This is a retrospective post featuring photos from 2016.

This is a retrospective post featuring photos from 2015.

As a keen photographer, I take lots of photos. It's not uncommon for me to shoot upwards of 500-600 photos in a weeks' holiday, and sometimes I like to feel that I've come home with some pretty good shots. I've tried my hand at submitting shots to the bigger stock libraries, but the process always seemed very complex, and the returns were never in your favour and also preferred top quality silly expensive hardware produced images. Canon 5D Quality, thousands of pixels by thousands of pixels, and shot with expensive prime lenses. Not that these requirements are unrealistic, they do charge top rate for their images, and they're all very high quality, but this meant my "hobbyist" shots were out of the running.

Then along came a UK startup Picfair.

The Swift programming language has a neat feature that guarantees the presence of optional values in conditionals.

It's been a year since we lived our Great Bulgarian adventure, 6 months spent living and working in the capital Sofia.

We arrived in mid february to a cold city, and a very unfriendly looking front door to our apartment building, our minds starting to wonder if this was such good idea after all. However, within a couple of hours, and short walk into the city centre for our first meal, our worries had been removed. We would get used to the broken paving tiles and the graffiti. Now we're back in the UK, we miss it, the friendly nature of the local Bulgarians, the great food and the months of blue skies.

Most of time in Bulgaria was spent surrounded by the historical buildings in the centre of the Sofia.

They say the best camera, is the camera you have with you, and for most of us, that will also be your phone. With an 8 megapixel sensor, the iPhone5 is already a pretty capable camera, then consider that modern smartphones are pretty powerful computers that allow you to do most

A recent snowboarding trip to Austria was a great opportunity to test out if just an iPhone was enough to capture some great images.

All of these photos were taken with an iPhone5 and processed on the phone with camera+. View the whole set on flickr

Like most software engineers, I've always got a few part-time side projects that work on, most start from what at the time seed like great ideas, most are started with great enthusiasm, most never see the light of day.

This is the story of side project that shipped.

It all started much the same as usual, have and idea, spend an evening playing around with it. Only this time I got a lot further than usual. I've been using X-Code, Objective-C and the iPhone frameworks with the iPhone simulator for other projects, so the tools are famililiar to me. My fulltime job at Kyan is mainly spent programming in Ruby, so the jump to Objective-C is quite straight forward.

My plan was to build a faux-3D endless runner game. I'd recently stumbled across a reference to how to use the UIKit framework to transform simple UIViews into 3D space. From there, I'd figure I could use some very simple animation and some collision detection, and I'd have the basis for the game. It couldn't really be that easy could it?

3 hours later

The Apple iOS frameworks are excellent. There really is no other way to say it. Within a very short space in time, I had the basic 3D environment built, animating 'obstacles', a space ship with movement controls and collision detection. This is half the game built, and although I some major refactoring as I've learnt more, these core parts of the game have remained largly untouched.

The game engine that astro runner uses is 100% Apple UIKit, there are no 3rd party frameworks or toolkits. There are also very little images and graphical assets. Apart from the application icon and the retro typeface, all the graphcial components are drawn in realtime with Core Graphics, this has kept the total download size to kjust under 300Kb, that's tiny compared to many other games, which easily run above 100Mb.

Astro Runner v1.1 has just landed in the App Store and is excepting new participents to the High Scores tables. Last week saw the soft launch of version 1,

Already I'm busy writing new features and enhancements for the newt version, which will include new obstacle pattens, power-ups and game progression.

using Range#cover? instead of Range#include? for Dates and Time Ranges