Swift is a new programming language designed by Apple for development on OS X and iOS. I thought that I should try to learn it a little so I decided to convert a non-trivial collection of classes from one of my apps (www.cut) into Swift. I always find it better to work on a real project rather than just to play around with things aimlessly. Also, by re-working an old project, I knew that all the problems I would find would be language related rather than anything to do with the architecture.

I’ve been pretty quiet here for a couple of of weeks and that’s because… well, a picture speaks a thousand words.

Junior took his sweet time popping out — we were in the hospital over a day before he made his grand appearance — but for Juniorette we weren’t sure we’d make it there in time! In the end we checked into the delivery suite just after ten in the evening and the birth was recorded just before eleven.

Last year we went to Barcelona and visited the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s amazing, unfinished cathedral. The organ was beautiful but it was difficult to get a picture of, until I realised the Reflection — this weeks PhotoFriday theme — of the stained glass window worked pretty well. (Don’t tell anyone, but my wife zoomed in closer and got a better image that I did.)

My first project out of university was a disaster.

The client was unhappy, technically it was a mess, no one knew what it was supposed to do despite the volume of requirements and functional specification documents and the quality of what was there was terrible. People were working hard but it wasn’t really going anywhere.

All of this, I should note, was happening before I joined. I didn’t realise how bad it really was at the time. The Real World was so different and new from university that I was blinded the problems and just did what I thought was best.

I’ve not had an entry for the last few weeks of PhotoFriday, but an image jumped straight to mind when I thought of this weeks challenge, “My Obsession.” This was inspired by a day working from home on a cold, wintry day followed by some relaxation afterwards and my realisation that they looked pretty much the same from the outside…

I’m not entirely sure what I was thinking. In about 2005 I bought an iSight, Apple’s relatively short-lived external webcam. It was a beautiful device. Sleek, easy to use and functional.

At least, I think it was functional.

For a device that cost me well over £100 I didn’t really think it through. No one else I knew at the time had a Mac with iChat. Or a webcam.

Before I finally gave in and sold it on eBay I did use it a few times with my then girlfriend (now wife). And it was really nice; like the future. Having grown up with old, slow computers the idea of playing video on them is still slightly magical to me. To have a computer simultaneously record, compress, transmit, receive, decode and display high resolution videos still strikes me as pretty amazing.

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.

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.)