Quad-core ARM and 2010 predictions

More than 1GHz per core, and now ARM has two and four core options. This is tracking my predictions from a few years ago quite well. The google Nexus One has a 1GHz ARM CPU with 512MB RAM. I expect that the rumored Apple tablet or iSlate is more likely to be a big iPhone than a small MacBook, so it would make sense for it to use a multi-core ARM and a Gigabyte or so of memory. This gives vendors a nice way to stratify their product, for example, Apple could support multi-core and background/multiple running apps in iPhone OS 4, release a two-core tablet now, then upgrade the iPhone to have a two core high end option in the summer, and push the tablet to have a four core high end option. If Apple doesn't, then the Android vendors will.

My other prediction for 2010 (that I made in early 2008) was that as ARM goes up market, Intel will come down-market to lower power consumption. So later in 2010 we may see Android based tablets and phones that use Intel Atom variants going head to head with ARM, as well as running more generic laptop derived operating systems.

http://www.marvell.com/armada/quadruple_core_arm_instruction_set/release/1363/

My millicomputing update ignite talk wasn't showing any text on the slides on slideshare, so I just re-loaded it.

TI Sees multi-core phones in 2011

Like I said at Ignite #velocityconf yesterday - see ARM Cortex A9 - which is 4x the iPhone 3GS http://gigaom.com/2009/06/23/ti-sees-multicore-phones-coming-in-2011/

iPhone 3GS Graphics

The new hardware is a huge leap forward, the 3GS is in Xbox territory according to Noel - details: http://www.mobileorchard.com/a-huge-leap-forward-graphics-on-the-iphone-3gs/ and RoughlyDrafted http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/06/10/a-closer-look-at-iphone-3g-s-cortex-a8-arm-and-powervr-chips/
My order is in :-)

iPhone 3.0 hardware interface implications

An insightful posting by Daniel Eran on the iPhone 3.0 hardware interface controller, and its significance.

All I would like to add is that I really hope wideband/wireless USB is a feature of the next iPhone hardware. 480Mbits/s without any wires, and with wireless video output, so your pocket can drive your projector sunglasses, TV, meeting room projector or computer screen without even leaving your pocket.

Extended iPhone cookbook XML parser

Erica Sadun published a tree based XML parser for the iPhone that works quite well. I needed to extend it to parse attributes and I posted my code back to Erica's google code forum. This works quite efficiently, my app parses complex XML for 100 movies in less than a second as it picks out the instant format ones.

Netflix API - Getting OAuth to work on iPhone - part 2: Adding the OAuth Code

To start with I found some examples by Nick Dalton that helped me build a simple application that included a Web View, a screen that acts like a web browser but with my custom Objective-C code embedded in it. This is important, because the OAuth sign-in process uses a web page, but on the iPhone, if you spawn a copy of Safari to visit a web page, your application quits first.

Next the Source Code Manager in Xcode was configured to load the OAuthconsumer Objective-C framework via subversion. This was easy and obvious, enter the URL http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/obj-c/ and checkout the code.

When trying to import the framework I discovered that Apple does not allow user specified binary frameworks to be added to iPhone applications. To work around this the source code was copied from the Xcode project for the framework, to the Xcode project for my Instant Test application. I renamed the  framework Classes folder as OAuth and copied to my project via drag and drop, choosing to copy the underlying files. The Cocoa Categories, Protocols and Other Sources>Crypto folder were also copied. The Tests folder did not compile for iPhone so don't bother to copy it over.

The standard system Security.Framework doesn't need to be added to the Frameworks folder. I initially thought it did, but its probably only needed for the KeyChain code.

The iPhone doesn't support the KeyChain functionality, so if you try to build for iPhone it will fail. It does however build for the iPhone Simulator, which is confusing. Open up the OAuth source code, and delete the last two files OAToken_KeychainExtensions.h and OAToken_KeychainExtensions.m.

Since the code is no longer a framework, the header file references need to be changed from #include to #include "file" for all the includes in OAuthConsumer.h apart from the first Foundation one.

At this point, before you try and call anything, try a build, it should compile with no errors. If it doesn't, look for missing files.

At this point, you should have all you need to connect to an OAuth service

Netflix API Getting OAuth to work on iPhone - Instant Queue Add part 1: why?

Why develop an iPhone app? Its "the future", a useful skill, and I can carry whatever I develop in my pocket and make it do whatever I want.

I work at Netflix, and I have instant watching on my TV, I built an application "Instant Queue Add" that lets me add a title to my instant queue using my iPhone in a couple of touches. It takes the Top20 and New Choices RSS feeds to find content, and it spawns a copy of Safari to add to instant queue for each pick. The first time it starts, you have to login, then it remembers the Netflix cookie. However I really want to add more features and avoid spawning a copy of Safari with a screen scraped URL.

The Netflix API uses a new standard called OAuth for Open Authentication. There are lots of features, but its complex, and there is no standard off the shelf library for OAuth on the iPhone. However it is a useful building block for more advanced applications.

In this series of posts, I will document the steps I'm making to get OAuth to work on the iPhone using Objective-C and Xcode. My starting point is this code base and tutorial by Jon R. Crosby, which is based on desktop MacOS X, and doesn't directly support the iPhone.

Samsung S3C6410 mobile processor

Samsung's latest device runs at 667MHz and includes video capture acceleration that claims to use much less power to compress or decompress video streams.

The device is sampling in Q2 and shipping in volume later in 2008, and there is a lot of speculation going around that this may be the CPU that Apple uses in its next generation 3G capable iPhone.