IPhone Web App Performance Tip - Use Inline Images

http://waynepan.com/2008/08/26/iphone-web-app-performance-tip-use-inline-images/

by waynep • 18 years ago

9 10 18 years ago

whalesalad• 18 years ago

Can we please, please start referring to the iPhone as it's actually called... _i_Phone, not Iphone or IPhone or I-Phone. Lowercase i, uppercase Phone.

iPhone.

I'm starting to think that News.YC does this automagically... someone help a brother out here.

obeattie• 18 years ago

waynep• 18 years ago

YC News does it automatically. I cut and paste the title from my blog (where I have it and will always spell it iPhone).

DougBTX• 18 years ago

Apparently we need some magic from here: http://daringfireball.net/2008/05/title_case

Specifically: The script assumes that words with capitalized letters other than the first character are already correctly capitalized. This means it will leave a word like “iTunes” alone, rather than mangling it into “ITunes” or, worse, “Itunes”.

tlrobinson3• 18 years ago

Yes, the first letter of titles is always automatically capitalized by news.yc.

geuis• 18 years ago

First point: MUCH thanks to the author for this tip. The working examples definitely showed the difference on my iPhone on edge.

Second point: who in the hell cares how the word "iPhone" is capitalized? Really, is the most pertinent comment you can contribute about being a f*cking grammar Nazi?

On a fun note, the iPhone makes sure you cap the "P" automatically. It doesn't care about the caps on microsoft.

tlrobinson3• 18 years ago

One thing to remember is Base64 encoding is less efficient than the raw binary. Also, all modern web servers and browsers support reusing TCP connections for multiple HTTP requests (though there is still the extra latency for each actual request, just not the TCP connection sequence, etc)

I'd be interested to see actual benchmarks, rather than this "trust me, it works" thing.

thamer• 18 years ago

Also, doesn't Safari on iPhone cache images? For those with a bandwidth cap, downloading all the images on every page could be quite heavy.

Not sure if this is a great idea if navigation involves multiple image-rich pages. Any idea?

pmjordan• 18 years ago

The Base64 issue should be relatively minor as long as you're gzip-encoding everything your server sends. (the iPhone supports that, right?) Each base64 byte only has 6 bits of entropy so it'll compress well. I'd be more worried about maintaining efficient caching with this technique.

tlrobinson3• 18 years ago

Good point. I did a quick test with a 190K PNG. Base64 encoded then gzipped it was almost exactly the same size as the original gzipped.

IPhone Web App Performance Tip - Use Inline Images

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