Hardware Woes

In order to test your apps on the iPhone, Apple makes you jump through a substantial number of hoops. I went through this process back in August when I initially started testing my apps on the iPhone hardware. However, the required provisioning profile to do this is only good for 3 months. Since the expiration of my previous profile, I've been dreading going through this process again but I felt it was time and so I spent a couple hours yesterday doing just that. I also took some time out to document my efforts via Wiki, so 3 months from now this process won't be nearly as tedious.

I must say, there's just something magical about running your apps on the hardware, especially the more touch intensive ones. I get very excited seeing my work running on the device. However, it became readily apparent that, graphically, there's a HUGE difference between the results displayed in the iPhone Simulator and on the iPhone hardware itself.

 

The simulator results are on the left. The actual hardware results are on the right. Looks like the anti-aliasing settings aren't actually supported on the hardware, which means I'm back to the drawing board again. Looks like I'll have to take yet another approach to rendering sub-pixel primitives.