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It’s a cliche to ask where the year has gone but it’s no less true this year than any other. Life has got in the way of blogging more than usual — moving house, a toddler, work — with only 23 posts this year and only one of those making my “most read” list.

Talking of which, these are the most read blogs this year:

1. iOS Developer Program: from individual to company
2. iPhone Dev: Saving State
3. Do Apple take 40% in the EU?
4. AQGridView to UICollectionView
5. Old Fashioned

Probably my favourite blog of the year was “What to do?” but I posted it a little too late to get the readership that I would have liked.

You can get a measure of my life this year when when you realise two things: my trip to Brittany was the first time I took much more than a week off work in two years; and we went in June and July this year. It’s taken me nearly six months to even start to write this. And not even I know how many times I had to revise that last sentence so that it’s accurate now!

The only thing that would have made it bigger would have been if the Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary show was on the same day. But I had to wait another day for that.

I was recently asked to recommend a tablet. I thought my reply might be generally useful, so below is a lightly edited version of what I wrote.

The machine I’d recommend depends. It depends mostly on how much you want to pay and what it might used for. The good news is that, by and large, you get what you pay for. (Corollary: don’t get any of the really cheap ones. Argos, for example, do a really cheap one. Avoid it.)

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 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.

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.

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

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.