MWorks blog
Mac OS X, iPhone & Android Development
iPad out April 3 – in the US…
Mar 6th
Yes, the iPad now has a shipping date. You will be able to preorder it on March 12th, but the shipping won’t happen until April 3rd (for the US) and late April for the rest of the world.
At least we have dates now!
Moving to a new blog
Feb 27th
Very soon (really really soon), we will be moving to an MWorks blog. This domain will still stay – but will redirect to the MWorks blog. With that move, we will release a beta of a brand new product…..JellyVNC…
Google Nexus One update
Feb 7th
Our Google Nexus One has been running as our main MWorks mobile since we got it and it is one great phone! Is it better than the iPhone? For some things – but less so for others. Its more of a geeks phone – so that works for us!
We just updated to Android 2.1 update 1 for the Nexus and the pinch/zoon features work as well as the iPhone (some would say better for browsing) and the 3G reception seems better.
It works really well on the Vodafone and 2degrees network, and works on XT as long as you are in Auckland city or another city center where they use 2100.
Google Nexus One
Jan 26th
Quick update: we now have a Google Nexus One development phone which means we can now develop for multiple screen sizes on actual hardware. While an emulator is good – nothing beats hardware…
Android
Jan 13th
We have our first Android handset to start developing with. While the emulators are fine – there is nothing like walking around with your applications running on physical hardware!
So far, the SDK(s) look fairly straight forward, but the insanely fast release cycle and the wide variety of screen sizes will make it fun compared to the iPhone! Love challenges.
So, we have the capability now and we hope we will release a simple app soon – as soon as we figure out Google Marketplace…
Speeding up SQL on the iPhone
Dec 29th
So, while using %LIKE% is a good option for a small dataset, the iPhone doesn’t have the CPU power to trawl through a large dataset quickly. Using PHP with sqlite, we took the large data set which has a description field in it, and split it down to a type of index table. With this, we were able to use the = and get better accuracy.
Example:
Field has index of 34 and a data field of “this is the best movie we have seen”
Our PHP script split this into another table which the main search looks at:
34 this
34 is
34 the
34 best
…
34 seen
As you can see, we could look for ‘best’, get the index of 34 and pull out the result very quickly. We hope this is useful to someone out there!
Numeraders 2.0 update
Dec 12th
Its been a couple of weeks since we talked about a Numeraders update – it is all going well. We are pushing to have it out before the holiday break – but if not, it will be early January. We have a few live iPhone projects on the boil – which is good. We *may* post up a prelim screenshot for you to look at…maybe, maybe not….
Numeraders 2.0 under development
Nov 21st
The very very popular Numeraders is getting a new look and feel, online hi-score list and special stages to give the most handy Numeraders pilot a real challenge. The current thinking is to get the game looking a bit more calculator-like, without looking like a calculator (hard to explain). The hi-score list will be maintained on a website for you to check out how you rank in the world.
But what we are really excited about are the “special stages” which break the continuous level-style game up with number sequences, count arounds and other fun number enhancements.
We hope to have it out before the end of the year – but if you have any suggestions – get them in now! (Just add comments here or email us)
LIKE % makes for a slow SQL search
Nov 10th
For those who don’t know, SQLite has a full text search module in the full distribution – but on the iPhone, it isn’t there. This means that you have to resort back to good old fashioned LIKE %word% in your SELECT statements. Because LIKE doesn’t speed up when using indexes (it is a full text compare) – it is fairly slow compared to a direct =
When planning your SQLite implementations on the iPhone, make sure you have your data structured in the best possible way for LIKE to fly over it!