It turns out, all of the WebViews you create on the iPhone are managed by a central object called WebCore. It seems to be some sort of singleton that takes care of loading content and managing resource loading threads - but it can lead to some interesting problems if you try to rapidly create, display, and release a series of WebViews. The upcoming version of NetSketch uses WebViews to ... More...

Apple has finally removed the NDA from non-beta iPhone software, so the community can finally come out of hiding. I can't wait to actually - you know - talk to people! I've got a few things in the pipes for NetSketch, and hopefully I can post some tutorials and info here. Then this blog might actually be useful... - Ben More...

l0k1 posted a picture of this t-shirt in the NetSketch forums yesterday - made from a NetSketch drawing by another artist. Pretty cool! It's nice to see stuff like this get put to use - I wasn't sure anybody was actually using the "Download to Illustrator" option on the site. Seeing stuff like this really makes it worth going the extra mile for features like that. The shirt ... More...

I broke a lot of stuff this weekend working on NetSketch. I'm not all that familiar with threading, and I wanted to add some progress indicators for long redraws. I ended up doing it a couple times, but it finally works. (You can cancel it half way through the redraw process and everything). For the longest time it was leaking memory, but it turns out I just forgot ... More...

I did a Google search for NetSketch a couple minutes ago (c'mon - I have to do it every day, right?) and I found this great review: http://www.appleiphoneapps.com/2008/07/review-netsketch/. 4.75 stars out of 5! I'm psyched :-). It's a bummer that the App Store pushes traffic off the web into iTunes, because I think people don't read a whole lot online about the apps they buy. Could be wrong ... More...

I've been having a lot of trouble with Flash recently. This weekend, I discovered a line size limitation that doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. Unfortunately, my.netsketchapp.com was already live and people's drawings were being rendered incorrectly. The goal was to create an online Flash viewer that replicated the behavior of NetSketch on the iPod. The iPod app supports infinite pan and zoom, and often it's not possible ... More...

So it's week 3 for NetSketch! I got a few awesome reviews on iTunes yesterday that basically made my day: "Quite a good app. Has not crashed yet, which is better than every single other app I have. Well worth it, especially considering how reachable the developer is and how frequently it is getting updated with new features."- Crabpot8 "Their website is a fantastic addition to an already great app. ... More...

I was working on NetSketch last night and ran into an interesting problem. To optimize the display of thumbnail images, I decided to cache them at their display size and not at full size (320x380). It worked out really well and led to a huge performance boost at launch. The allocation of memory is so slow on the iPhone that leaving around a bunch of large images just ... More...

Finally! I got an email from Apple today confirming that NetSketch will be available on the App Store this Friday. Let's hope everything goes well this weekend :-). Unfortunately, CafePress had to step in and rain on my parade. I ordered a few NetSketch t-shirts after I made the 512x512 version of the logo. I haven't used CafePress in a few years and I decided to give their black ... More...

I've been hard at work on NetSketch these past few weeks and the site is finally up over at http://www.netsketchapp.com/. I'm putting some finishing touches on the app and it should be ready for the App store launch on the 11th! - Ben More...