What a difference two years makes. Just a little over twenty-four months ago we were awaiting the arrival of our son. To commemorate the occasion we went to the park and took a few pictures. The bump, after all, would be short lived.

Since then we’ve spent a lot of time in the playground where these pictures were taken.

Last week we did the same thing, now that we’re expecting our daughter in a few weeks. Other than the obvious difference — we had a two year old in tow this time — we had a very different time of year and a change of location — Cannizaro House.

While a landscape is more typically about land, I didn’t really visit anywhere very far inland in the last year, hence this image of a walk between Perros-Guirec and Ploumanac’h in France as my entry in this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Landscape 2014.” In any case, the landscape here is influenced by the nearby sea so I don’t think I’m too far from the mark!

The flood of new so-called smart watches continues. Some people seem to love theirs, others remain to be convinced.

Count me in with the unconvinced, though only because the current ones seem to be poorly conceived.

Marco Arment says:

Portability is critical to modern device usefulness, and there are only two classes that matter anymore: always with you, and not… Smartphones dominate always with you.

I think this gets to the heart of why the current range of devices — both those for sale and also those just announced at CES — just are not very compelling.

I’m afraid that I didn’t have any pictures of vampires for this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Twilight.” I had to make do with this image, taken on my iPhone from my back garden. (In fact I do have a couple of other pictures that might match the theme better, but I’ve already used them for PhotoFriday before. I decided to use a new picture instead.)

Last night I did a short presentation about my WSLHTMLEntities open source project at the London iOS Developer Group meeting. You can see the slides here:

One question I got at the end that I was unable to answer is how well it performs compared to other solutions.

As happy as I am with the way that my new app, CameraGPS, a GPS logger application for people who want to geotag their photographs, came out I can’t say that it’s exactly as I envisioned it at the start of the process.

The idea was something like this: many of the GPS logger apps in the App Store require you to either use iTunes file sharing (who connects their iPhone’s to iTunes any more?) or mail yourself the exported document or sign up to some third party fitness or trekking website. Mailing yourself stuff just didn’t feel very slick and I didn’t want to record my trails for fitness purposes.

As the risk of going for the cliché for this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Female,” I went for the wedding picture, the big white dress and the contrast with the groom.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Beasts.” I’m entry number 40.

At the risk of sounding like a Top Gear presenter, I thought this lineup of super-cars might work as my entry for this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Beasts.”

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Dramatic.” I’m entry number 46.

I like the way that the sun spotlights this tiny town in Corsica. You could almost say that it’s “Dramatic,” which is why it’s my entry for this weeks PhotoFriday challenge of the same name.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Climate.” I’m entry number 96.

This took me a while to figure out so I thought it was worth blogging about. The short version: I’m using Core Data with iCloud syncing and it works… mostly. When starting up for the first time — when there is already data in iCloud — none of the data appears in a table view, but restarting the app correctly displays it.

I know what you’re thinking: you’re not merging the updates into the right managed object context. Nope. Sorry. Thinking that was the problem is probably why it took me quite so long to track the real problem down!