In a word: yes.

Features aside, which those of us stuck with older iPhones won’t be able to use (No compass? What will I do when I’m lost hiking on the Great Wall?), the new operating system has made some serious performance gains in the web browsing arena. The graphic going around the intarwebs right now:

Even on the same old iPhone 3G, browsing performance is massively improved. Hopefully there are other performance improvements in the OS, such as app launch times or general lagginess you tend to see.

I absolutely love how these results are still all an order of magnitude slower than a reasonably low-end mac laptop. 15-45s vs … 1.3s. Excellent.

It was with no small amount of dismay that I recently noticed JustLooking was leaking tonnes of memory on my Leopard machine here at home. When developing the program, I put enormous amounts of time an energy into ensuring the program behaved well and didn’t leak. And yet, browsing through 75 photos from a trip to Hong Kong ground my 2GB system into the dirt in a hurry.

Upon further investigation, this appears to be a bug in Leopard—my Tiger machine has absolutely no leaking at all. The bug occurs specifically when using CoreImage and NSImage interchangeably. In effect, CoreImage works entirely on video card RAM, and NSImage works entirely in system RAM. The resizing method I use causes the system to copy some of that memory from the VRAM to the system RAM, and that code leaks a tonne at a time.

The good news is that you can fix this by just having CoreImage do the rotation. The bad news is that this is 100% incompatible with the fade effect transitions I use. So, right now, I have the choice between transitions or memory leaks. Or just using Tiger (for which there are a number of other great arguments).

One of things I had been looking at for JustLooking 3.2 was reworking exactly how I use CoreImage, filters, and the system’s loading code. It looks as though this work has just taken on added urgency.