Agen G. N. Schmitz:
Shortly after Mountain Lion was released, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro owners reported on Apple’s support forums that running 10.8 caused significant battery drainage issues, with some complaining that battery life was reduced to almost half the normal amount. Ars Technica then ran what they called “real world” tests on its MacBook Pro with Retina Display (which, according to Apple, should have an 8-hour battery life on a full charge), and their testing results never yielded more than 5 hours and a few minutes of run time.
Jim Tanous:
With great anticipation, we installed the final build of 10.8.1 this morning and ran our benchmark again, only to be disappointed by the results. Battery life did improve by about 17 minutes over the prerelease build, but we are still over an hour short on battery life compared to 10.7.4’s numbers, a difference of about 20 percent.
Battery Life Mac Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
Jonathan Dann (formerly of Sofa) on the previously announced rewrite from HTML5 to Objective-C:
One of the biggest advantages we’ve gained from building on native iOS has been the ability to make the app fast. Now, when you scroll through your news feed on the new Facebook for iOS, you’ll notice that it feels much faster than before. One way we have achieved this is by re-balancing where we perform certain tasks. For example, in iOS, the main thread drives the UI and handles touch events, so the more work we do on the main thread, the slower the app feels. Instead, we take care to perform computationally expensive tasks in the background. This means all our networking activity, JSON parsing, NSManagedObject creation, and saving to disk never touches the main thread.
Jacqui Cheng:
Facebook’s previous app—particularly the version just before this, 4.1.1—did not have a good reputation. Ratings on the App Store hovered around the two-star mark, and on any given day, a search on either Facebook or Twitter would yield hundreds of complaints about the mobile app’s slowness or bugginess.
Facebook iOS iOS App Software Rewrite
John Carmack:
I had mentioned something about how, you I’ve been learning a whole lot, and I’m a better programmer now than I was a year ago and the interviewer expressed a lot of surprise at that, you know after 20 years and going through all of this that you’d have it all figured out by now, but I actually have been learning quite a bit about software development, both on the personal craftsman level but also paying more attention by what it means on the team dynamics side of things.
Craft John Carmack
