Optimizing Moquu for iPhone 3G

As you may already experienced, Moquu had several problems on iPhone 3G devices. So one of the most important task during update developments was to “repair” the 3G experience.

The first problem was around storing the frames during a capture session, some problem with the memory allocations (this stackoverflow post is about the same problem).

After that the main issue was to optimize the memory consumption. The common moquu size is 600x450 for now (this is the display size on every web surface).

As we implemented the effect processing in OpenGL ES, the texture buffer sizes has to be “power of two” textures (1024x1024, 1024x512, etc.). To store the frames in OpenGL textures with the size above, the planes has to be 1024x512, which method is wasting some memory. So I began to play around with different Moquu sizes to see which quality can make it.

This one is the original iPad/iPhone 4 quality (450x600).

Now this is the halved size (225x300), it fits into a 512x512 texture buffer easily, but we had to trade too many quality here.

So the final solution in somewhere in the middleground (this moquu has a base size of 360x480). Still fits into the 512x512 plane, and quality is still reasonable.

As the Moquu size is determined runtime in the App, the logic needed some refinements, and default Moquuments had to be resized on the fly as well, but in the end the 3G experience became far more stable than it was.

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Another tiny issues during update development was to get the Application size below 20 MB (over this limit the App can be downloaded via WiFi only).

As it turned out (from a brief explaination at Steffen Itterheim’s post), there is a tricky way to estimate your “final” app size. The uncompressed .app file’s size (in the archived package), the zipped bundle (without the .app file), and an additional 100 Kb (some iTuens metadata). The .app file’s size may vary after submission down to Apple’s encryption, there is nothing to do with it.

Update your iPhone App

The “Invalid binary” iTunesConnect issue.

I struggled a lot with the error message above, so I think that others may find helpful the hints below. The problem was caused by the xCode 4 update.

- So if you submitted your 1.0 App release from an older xCode version, you should replace your Entitlements.plist file (delete it, then add trough New File/Code signing/Eltitlements).

- Don’t forget to fill the “Bundle versions string, short” (CFBundleShortVersionString) field in your info.plist along “Bundle version”.

- And should select “Release” for Build configuration in Schemes.

The final tests of the zoom feature.

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The blueprint of the one-step digital zoom implementation above.

It took some time to realize it, there were some problems with the iPhone live preview parallax. Ever wondered about iPhone’s screen aspect ratio? It is 3:4.5, or 1.5 can say, not 3:4 as you may expect (the iPad do have the 3:4, so the mess around here was not an issue during iPad development). If you want a full screen live preview to have in an iPhone application, then you must fake it somehow.

All in all, the digital zoom feature will be included among many others in the upcomin’ iPhone version.

New features implemented in the iPhone version so far:
-Digital zoom mentioned above (up to 6x),
-Playback speed adjustment (value stored with moquu),
-Pinchable grid to align markers more preciesly,
-iPhone 4 LED flash support (included torch mode),
-Effects now can be stacked with the new apply feature,
-and at last, you can now export moquu frames to your Photo Library

Finetuning issues in progress:
-Retina display support,
-UI rearrangement,
-General debugging, stability issues

Oh, and yet another feature to come:
-Public mode moquus (you can browse any public moquus at moqu.us)

We’re excited about the launch, it takes around two weeks to get there (supposing that the review process will be as quick as it was with the iPad version).

Why miss to be notified about the release?

vimeo HTML5 player vs. mobile safari

just before the launch we faced a problem while embedding Vimeo’s HTML5 player. we did not find any fast solution so used YouTube’s player instead to make it work on the iPad devices as well. 

later on, we did some research, came up with a workaround and sent the Vimeo support the following message: 

on the iPad, Vimeo embed does not work properly when used in a hidden layer. we’ve put together a little demo with basic CSS & JS to show this, and we also found a workaround which seems to solve the problem. 

http://www.moqu.us/x/vimeo.html

http://www.moqu.us/x/vimeo_fixed.html

the thing is that we need to load the player into an empty iframe, but
only after displaying the hidden layer. otherwise it won’t show up at
all, although taping the empty place of the player starts the video.
(fun fact: when putting the two demos into one HTML page, things got
messed up after switching between the original version and the fixed
version and the workaround stops working.)

the workaround solves the problem for us, though you might want to look
into this. I’m not 100% sure if this bug is related to Vimeo or the
iPad’s Safari, or maybe both, however the YouTube player, for example,
worked fine even without this workaround. but we prefer Vimeo on our
site, that’s why we insisted on using Vimeo anyway.

what do you think?

as we thought, they came back with the answer very soon. 

First off, thank you for being so thorough in your investigations!

Looks like this happens because of bugs on both sides. It is initializing the iframe, but the values for screen width and height are 0 (which is a bug in Mobile Safari, as this value is correct on the desktop version). That causes our player to initialize incorrectly.

That being said, the workaround you discovered is probably a best practice anyway. iframes are expensive, and it’s probably best to not initialize one unless it actually needs to be displayed. (Plus, you get the fade in!). We’ll make a note of this somewhere on the Player documentation page and probably in the FAQ as well.
Sincerely,
Vimeo

We didn’t lived for nothing! 
And now, something completely different. 

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iPhone version alpha! get notified about the release.

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leftover from yesterday: @ppk summing up his thought about the future of mobile web. he demonstrated it through an example of a developing world’s fisherman. thought-provoking concepts emerged, like accessing data in JSON over SMS, disappearing app stores, etc. nice!

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Sultan showed us the following project called olloclip. We’re really curious about the photo quality but anyway since we have already started the iPhone version for Moquu, we think we will get one as soon it’s available. 

here is a moquu from Mobilism 2011, taking place right now in Amsterdam. this is the audience, and on the stage you can see Brian LeRoux giving his great talk about PhoneGap and other fun things.

(Source: tumblr.com)

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This is Luke Wroblewski’s opening session ‘Mobile First’ at the Mobilism 2011 conference in Amsterdam. Szajmon is there, too [obviously, we needed some time without him]. So you can follow our tweets @moquu or just looking for the #mobilism hashtag.