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This is the time of the year when I do my little stock-taking around my memories about last year. Mate had a good start in the school with the exception of some innocent violence pushing and kicking others. He has a good grasp of reading, he is using this newly acquired skill with confidence. The school turned out as an excellent choice. Daniel failed to get good GCSE grades, but we have found a course at East Surrey College for him where he seems to be happy.

I work with multiple sites without cache warmup technology. So I created one. Don’t be mislead, it’s simple. Basic usage: <br /> $ ./warmup.rb www.someurl.tld<br /> It will download http://www.someurl.tld/sitemap.xml parse that sitemap for urls run through that list of urls, downloading every HTML to warmup the cache For further information and the code check up the Github repository

As I’m working on Facebook share – there will be a share button under the recipe viewer screen that creates a Facebook note from the recipe – I had to create a Facebook page so I can link to it from every post. Please like and check iRecipebook app Facebook page, I will update TODOs, fresh screenshots, recipes and my copy-paste resource links there.

As Apple is pushing Storyboard based app development I’ve decided to give it a go. Having a family holiday with lots of spare time after the pools closed I’ve started to pull it together for iRecipeBook. I had to find out how to simplify and standardise my old – I mean really old – code that I call guano code, created layer-by-layer as technology changed and requests came. Mostly it was about delegates, callbacks and properties – duplicated here and there, non-standard solutions for supporting of older (iOS 4.

As of today, we still have 4.x systems running, iOS 5 is still not real minority, so I can’t just use iOS 6 API. After reading several articles and trying every framework and sample code I could find my verdict is the same, iOS is not ready for Core Data iCloud yet. The currently available iOS versions are not behaving the same way so either it’s a testing nightmare or just a nightmare, developers can choose.

I had some time to focus on localisation. As 4.3 and 5.0 version is still majority so I can’t really put iCloud features in use, I did something instead for non-English speakers. I hope every translation is correct. If not, please let me know.

Finally I’ve released my block-building game for the kids! They’ve been testing it on the iPad for ages, asking for more faces, telling me that they like this, don’t like that etc. Of course for App Store screen-shots I had to modify the UI, for loading and saving block layouts, it’s hard to create the same screen-shots for all the resolutions… and left a broken callback in the code even after testing, so 1.

This post is about last year. I have to say it was really colourful. Lets begin with office matters. This was my second year at the company, we had good year so management decided to go to other markets too. This meant new language to support, having fun with French again, c’est bon. New colleagues, lots of learning. Good and bad decisions, really good and really bad days too. At home we have helping hand (au pair) so my loved one Emese has a full time job again.

We have a new release! The iPad compatible iRecipeBook was a request, actually we had a bad review, stating that the – iPhone only – iRecipeBook looks wrong on the iPad… The reviewer stated that five stars will be the award of an iPad compatible release. I’m waiting! Meanwhile I’m already working on localisations, social networking update (Facebook share, Twitter, Pinterest maybe…) and sharing recipes via email and from within the App.

iRecipeBook released in App Store just few weeks ago but we already have news about further developments. The new release will support iPad, will have iOS usability and design improvements. We plan to release it just before Christmas!