Friday, September 4, 2009

Crashes on 3G and iTouch reproduced and fixed

I've had a few bad reviews in various countries due to "crashing" of the app. It turns out that the application is running out of memory in certain situations. A recent improvement in Live Cams was to fetch 640x480 images for cameras instead of 320x240. This makes the cameras a little slower but much clearer to view. Unfortunately the older Apple devices have half of the system memory that the new 3GS devices do, and when the 6-thumbnail view happens to hit a combination of 6 full-res cameras at a time it will hold most of the system ram and then crash shortly after.

I have altered the code to release the 6 images and replace them with color bars before proceeding to the next screen. The color bars are a single low-res cached image that doesn't require much memory. This seems to give the devices just enough room to "squeak by".

The patch for this and the other fixes mentioned in this blog has been submitted to Apple. Thanks for those who helped identify this situation on their devices!

Barry