Inside Trader Blog

news, developments, and information

JavaScript Performance on iPhone OS 3.0

This will be huge for Inside Trader.

via Daring Fireball by John Gruber on 3/26/09

A few weeks before the iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0 shipped last summer, the WebKit team announced their new hot-rodded JavaScript engine — then called SquirrelFish, now renamed Nitro. WebKit performance was dramatically improved in iPhone OS 2.0, both for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution, but the new SquirrelFish/Nitro JavaScript engine was far too new to be included yet. I.e. the significant JavaScript improvements were yet to come. I published a piece on this that included a simple recursion depth test to indicate whether a JavaScript interpreter might be Nitro.

Wayne Pan has braved the NDA waters and published JavaScript benchmarks for iPhone OS 3.0, and they are impressive — with results ranging between 3× and 10× faster than iPhone OS 2.2. And I’ll confirm that MobileSafari on iPhone OS 3.0 passes my simple “could be Nitro” recursion depth test.

In short, JavaScript performance on iPhone OS 3 is way faster.

Where is version 2?

Where is version 2? It's a fair question. Here's the story.

1.1 was released in November. I had hoped to release 1.2 by Christmas, but I was out of town for most of December with family, and little progress was made.

I didn't get rolling again until mid January, and by that time I had expanded the scope of what I wanted to do with the next release. Online high scores had become the most important feature in my mind, and I set off to getting that working. Since it involved both client and server components, the implementation was a bit tedious.

By mid February I had a working version complete with new Tipsters, new Lawyers, Loans, and Online scores. But there was an interface issue that I just wasn't satisfied with. I ended up making a major modification to the interface, which set me back about 2 weeks.

So where are we now? 2.0 is in a private beta, and it is actually working. There are still some bugs to be ironed out, but the core is all there. Lawyers are out; the interface proved too tedious to manage the way it was, and I don't think the gameplay change was positive. This was based on my own impressions as well as feedback from beta testers. Loans and Tipsters are in, as is new pricing for SEC options. See the previous post for some screenshots. 

Right now the goal is to have the game to Apple within the next 2 weeks. That means it should hit the appstore within 4, pending approval, which is always a big unknown. 

I want to apologize to the loyal fans who have been waiting 3.5 months for this release. I do promise to do more blogging about the process of development, to try to be more open about how things are progressing. I really think this next release is worth the wait. The interface changes that have caused the delay were absolutely necessary; no one will regret that change. Online high scores are going to be massively fun, and once we can open up the gameplay on desktop versions the world-wide competition should be fantastic.

For the future there will be more stocks and some special events, all with online high scores.

Thanks to those who have sent kind words, offered to be beta testers, and just played the game. I couldn't keep this up without you.

Now back to coding...