Chapter 20: Performance Tuning Until It Flies
Performance is one of those things that separates acceptable apps from extraordinary apps. Of course, some performance bugs make an app unusable, but many more just make an app sluggish. Even apps that have good UI responsiveness may be using much more battery life than they should. Every developer needs to spend time periodically evaluating performance and making sure that nothing is being wasted. In this chapter you discover how to best prioritize, measure and improve the performance of your apps, including memory, CPU, drawing, and disk and network performance. Through it all, you learn how to best use one of the most powerful profiling tools available: Instruments. This chapter also provides tips on how to get the most from the powerful math frameworks available in iOS, including Accelerate, GLKit, and Core Image.
The Performance Mindset
Before going down the road of optimizing an application, you need to adopt the right mindset. This mindset can be summarized in a few rules.
Rule 1: The App Exists to Delight the User
I could really stop the rules right here. Everything else is a corollary. As a developer, never forget that your app exists to do more than just “provide value” to the user. It’s a competitive market out there. You want an app that the user really loves. Even minor annoyances detract from that goal. Scrolling that stutters, a slow launch, poor response to buttons, all these things accumulate in the user’s mind and ...
