But, stop saying useless and not interesting things, it’s the day of XCode 4.3 and I’ll quickly post about the fact that has finally become a single bundled app.
I think this is due to the fact that Apple is pushing forward the sandboxing for all apps, of course they have to be an example, so they made Xcode a single app.

I was wondering about the fact that I have XCode 4.2 installed and I was thinking to uninstall it before procede to uninstall XCode 4.3… but, then I decide to go on without doing it, trusting in Apple engenieers and… I was right. On first launch, XCode 4.3 asks to agree to the EULA, then to install additional components. The important thing is that if you want to uninstall old Xcode installations (4.2 in my case), the system asks to do it right after the additional components installation. Just say yes if you want to do and start using XCode 4.3 without problems!

So, using ragebuilder I did this funny pic:

Basically MCMenuViewController is a reproduction of the Menu in Facebook app (Path has both sides, this version only has left side).

I reprodouced this component to use it inside an app, so I made it open source under MIT license. I created this component to be used as Root controller or as child in an UINavigationController.

GitHub

I have my Macbook Air with Time Machine connected to an Ubuntu 10.04 server ‘faking’ a Time Capsule, thank to Netatalk, and I discovered that Mac OS X starting from Lion, has the local snapshot enabled as default on notebook.

This means that a local copy of files are keeped in the local drive, using space. So, if you want to check how much space are the snapshots using, you just have to open the terminal and run:

sudo du -sh /.MobileBackups

This was on my machine:

From my point of view this is a waste of space so I decided to turn off this feature. The command to do this is quite simple (always using the Terminal):

sudo tmutil disablelocal

Immediately after this command, Time Machine should start a backup indexing all files from scratch and deleting the /.MobileBackups folder.

P.S. Please be careful in doing this, I’m not responsible to any data loss or damages

I decided to start with a really simple game that I found around the web: Montessori Memory.
The development wasn’t long as expected, I spent less that 2 week to complete the game and now I’m happy to announce that Montessori Memory is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad (as universal app).
The app is for kids of 4-8 years old and has been localized in: English, French, Italian and German.

Here some screenshots from the iPhone version:

After few hours since the article has been published, I had a lot of visits on my blog, so I decide to improve the quality of the code and invest some time in getting more accurate results.

I received a couple of good comments and the first one that made me think a lot was this:

Some of these number don’t look right. Did you compile on release with no assertions?

I have to be honest: I completely missed that point, I forgot to disable assertion or use a ‘Release’ build configuration. I decide to do all the tests again and, thank to some suggestions from steipete in Github, I added the possibility to decide how many times the library will parse the file, this is for more accurate results and some useful stats like average, minimum and maximum. Adding some stats is good, but it’s better if you have some kind of graphic to represent these results, so I decided to add a graphic chart if the phone is turned in landscape after the parsing (thanks to HighCharts).

Just fixing the assertion problem, results are now looking more accurate and they seem to be what I was expecting when I started this project. Let’s see what are the new results starting from the twitter_timeline.json, using an iPhone 4S with iOS 5.0.1 (parsed 50 times):

Now JSONKit is the top class library, the fastest one! NSJSONSerialization is the second one, following with a small gap and NextiveJSON is now the third, really close to the 2 top libraries. Now SBJSON is the 4th library and TouchJSON is the slowest, like in the previous test with the build configuration mistake.

Let’s see the result in a chart:

Now it’s the time of repeat.json, the json file with a repeated structure. I did this test parsing the same file 100 times, this is a quite fast parse, so it’s not a big deal for an iPhone 4S.

The results are the same of the previous test: JSONKit is the fastest library, followed again by NSJSONSerialization and NextiveJSON. SBJSON and Touch JSON are, again, the 2 slowest libraries.

Again, let’s see the chart:

Now it’s the time of the hardest json file, the one with 1000 objects with a random structure. I parsed this file only 5 times, because the process is longer than the other 2 and I think that 5 times is the minimum number for having a good stat.

Even here, JSONKit is the best, doing better than NSJSONSerialization and NextiveJSON, both are following with a small gap. Always behind SBJSON and TouchJSON.

And… guess what? Chart time!

Conclusion

After using a release build configuration, things changed a lot, now the results are more accurate and using a chart to describe the results, it’s more clear the gap between the fastest library and the worst library.

At this point and without doubts, JSONKit is the best library, followed by NSJSONSerialization and NextiveJSON. SBJSON and TouchJSON are a little bit slower than the 3 bests libraries.

Next time I’ll do the serialization test, updating this project that has been update in Github. Like the previous post, feel free to comment what you think and suggest improvements.

I think the best test that we can do is a quick benchmark, even if I think that it’s not only the speed that makes a library better than others.

So, today I decided to do a quick performance project to check which of the following libraries is the best one in terms of speed:

• SBJson - Previously known as json-framework
• JSONKit
• NextiveJSON
• TouchJSON
• NSJSONSerialization - Public API since iOS5

To do this quick test (at the moment I’m only deserializing the JSON file) I create a project with all the libraries.
I also created 3 different kind of JSON file:

1. A JSON file from public Twitter timeline
2. A random JSON file generated with 1000 records with variable objects *
3. A classic JSON file with 100 records with 2 objects *

To generate the files marked with * I used this nice online tool: json-generator.appspot.com

For the test I used an iPhone 4S with iOS 5.0.1.
I’ll redo the test as soon as possible with an iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPad 2.

This post has been updated with more accurate results!

You can find the repo in Github :)