October 9, 2013
We are very happy to announce the release of Photosmith for iPad version 3.0.2. This is a maintenance release only, and fixes the crashing many users experienced after upgrading to iOS 7, especially when swiping through photos in Loupe and Fulllscreen Views.
Photosmith uses caching to help increase performance. We cache a number of things, but in particular, we keep photos in memory so scrolling and movement between large images is more responsive. For example, if you just viewed a photo, then swiped to look at another photo, there shouldn’t be any reason to wait for the previous photo to load again if you swipe back to it – simply pull it out of the already-rendered cache if needed. It only makes sense, right?
To do this, we made use of iOS’s built-in NSCache for some of our photo caching needs. NSCache is handy because iOS manages what is kept in cache automatically, discarding anything that it doesn’t have room for anymore. This is especially handy when writing code that isn’t dependent upon a particular piece of hardware – available RAM varies from around 35MB on an iPad 1 to several hundred megabytes on the iPad 4; we can simply cache as many photos as necessary, and if iOS decides there isn’t enough memory, it will handily remove it from the cache for us.
Except… that’s not what happens in iOS 7. For reasons we can’t quite explain, this appears to no longer be the behavior. There were no announcements in the iOS 7 pre-release notes (or even in the released SDK documentation) and we didn’t run into the issue while testing beta versions of iOS 7. And this is why things will work for a while and then crash unexpectedly – NSCache is getting filled up, and iOS 7 is no longer removing photos as it did in the past when cache memory got full.
In Photosmith for iPad version 3.0.2, we still use NSCache, but added some code so that for users running iOS 7, the total number of entries was limited, thereby having a somewhat similar (though not quite as optimal) effect.
Users with iOS 6 (or earlier) will see no difference, as our method of handling this caching issue only applies to iOS 7. Also, there are no updates to our Lightroom plugin at this time.
We are very interested in hearing your thoughts on Photosmith performance in iOS 7 – please drop us a note over on our User Forums at http://forums.photosmithapp.com.
Photosmith 3.0.2 will be become available today as a free update in the App Store for your country – standard delays may apply as the update propagates through Apple’s servers worldwide.
Posted in: Current Progress, Development, Musings, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
Thanks guys!
Much improved stability under IOS 7! Version 3.0.1 kept crashing under IOS 7 after very few minutes of normal use – with 3.0.2 I did not manage to crash it so far even when trying to do so. So great progress for IOS 7 users (at least for me). If you get the other known issues (in particluar concering sync) fixed with 3.1, this is a really excellent app (and for me it will be the one and only reason that my next tablet will be an Ipad again and not an Android tablet)
Claudio
Any update or workaround on the XMP import into Lightroom issue? Struggling a bit here.
Yes, this has been addressed and the fix will be part of Lightroom 3.1, which is on target for release within a week. Note that Lightroom only reads sidecar XMP metadata with camera raw files – sidecar XMP’s are ignored for JPG and TIFF files.