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What you forgot from your Computer Science Degree

Last night I did a short presentation about my WSLHTMLEntities open source project at the London iOS Developer Group meeting. You can see the slides here:

**[What you forgot from your Computer Science Degree](https://www.slideshare.net/stephendarlington/what-you-forgot-from-your-computer-science-degree "What you forgot from your Computer Science Degree")** from **[Stephen Darlington](http://www.slideshare.net/stephendarlington)**
Since last time I did a talk there people snickered because I built the slides using PowerPoint, this time I decided to use the latest Apple technology: Keynote in iCloud. Unfortunately this was a bit too new for the Mac Pro they use in the Apple Store, so we ended up downloading a copy in PowerPoint format and loading *that* into the local copy of Keynote. Nothing is ever simple.

One question I got at the end that I was unable to answer is how well it performs compared to other solutions.

CameraGPS debrief

As happy as I am with the way that my new app, CameraGPS, a GPS logger application for people who want to geotag their photographs, came out I can’t say that it’s exactly as I envisioned it at the start of the process.

The idea was something like this: many of the GPS logger apps in the App Store require you to either use iTunes file sharing (who connects their iPhone’s to iTunes any more?) or mail yourself the exported document or sign up to some third party fitness or trekking website. Mailing yourself stuff just didn’t feel very slick and I didn’t want to record my trails for fitness purposes.

NSFetchedResultsController and iCloud

This took me a while to figure out so I thought it was worth blogging about. The short version: I’m using Core Data with iCloud syncing and it works… mostly. When starting up for the first time — when there is already data in iCloud — none of the data appears in a table view, but restarting the app correctly displays it.

I know what you’re thinking: you’re not merging the updates into the right managed object context. Nope. Sorry. Thinking that was the problem is probably why it took me quite so long to track the real problem down!

That was 2013

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.