One of the great things about WordPress is the community and the number of great plugins that can do amazing things with little effort.

But all that code, as any good developer will tell you, is a liability. How do you pick a plugin that not only meets your requirements now, but will both continue to do so? WordPress advances. APIs change. Plugins need love too.

Many moons ago I settled upon Flickr Gallery, a plugin that allows you to import Flickr images just by adding a short-code to posts. I thought there was value in keeping all my public photos in one place and, at that time, WordPress had poor media management facilities. The plugin seemed popular and well supported.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Sunrise” (the second time this subject has been used!). This is one of an increasing number of decent pictures taken on my iPhone rather than my SLR.

I missed last weeks challenge, so no need to vote for me!

“Preview” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.

This was the rather surprising error message that I’ve been getting when I try to open a PDF from the Finder since I upgraded to OS X Yosemite. It’s bad enough when you get an error message, but one suggesting that you delete a frequently used app is inconvenient to say the least!

When I think of “Stillness,” this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, I tend to think of a lake; an apparently unmoving body of water. (A lot of the other entries, to my eyes at least, don’t represent “Stillness.” Of course, mine may well miss the mark for them…)

Whatever its merits, this one was taken near Spooner Lake, which is very near Lake Tahoe.

I didn’t have an entry in the last challenge, so there’s no need to vote for me(!).

It’s important to have a Top 10 list. I know this as every other site has one. I don’t want to miss out. So here are the top ten most read posts here this year, with the year they were originally published in parenthesis:

1. QA Mindf**k
2. Do Apple take 40% in the EU? (2011)
3. Learning Swift
4. iOS Developer Program: from individual to company (2011)
5. How do I do “X” in Swift?
6. AQGridView to UICollectionView (2013)
7. iPhone Dev: Saving State (2010)
8. NSFetchedResultsController and iCloud
9. Why you need a crash reporter (2011)
10. Sophia Smith (2006)

If there’s a lesson here in increasing readership it’s simple: get retweeted by people with lots of followers.

Preamble: In pre-Swift and pre-ARC days of development on Apple’s platforms, it was necessary to “manually” retain and release objects as you used and discarded them. One common, but incorrect, pattern that kept reappearing was the idea that you could use the retainCount method to ascertain whether an object was still being used.

## When to use -retainCount? Never!

There’s pretty much never a good reason to use -retainCount. Here’s a short and mildly abusive explanation why.

This weeks PhotoFriday them is “Blue” and these are bluebells (I think), which should count, even though there aren’t technically blue.

I didn’t enter last weeks challenge, so I’m not going to insist that you vote for me. (In fact, the last time I forgot to even vote for myself!)

When I read Rand’s recent post on QA I was pretty much entirely in agreement. A good QA team is a real asset to any project, especially large ones. However, a bad QA team can be a huge liability and cause problems for everyone.

Bad testers don’t understand the product they’re working on. They follow test scripts they don’t understand, write short, inaccurate bug reports and make no attempt to appreciate the context of any error.

I had images in my mind of gleaming, bright, shiny metals but in the end, I thought this picture of a rusting cannon in Rhodes Town was a better photograph. And a better photograph is what PhotoFriday is all about!

Ever since upgrading from OS X 10.9 to Yosemite (10.10) I’ve been getting the above error message periodically. As far as I know I have no software that needs Java to run.

When I asked on Twitter, the most common suggestion was that it was the Adobe updater. But I don’t have PhotoShop or anything else likely installed.