GCD Example Updated (Now With More Speed!)

Due to popular demand, I’ve updated my GCD example from previous talks to include a few things to make the example not only do something on a background queue, but also snappy. It should scroll much better now. A quick rundown of what changed:

  • Images are now resized. Since the example uses wallpaper-sized images, there’s no sense in not resizing them to go on a 44-pixel-tall table view cell. I’m using the popular image-resizing routines from Trevor’s Bike Shed to do the resizing with a nice interpolation quailty.
  • Those resized images are now cached. I use an NSCache to store the images. If the app receives a memory warning, it’ll jettison all of the cached images, but if you’re just scrolling up and down this is a quick and dirty way to cache the images. I had never really used NSCache before, so this was a good excuse to try it.
  • I’m at CocoaConf in that state down to the South today, so this post has been brought to you by late-night hotel room caffeine. I made some other changes to the project to deal with a weird table view cell bug that I’ve submitted to Apple; a post on that is coming up next!

WordPress 3.0

I’ve updated the site to WordPress 3.0. So far all is well; I’ll likely create a new post type (excellent new feature) for software once I have more software to be creating posts about.

Site Update

I’ve updated this site to WordPress 2.7.  Wahoo!  I also cleaned up some old posts, re-did some tags, and cleaned out old tags.  Posts are also now sorted into categories.

Relaunch

I’ve moved this blog over to Dreamhost, which means a couple of things: first, I’m managing my own WordPress installation now, which is pretty cool.  Don’t get me wrong, WordPress.com is great—and I’m still technically using it to forward traffic to my old address here—but managing your own server is pretty cool.  I can install whatever themes I want and edit them as I see fit, without paying money to do so.  Sure, I’m paying money for hosting, the domain name, and the domain name forwarding from WordPress.com, but at least now the blog is here on my own terms.

Moving the blog here was a long and arduous process, one that required patience on my part and that gave me a crash course in DNS for web servers.  I was able to do it mostly off of a post at blog-well.com, and since the attached PDF has rights to edit it built in, I think I’ll work on some instructions for this process to help others along.  Keep your eyes peeled!