Even though we want our apps to run as quickly as possible when set free in the wild, while developing it's often invaluable to slow things down sometimes.

Until the 3.0 SDK, you could toggle the iPhone Simulator in and out of slow-mo mode by pressing Shift rapidly three times in a row. In slow-mo mode, animations are slowed down so you can see exactly what's happening (the idea being that you can notice and fix artifacts that may be lost during full-speed playback). Apple seems to have removed this feature in the 3.0 SDK. Thankfully, however, Mike Schrag has released an open source tool aptly named slowmo that returns this functionality to the iPhone Simulator.

But that's not all!

While you may be jacking into your personal T5 connection, your users may be stuck on EDGE in some remote savage corner of the world (like central Brighton; thanks O2). Being able to throttle your bandwidth is invaluable for testing the behavior of your application with slower connections. While you can do this with commercial tools like Charles, Mike Schrag once again comes to the rescue with an open source tool called speedlimit that limits bandwidth speeds to meaningful defaults for iPhone developers.

As you may well be able to tell, I like Mike Schrag.

Thanks, Mike! :)

The Slow motion and bandwidth throttling for the iPhone simulator in 3.0 article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.