. Just about as fast as Chrome (if not faster) and a lot faster than Safari. Chrome and Firefox 4 are now neck-and-neck for winning my default Browser of choice. But that’s today and I’m sure that won’t last long and, once again, I’ll be left with the nauseating choice of jumping ship.

Chrome is faster than lightning

May 10th, 2010

So Chrome is faster than Safari again. Not one month ago I said:

“I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.”

It seems I’m going to follow the speed and it turns out that Chrome is faster than lightning. I’m glad to be back on Chrome as Safari’s address bar is, as Jonathan Christopher put it, annoying but I will miss the Top Sites screen and visual history search.