Archive for July 2, 2010

Friday, July 2, 2010

GCD Background Timers

Mike Ash:

Coalesce is good for periodic maintenance tasks. You can call the timer many times, and it will fire periodically as needed. By passing different delays into the timer, you can handle events with varying urgency. For example, if you write some very low-priority data to a file handle, you might specify a 60-second delay. If you write high-priority data, you might specify a 0.1-second delay. MABGTimer will intelligently combine those so that high-priority data following low-priority data will flush the entire cache.

Apple Responds to iPhone 4 Reception Problems

Apple’s response to the grip of death is:

  1. Pretending that previous iPhones were also subject to this problem, which as far as I know is not true—certainly not to the same extent.
  2. Acknowledging that iPhone has always inflated the signal strength. This explains why I usually have more bars than other AT&T phones and why calling is unreliable even with 4–5 bars.
  3. Announcing a free update that will reduce the number of displayed bars, thus hiding the drop.
  4. Not announcing anything that will improve the actual reception for people affected by this issue.
  5. Deflecting the blame to AT&T.

John Gruber brings his usual translation.