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 weeks PhotoFriday challenge is “Frozen” and, I suppose, technically this snow might not actually be frozen. But snow is something you think of when you the word frozen comes up so I think it’s a valid interpretation of the theme! It was taken (in July!) near Lake Tahoe.

This post is a rant. I can offer no solutions, no help. Some sympathy perhaps but that’s not terribly useful.

The story: we’re moving house. So we need to deal with lawyers and mortgage companies. For sound reasons, they both need to prove that we’re not laundering money.

Frankly, until I had to do a number of anti-money laundering courses at work I would have had no idea how to launder money. I’d be stuck like the characters in Office Space looking up the definition in a dictionary. Or, more to the point, looking it up online.

I’m sure that this is exactly what the PhotoFriday people had in mind when they created the challenge, “Mobile Phone Photo.”

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Structures.” I’m entry 81.

There have been a few blogs recently about people finding their true vocation and discovering that it’s not developing software. This is not a “me too” post. I do still develop software for a living and I don’t intend becoming a writer or anything else any time soon. But like most people (I assume) my career has taken turns that I never would have imagined when I started out.

In fact when I was at school I took quite some time trying very hard not to be a software developer for a living. I took geography rather than the rather more obvious (if you know me) chemistry because I wanted to be a pilot. I was so determined to keep programming computers as a hobby that I almost took woodwork instead of computer studies when I was fourteen.

Yet another long gap between entries to PhotoFriday, but when I saw that the theme was “Structures” I immediately thought about, first, the Sagrada Família. But I didn’t have any pictures of the outside that I liked so second thought was the Oslo Opera House. I think this picture of the inside shows the structures better than any image of the outside.

Since I wrote about iTunes Match nearly eighteen months ago I thought it was worth revisiting and seeing how things have changed in that time.

Oddly, the short answer is “not very much.”

The problems that I identified last year are still very much present. Indeed there are some new examples. This is my favourite: when listening to “Man Machine” by Kraftwerk, iTunes Match seems to have decided that track four, which should be “The Model,” is really “Wouldn’t it be nice” by the Beach Boys. I don’t even own a copy of “Wouldn’t it be nice.”

I went to the north of Spain twice in the early nineties and visited Barcelona for a day each time. I only remember bits and pieces — walking down the Ramblas and how weird the Gaudi cathedral was — and can’t find any pictures from either trip, so it made sense to make it the first city break of 2013 and the first time we’ve done something like this since the birth of Junior¹

It’s been a while since I’ve entered the PhotoFriday challenge, but I liked this weeks theme — “Body of Water” — and thought I had a good image for it. This was taken a couple of years ago in Lake Tahoe, California.

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.