Slow and steady wins the race!

Notes

Wow, what a fight it’s been! The promised update to The Dossier is inching closer. We’re still getting the finishing touches on the update process, and hope to submit the update to Apple early next week. You’ll hear it here first when we do.

In case you’re interested in the technical details of what we’ve been doing, here’s an overview:

Having multiple photos turned out to be a big ol’ memory hog because we were loading the entire image and displaying only the zoomed, cropped piece. As soon as we added the ability to have multiple photos, memory became an issue, so we had the rewrite the way we displayed and edited the photos.

It was also a massive speed problem. Having 3 or 4 photos on a dossier was taking up 30+mb (which is about the time that iOS says “hey, yeah. No.” and shuts down the app, and it was taking several seconds to open. With the changes, dossiers with a dozen photos now open nearly instantly, and take up a couple of mb, tops, with a jump of about a mb when editing, keeping us well below the crash threshold.
Coming up with an elegant way to associate a dossier with a contact was awkward. We’d tried a few different methods, but ultimately decided to keep it really, really simple. When you’re editing the title of a dossier, you can now select a contact if you want to from a popover. If you don’t want to, just don’t select anyone! If you accidentally select someone, simply tap the None button to have a dossier that isn’t associated with anyone again.
Migrating the data has turned out to be very difficult. In the current version of The Dossier, we’re storing the entire original image in Core Data. This turned out to be very, very slow (and prone to crashing). So, we’ve changed how we store the images internally, but this has meant working hard to make sure that when you migrate from 1.0 to 1.1 you won’t lose your photos. This is where we’re currently focusing most of our energy.

We’re profoundly affected by the comments you send us, both the positive and the negative, so please do keep them coming.