I’ve been using iOS 7 for a while now — for a couple of months on my iPad and about half that on my iPhone — so thought it was worth a quick summary of my experience. I’m certainly not going into the depth that Arstechnica have; I’ll do it all in a few bullet points.

The good

• Control Center. Switch on and off BlueTooth and WiFi without having to go into Settings. I’ve been wanting this since iPhone OS 1 so this is more than welcome!
• The look. It is controversial and it does take a bit of getting used to but overall I like it and it works well
• I didn’t find the new look to be as jarring as I thought it would be based on what I saw in the screenshots
• The “Today” view in Notification Center. All your notifications and stuff that’s happening shortly in one place. Felt like nice PowerPoint (Keynote, I suppose) material when I first saw it but I actually find it quite useful
• The “back swipe” gesture in navigation views that goes back to the previous screen. I noticed how useful it was when I started trying it in apps that don’t support it. Tweetbot I’m looking at you!

The bad

This is a long way of saying Thank You to F for the Olloclip, the ideal gadget for someone who loves both their iPhone and photography. Literally only available a couple of weeks before Christmas (for iPhone 5 at least), it still arrived before the 25th.

For those that don’t know, the Olloclip is an attachment for the iPhone’s camera. It looks like this:

It sits over the iPhone’s camera. It has three lenses on two sides. On one side there’s the fish-eye adapter, on the other is a wide-angle. If you unscrew the the wide-angle it becomes a macro adapter.

Like all the best upgrades, iOS 6 is almost entirely invisible. It works just like iOS 5 — which is to say, pretty well most of the time — but with some convenient new additions. Also, unlike version five, it’s been relatively stable throughout the beta process.

What’s new and what will you like? I’ve grown so accustomed to most of them that I had to look up the “What’s new” page on Apple’s website. Really, that’s a good thing. Invisibility is the fate of a feature that’s quickly integrated with how you use a device. (The thing that makes it tricky is that it’s also the fate of a completely useless feature that you never use.)

It started with this image. Or rather the glitch that you can see in the middle of the screen.

It’s one of the screens in a new app that I’ve been developing. There’s lots of hard stuff in there but this is the first problem that has really stumped me. What it appeared to be was this: a text view (UITextView) on a table (UITableView) showed a nasty glitch when you tried to place the curser in the text box.

• Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support – I think this is one of Androids biggest failings.
• John McCarthy — Father of AI and Lisp — Dies at 84 – Really not a good month for IT or Computer Science.
• The original iPod, 10 years later: a re-review – The original iPod is ten years old and, actually, stands up pretty well.

• Lytro — light field sensor photography – This “light field sensor” sounds amazing but I am a little skeptical. I’ll believe its potential more when I hear about it being used by “real” people rather than in controlled situations.
• QuickLook Plugin For Mobile Provisioning Files – If you understand the title and develop iOS apps you need this plugin!
• C and Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie reported dead – It’s a sad week for the IT industry.

I’m very pleased to announce the new version of www.cut, a major release including an almost complete rewrite of all the UI code and a bunch of stuff under the hood. You don’t care about that, but it does bring you iPad support, the ability to lengthen already shortened URLs and the ability to sync your settings between devices using iCloud.

The iCloud bit, as with lots of stuff under the hood, means that it will only work on devices that run iOS5.

If you look at the sales reports from iTunes Connect, it seems that Apple are taking nearly 40% of the sale price for downloads made in Europe. Of course they claim to take 30% and, indeed, that’s exactly what you see in the US store.

So what’s going on?

The good news is that Apple are not screwing you over. The numbers do add up. The difference is that prices in the US App Store do not include sales tax (VAT) but those in Europe do. This means that before Apple take their 30% cut, they first take off the tax that needs to be paid. If that’s not clear, let’s work through an example.

• The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer – “My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one.”
• The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s choice is beyond belief – “But what these cases illustrate is that in certain areas compromise is not possible because the rights of different minorities are mutually exclusive. When one group refuses to fulfil its job description because it disapproves of another group, there is no middle ground, no give and take.”

• Enough Is Enough – “The whole [Lodsys] thing is nuts. I can’t understand why our goverment allows this shit to go on. "
• Android App Removals Cast Doubt on Google’s ‘Openness’ – “It’s certainly more open than Apple’s platform. But really, that’s like being a taller midget.”