Developer Tools

Custom Animation for an Unwind Segue

This is the third part of my series on Unwind Segues:

On the first post in this series, someone left a comment asking, “What do you do if you want a custom segue transition for the unwind?” I thought that was a great topic to cover since most people only worry about the transitions going forward on a navigation stack and don’t think about how to transition when you unwind several layers back.

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Stow Your Dotfiles – GNU Stow for Managing Symlinks

If you’ve done much work with command line tools, you’ve undoubtedly wrestled with dotfiles, those pesky configuration files in your home directory that are hidden from view by having a dot at the beginning of their name. Bash uses a .bashrc configuration file. Vim uses a .vimrc file and a .vim directory for additional scripts. Tmux uses a .tmux.conf file. Git uses a global .gitconfig. Untold other tools follow the pattern.

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How to Perform an Unwind Segue Programatically

This is the second part of my series on Unwind Segues:

In my previous blog post, I introduced you to Unwind Segues in iOS. In that example, much of the work was done in the Interface Builder of Xcode. Now I’ll show you how to perform an unwind segue in code and how to pass data along the unwind segue. Read more on How to Perform an Unwind Segue Programatically…

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Unwind Segues in iOS Storyboards

This is the first part of my series on Unwind Segues:

Introduced in 2012 with iOS 6, Unwind Segues give you a way to “unwind” the navigation stack and specify a destination to go back to. The first time you use them, they can be confusing. In fact there’s no other UI feature of iOS development that has caused more discussion in our office than Unwind Segues. In this post, I’ll help you understand the fundamentals.

Ever since I noticed the strange “Exit” outlet show up in Xcode, I’ve wondered what it did. Most people probably did what I did the first time they saw it. I Ctrl-draged from a button to the “Exit” outlet and nothing happened. This is the beginning of the confusion for new developers. How do I get the “Exit” outlet to do anything?

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Interacting with Git: Cryptic RPC Errors, HTTPS, and SSH

In my experience, working with a Git repository hosted by Gitlab, Github, or Gitorious has generally been issue free and enjoyable. Recently, however, three members of my team ran across the same cryptic RPC error when trying to push changes to a remote repository on Gitlab:

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error: RPC failed; result=22, HTTP code = 411

In two cases, developers were trying to push new framework libraries (they were moderately sized, 2-9 MB). In the third case, a designer was trying to push a large batch of image assets. In all cases, the problem was caused by using the HTTPS protocol with a server configuration that disallowed individual files larger than 1 MB.

After some basic investigation (thanks Stack Overflow!), we found that using the SSH protocol with Git solved the problem. This type of issue could trip up a new user of Git, so I am going to use this post to briefly describe the problem and summarize the pros/cons of using HTTPS vs. SSH protocols to talk to remote repositories.

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Sharpen Your Git Saw – Aliases, Selective Staging, & Interactive Rebasing

Git is a powerful tool that we love as developers. It’s also complicated. I consider the bare essentials of Git, the minimum set of features to be familiar with before we can be productive, to be all of this:

  • local interaction: status, add, remove, commit, reset, checkout
  • branch management: checkout, merge
  • remote interaction: clone, fetch, push, pull

Once we’ve learned these basics well, we move onto advanced features and tricks. Read more on Sharpen Your Git Saw – Aliases, Selective Staging, & Interactive Rebasing…

Git-SVN Gotcha with Empty Directories

This short post is intended to serve as a warning about a potential gotcha with git-svn, and how to prevent it.

An Anecdote

First, a sort of “postmortem” of my run-in with this issue:

I was working to migrate an old SVN repository full of documents to Git. We had decided that we didn’t need to maintain a complete history going forward, that we would just take what was currently there and put it in a new Git repository. We would keep the old SVN repository around for reference in case we ever did need to go back through that older history. We wanted to preserve the old history in SVN, but make a clean break from it for a fresh start with a new Git repo.

I used SVN to check out a fresh copy of the repo, removed .svn, turned the directory into a Git repo, and pushed it out to the new remote. All good there. Read more on Git-SVN Gotcha with Empty Directories…