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.)

This weeks theme is “Autumn 2013” and while I was out on a quick walk this afternoon I spotted this pile of leaves. Nothing says “autumn” like leaves falling from trees and their colours.

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.