Optimizing Tables in iPhone Apps

An 80-minute on-demand video course from the O’Reilly iPhone development series, focused on performance optimization for UITableView — the workhorse list control of every early iPhone app. Covers cell reuse, asynchronous image loading, lazy data fetching, scroll performance profiling with Instruments, and the patterns that prevent dropped frames in long lists.

Recorded in late 2010, when the iPhone 4 was the current device and developers were still calibrating what was possible inside a 512MB-RAM mobile app. Many of the optimization patterns covered are now built into UIKit defaults, but the underlying mental model — minimize work per row, recycle aggressively, push expensive operations off the main thread — remains the foundation of any modern iOS list implementation.

Part of a four-course iPhone development series released October–November 2010 alongside Supporting Multitasking, Consuming Web Services, and Injecting iAds.