Xcode4 and GitHub for existing projects

If you are unlucky, like I was, you started iOS development and didn't even know about source control.

I am sure that, like me, you manually copied the entire Xcode project's directory for every version of your app to be released. Then, you decided to be more cautious and did the same even for development versions, and even saved those copies on an online server.

No more! Now in 5 easy steps you can use the glory of Xcode 4's Git source control and  your private GitHub repository with an existing project that had no automatic source control before.

What's even more amazing is that the first 4 steps were in the Mac OSX documentation all along and I didn't even know!

So here they are:

1. Use the 

   1

   cd

   command to switch to your project folder, making it the current working directory.

2. Enter 

   1

   git init

   to create an empty repository.

3. Enter 

   1

   git add .

   to copy your project files into the repository.

4. Enter 

   1	git commit -m "Initial commit."

   to commit all the files.

5. Check out my previous post on How to push your Xcode4 project to GitHub and you are done!

Then, start Xcode4, open your project and take a look at your repositories and if you are lucky, like me =), you will see a brand new repository there for your project with thousands of added files.

Xcode4 and GitHub for new projects, I finally got it

After suffering ages to figure out the best way to integrate Xcode 4 and GitHub and make it as easy as possible, last weekend at the Code For Change hacktahon, I finally got it!

Here are the simple steps:

1. Create a repository on GitHub
2. Create a new project on Xcode4 and don't forget to check the checkbox to enable Git source control.
3. From Xcode, commit whenever you want.
4. Using Terminal on you Mac, go to the folder where you created your Xcode project and then type:

   git remote add origin git@github.com:yourUsername/yourRepo.git
   (of course, replace yourUsername/yourRepo with your own)
   git push -u origin master
   

5. You should now see your project on GitHub. So now just continue working on Xcode and commit whenever you want. To push your new commit to GitHub simply type in the Terminal:

   git push

And you're done!

I will post the best way to do it with an existing project soon, so stay tuned!

Embed images into email

One of the biggest problems of the MFMailComposerViewController, provided by Apple to allow us to send emails easily, is that it hasn't been updated since it first came out leaving us with very few (yet useful) methods to create and send an email.

Since it hasn't been updated, the only way to add an attachment to the email is by calling the

– addAttachmentData:mimeType:fileName: method on MFMailComposeViewController. The problem again is that the attachment will be posted at the bottom and not inline with the rest of the email body.

For images, there is a simple solution =)

Since the email body only accepts an NSString with HTML code we need to encode the image data into a base 64 encoded string, then use that string and add it to your email body.

To encode the image you need to simply:

As you can see, base64EncodedString is not a method on NSData, but there is a category by Matt Gallagher that makes this possible.

After encoding the image into a string is just a matter of simply use it in the HTML code to be used for the email body:

UIImage *img = [UIImage imageNamed:@"testImage"];

NSString *dataString = [self stringBase64EncodedImage:img];

[emailBody appendFormat:@" src="data:image/png;base64,%@" alt="" width="%d" height="%d" />"", dataString, img.size.width, img.size.height];

A pretty good example can be found in inClass, when sharing a note via email as shown below.

And guess what! I made a sample XCode project too!