Grant Lucas

Let me be upfront: the app I’m about to describe is useful for maybe three weeks out of the year. It helps you figure out when to tap a maple tree for sap. That’s it. The rest of the year it just sits there, waiting for February to roll around again. I can’t think of much else targeting such a specific, and time-limited, niche…

A year ago, I wouldn’t have built this. Not because it’s hard, but because the return on investment is laughable. A few weeks of utility for evenings of development time, if I finish it at all, is not worth it. I’d just check the weather forecast myself, squint at the overnight lows, and make a guess like I did last year. The motivation simply wouldn’t survive contact with the reality of actually sitting down to build it.

I’ve been experimenting with using Claude Code on iOS to build projects from my phone. It’s been a great learning experience, and I wrote about the broader experiment in I Built an App That’s Only Useful Three Weeks a Year. But before that project went smoothly, I hit some friction that’s worth sharing on its own.

Most of these tips are specific to starting greenfield projects from your phone. If you’re making changes to an existing repo that already has the right files in place, the experience is significantly smoother from the start.

When using a single computer for multiple categories of development (personal, work, etc), there is often a need to set a specific user.email value for each repository cloned depending on the use. For example, it’d make sense to use your work email for repositories cloned for work while you’d use your personal email for you own projects.

Without the following setup, it’s very easy to forget to override your user.email at a repository level and end up committing to one or the other with the wrong email attached. Though not the end of the world, I can imagine your company, coworkers, and security department would prefer to see your work email attached to all commits instead of a random Gmail account.

Over time, whether working alone or in a team, your Git environment can become cluttered and messy with branches of the past, both local and remote. Though this isn’t an issue in the short term, if left alone, it can lead to time wasting mistakes, out of date code that doesn’t work once pushed to origin, and clutter in any Git tools or GUIs you may use leading to lower productivity.

Last week Confoo took place in Montreal. This has always been a good conference in that there’s quite a bit of variety in talks offered. No matter your interests, there will be talks of interest for you. It’s a pretty pricey conference though but normal compared to many larger conferences. This post covers some of the main points that I took away from the talks I attended. Mainly for my own long term reference but maybe it’ll be useful to others.

I won’t go into details on implementation below as there’s a lot of information out there on each subject already. From the talks at Confoo, I aimed for ones that were more architecture focused with as little language specific info as possible. This provided a lot of theoretical information leaving the practical information flexible for whatever implantation is desired.

After some frustrations with conflicting documentation, I figured I’d make the blog post I wished I had at the start of this all. This forum post is what finally led me in the correct direction.

If you’re using Universal Analytics through Google Tag Manager and are tracking Standard Ecommerce transactions in multiple currencies, you’ll need some extra setup beyond the documentation they provide. You’ll notice there’s no mention of setting the currency when sending a standard ecommerce transaction because the Universal Analytics through Google Tag Manager doesn’t support it. Thankfully, it’s easy to add.

Recently I was working with Assetic for combining and minifying CSS and JS files but ran into an issue with regards to caching the created asset collection. The resulting minified file was being rewritten on every page load which was no good at all.

TL;DR: Get the asset collection’s “last modified” property and compare it to the written minified file to determine if it needs updating.

Updated Feb 29, 2016

This post originally used String Assets to cache the collection’s content. It was later found that the string asset caches would conflict due to string assets not having “source” or “target” paths which are a component of the hash. Though an arbitrary source could be set on a string asset to resolve the issue, it’s probably better to just use the collection’s getLastModified before writing the minified file. The post has been updated to reflect the new approach.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing a fairly major change to Logger-TXT OSX that adds autocomplete to the type and project inputs. I’ve spent a while sitting on this change as to make it happen, there were some large, behind the scenes, changes that needed to be made. There’s a few bugs that were caught, like adding extra blank lines to log files, that were uncovered throughout this process.

Since Dev Diary #3, a fair amount of work has been done due to trying to get NSPopovers to work reliably with the rest of OSX. Though in its previous state it worked, the overall user experience was unacceptable due to too many unreliable behaviours stemming from trying to use a popover from a menu bar status item.

Issues with the Menu Bar Popover

A few issues that were present with the popover implementation were:

Over the past week and a half I’ve been working on getting what I previously had moved to the menu bar. Popping open a window was alright but I’ve always wanted to create a menu bar app and this was a perfect fit. Already, after just a few days of testing, the menu bar pop-up feels a lot nicer than a regular window opening for input.

It wasn’t an easy transition as there was a fair amount of learning to be done and there are many ways to achieve the same general result. Apple added NSPopover in OSX 10.7 but never really intended for it to be used from a menu bar item, so there were/are some quirks that need to be worked out to get it all done. Overall, using NSPopover was a decent solution as it lets the OS handle the pop-up animation, styling and nitty-gritty work. Due to my in-experience, just getting it all working properly was a decent challenge.