Apple releases iOS 5 beta 3 to developers [updated with full change log] | Hacker News Reader

Apple releases iOS 5 beta 3 to developers [updated with full change log]

bgr.com

17 pointssahillavingia13 comments

The only thing I really want in a future iOS release is for Apple to remove the arbitrary restrictions they've put in place for mobile Safari.

I want to be able to play 2 audio clips at once. I want to be able to auto-load audio clips on page load. I want to be able to play them without forcing the user to touch the screen. I want to be able to load more than 6.5mb of imagery without resorting to silly workarounds. I want to be able to run complex animations without Safari simply crashing and depositing my users on the desktop.

In short, I want to be able to write applications that target HTML5. At the moment, you can do so, but you spend maybe 80% of your time jumping through hoops, working around things, and tracking down mysterious browser crashes and memory limitations.

The iPad has a ton of physical memory and a very fast processor. It would be nice to be able to use those things without having to write native apps.

> I want to be able to play 2 audio clips at once. I want to be able to auto-load audio clips on page load. I want to be able to play them without forcing the user to touch the screen

I'm glad Apple doesn't allow these then :). I'm glad they have those restrictions in place, keeps me from awkward sound-producing moments and spares my bandwidth if I'm on 3G.

It also spares you being able to play games written in HTML5.

Just games with sound. 99% of the time I play games on a mobile device I use my own music, or turn the volume off. And using your own music is an increasingly common feature on iOS games. So the lack of sound support should not be stopping anyone from making games.

No, sound is just one of the issues I enumerated above (which is just a subset of a much larger list of things that you can't do on mobile Safari that you can in desktop Safari).

The big issues holding back game development are the rendering ones. A simple 2D scroller in HTML5 will be dog slow on an iPad, and will likely crash it withing a minute if it does anything interesting. The equivilent game ported to native code will run fast, and won't use even a fraction of system resources.

Too bad their servers are slow as can be.

They're not too bad, the iTunes and iOS images took no more than two minutes, and the Xcode image is about 10 minutes for me. Not saturating my connection, but not terrible.

I got more than 1MB/s (not Mbps) for downloads.

If you're using a DNS service, try removing that from your TCP/IP settings. Dramatic improvement for me.

Downvotes... why? Seriously, dropping Google DNS and reverting to my ISP's defaults improved my ADC downloads by 1 mbit.

...for you.

That's how "if" works, yes.

Here are some links:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2778603?start=15&ts...

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20026241-263.html

It's something to do with Apple's CDN, as I remember it.

CDNs often balance by returning an IP address for a server near you when you do a DNS lookp for the CDN. Servers near you generally download faster because of less time wasted waiting on round trip time latency.

Problem is, the CDN returns a server near the IP address of the machine doing the DNS lookup, and that's generally your DNS server, not your own box. If you use your local ISP DNS server, that's close enough you do get a nearby server. But if you use a third party DNS server, your DNS lookup might happen from a DNS server in Ashburn VA while you're actually in Chicago. The CDN would balance you to VA instead of Chicago.

That's why using a local DNS provider gives faster downloads when the download comes from a multi-POP CDN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com