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AQGridView to UICollectionView

I recently moved a code base from using AQGridView — a third party library — to UICollectionView. I have nothing against third party components but I’m a big fan of minimising dependencies and reducing the amount of code that need to be understood. In this case I managed to remove about 5000 lines of code from the project. Switching to the UIKit version made sense on both counts.

Both components do more or less the same thing and their APIs fortunately look pretty similar. (UICollectionView can be coerced into doing a lot more but we just need it for a simple grid.) Most of the changes are just renaming methods; I was surprised how little new code needed to be written.

Temperature

[![](https://i0.wp.com/farm9.staticflickr.com/8134/8705753992_ca535b52c4.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/8705753992/ "photo sharing")[Ice cream](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/8705753992/), originally uploaded by [stephendarlington](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/).
This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “[Temperature](http://www.photofriday.com/challenge.php?id=1286).” I thought this image from my recent trip to Barcelona fit the bill.

Distance

[![](https://i0.wp.com/farm9.staticflickr.com/8103/8604911809_e82e51b143.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/8604911809/ "photo sharing")[Distance](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/8604911809/), originally uploaded by [stephendarlington](http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/).
This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “[Distance](http://www.photofriday.com/challenge.php?id=1276).” They said that Junior was independent at the nursery. They weren’t joking. He was half way across the park before we could catch him…

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

This week I did a presentation at the London iPhone Developer Group meeting. Given my experience with using lots of APIs, I thought it might be a good, if dry, topic. I tried to spice it up by complaining about lots of them and trying to condense that negativity into some useful lessons to take away.

Most of the other discussions of this subject that I’ve seen focus on designing libraries but I thought the same lessons could be applied to all kinds of interfaces, from Objective C libraries to REST API’s for connecting to web services. (I don’t mean to suggest that the focus of the two articles I link to is wrong. They’re both very much worth reading.)

No Massive Google Play Privacy Issue

If you follow any iOS technology blogs you might have seen this recent scandal:

If you bought the app on Google Play (even if you cancelled the order) I have your email address, your suburb, and in many instances your full name.

This, they say, is bad because this is not what happens with Apple’s App Store.

However, I don’t think Google are doing anything weird here, and I say this as someone who is not a fan of Android. The commercial relationship between developers and Apple is different from the relationship between Google and developers1.