With this article, I’m starting a series about all the goodies — useful tools — that can be found in Xcode. Some of these tidbits are tools everyone knows about while others are barely documented to undocumented. For example, how many of you know that you can view, inspect, and debug all your Auto Layout constraints live during app execution using the “Debug View Hierarchy” Xcode feature? I discussed that feature in detail in this article, “Troubleshooting Auto Layout using Xcode’s Debug View Hierarchy.” Today, we’ll discover two editors that ship with Xcode, the “Open As > Hex” and “Open As > Source Code” editors, both only available by right-clicking on files in the “Project Navigator” to reveal a contextual menu.
Category: Git
Typical Git/GitHub workflow tutorial: configure, clone, commit, stage, push, pull, status
Introduction
Suppose your supervisor or customer gives you a new project to work on: “I want you to start helping out on my iOS project, ‘Blocks-in-Objective-C.’ Please get a copy of the code, make these changes, test, and then check your new code into the repo. By the way, we’re using Git for source control.” Have you used Git before? Do you know it well? (Does anyone truly understand Git?) Today, I’ll show you how to accomplish that task just assigned by your supervisor or customer.
Requirements
Since this is an iOS blog, I’m assuming you’ve installed Xcode and therefore Git is installed on your Mac. (If you need to install Git, click here.)
Creating a new Git/GitHub repository for your Xcode project — a detailed tutorial
Let’s talk about source/version control, why it’s so important, and how you can easily put all your iOS code under source/version control management (SCM). I’m going to show you the manual steps involved in putting your code into a Git SCM “repository” (repo) so you fully understand how source/version control works. Jump straight to the tutorial if you’re already familiar with the concept of source control. I can’t explain everything about SCM in one blog post, but I’ll get you started and provide many online resources for you to reference. Why am I using Git? Like it or not, Git has become the de facto standard in SCM systems, mainly because it “is a free and open source [and] distributed version control system.” I don’t buy into the “Git is easy to learn” argument. I find Git to be overly complicated, cryptic, and generally requiring more steps to accomplish source control tasks than say centralized SCM systems like TFS or Subversion/SVN. Git does have some advantages over other SCM products, and it even becomes quite efficacious once you pay your dues learning how to use it properly.
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