My First Tutorial and Other News
February 2nd, 2009
I spent most of yesterday working on a tutorial on tracking down memory leaks on the iPhone using the Instruments tool. You can find it here:
- Streaming Colour Tutorials Page (www.streamingcolour.com)
Or by hitting the “Tutorials” link in the left-hand sidebar navigation (if you’re reading this on the site).
It was really fun to write this up for some reason. Learning how to track mem leaks on the iPhone was fun, but kind of frustrating, so I wanted to help other people just experience the fun parts without all the frustration. Yes kids, tracking down memory leaks can be fun!
I’m preparing a new build this morning for my testers. I’ve gotten some great feedback from some of the new beta testers and I’m trying to incorporate changes where I feel they make sense. Most of the changes are around how the game communicates with new players.
Speaking of tester feedback, I’m kind of torn about something I’ve done. Late last week I put a pop-up into the game that comes up whenever your iPhone or iPod touch generates a “low memory” warning. This usually happens because other programs have been leaking memory and then someone boots up your game and the device doesn’t have much RAM left. This generates an event in your app and you can handle it however you want. In my experience, most apps ignore it, then crash a few minutes later when the device runs out of RAM. I didn’t want this to happen, so I bring up a pop-up saying “Your device is running low on memory. It is recommended that you reboot your device or the game may quit unexpectedly.”
The problem is this: several of my testers have mentioned to me that the message came up during their first few sessions of play. Virtually all of them have said something like this “I don’t know if it was your game’s fault, or if I just hadn’t rebooted my iPhone in a while.” This worries me because I’ve measured my game’s memory footprint; it’s not that big. It maxes out around 15-17MB of RAM used. My concern is that people will see this pop-up, and instead of seeing it as helpful, they’ll assume my game is the problem.
On the other hand, I don’t just want to do nothing, have the game crash, and then have people blame my game for crashing.
Anyone have any thoughts on that?
Finally, I just wanted to mention one aesthetic change I made to the site over the weekend: if you’re viewing the actual site (and not reading this is an RSS reader) then you’ll notice that all of the content text is now bigger. I had gotten a lot of feedback that the font was too small and too difficult to read. Well, I listened to you, my dear readers, and I have made it bigger!
Owen