Opinionated Notes (Page 2)

Preview CSS for redmine-Textile in BBEdit

A few years ago, I bought a license for BBEdit, a commercial text editor for macOS, that doesn't suck. But: I never read the manual and so I used it not very often. Until recently. Because recently, I discovered, that BBEdit has a Preview Mode for several Markup

Save NSSecureCoding-decoding for Dummies

After my last wrong assumption, that I don't need to look up easy things, I stumbled upon this assumption again. This week, I failed to implement NSSecureCoding the right way. In the end, I learned some things. I wanted to persist some data using NSSecureCoding, NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver.

Variable declaration in switch-case

Welcome back to Objective C-land! Last week, I doubted my own sanity more than once. One day, for example, I refactored some code to use an enum and I nearly dispaired on a simple switch-case, until I reminded myself that I've stumbled over this issue quite a while

All Things Version Controlled

These are some things, articles and thoughts about version control. You are already using it, of course you are, aren't you? Recently, we recorded an episode for our German podcast. For nearly 50 minutes we talked about version control: We discussed the basic principles, git, Subversion and fossil.

Buildings from the 19th Century

In my new job I'm dealing with a lot of legacy code and from time to time, I want to set it all on fire and burn it to the ground and nuke it and burn it again, just to completely rewite everything. And although I know, that

Bordered Slicing in Xcode

This is another small blogpost about how I solved a little issue. This time it's about borded buttons, rounded corners and slicing. First things first: I got a new job as — surprise 🎉 — iOS developer and it's much, much better than the previous one. Let's

SecItemDelete without limits

Together with a friend I'm working on a small app for iOS written in good ol' Objective-C. It's a (another) small timetracking application with an optional backend. The credentials for the backend are to be stored in the Keychain. Users should also be able to

No SwiftConf this year

More than one month ago — one day after I published the last story — I got fired. That's one reason why I haven't written any blogposts since then. I'm still getting paid until the end of August, but then that's it. On the

isActive = true vs. NSLayoutConstraint.activate

The whole UI of the app, I helped to develop, is written in code. No Storyboards, no XIBs, just Swift. Someone made this decision looooong ago. Nevertheless, we're using AutoLayout, just like every cool kid should do these days. Typically, our code looks like this: self.titleLabel.topAnchor.

Dear recruiter

In April 2018, I wrote an article and published it on my personal blog. This is an updated version of the original post. A few weeks ago I wrote a thread on twitter. I wanted this thread to be on my blog in an extended version. So here we go:

Me, my future self and self

A colleague of mine complained, that I use self too much. In Objective-C, it was everywhere, but he sent me this blogpost and recommended me to use self in Swift sparingly and only when necessary for the compiler. But back in 2012 I started to learn Objective-C. Until 2015 it

preconditionFailure

One of my goals for May 2018 was to finally read The Pragmatic Programmer. I haven't succeeded yet, that's why this year, June was May, Extended Edition and July is June, Extended Edition. A few years ago, a dear friend of mine recommended reading this book