Signal 1.1.6

June 19, 2009

Signal 1.1.6 is now available and resolves a compatibility issue with iPhone OS 3.0.

My apologies for not catching this one before launch day, it should have been found earlier and fixed in advance of the iPhone update. Signal was tested thoroughly against earlier development versions of the iPhone 3.0 software and I made the mistake of assuming that no compatibility-breaking changes would be made to the browser in the final release. Not so lucky.

The problem was caused by Signal’s use of a persistent HTTP connection back to the desktop application for fast interface updates. When putting the device to sleep with such a connection running Safari was suspending all JavaScript execution and Signal was not able to recover when the device was woken up again.

The 1.1.6 update resolves this issue and offers an added bonus - by taking advantage of network state notifications in Safari to fix the problem the iPhone interface now reconnects faster than ever. This fix has also served as a good reminder that even small OS changes can have a big impact.