So, now I'm impressed.

After a hard day upgrading the Mac I thought I would sit in front of the box for an hour and rewatch an episode of Stargate Universe just for a break. I fire up the PC in the living room and ITunes shows the list of episodes on my library but when I tried to play it; nothing.
Checking on my library, the three pilot episodes have been deleted. I know they were there someplace but in the reorg of my Mac they got trashed.
I'd never actually used Time Machine in earnest before so I was pleasantly surprised at the ease with which the backups were found from a few days ago and restored not to their original positions but to the new directory where I had placed the iTunes library.
Time machine is a brilliant bit of kit!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Big Mac Day

Installing Lion and the new version of Monotouch as well as Xcode 4 and such began to push my 80 gig hard-drive that the Mac Mini came with to its limits. Moving my iTunes library off of the main disk helped but still didn't give me that feeling of security that a nice large disk provides. I could have shopped for a terabyte drive but on rooting around "chez moi" I discovered a 2.5 inch SATA drive with 500 gigabyte capacity and thought I might swop out my main hard drive and replace it with that.

I attacked the hardware side of it with confidence having already upgraded the memory in the machine some while ago so apart from my fifty plus year old eyes having trouble with tiny screws (tip, don't get any older) I was ok.

Rebooting the machine was uneventful, inasmuch as nothing happened, but after I plugged the old main drive into a spare external drive case, the machine booted with no problems.

I downloaded Carbon Copy and did a brain dump of the old drive to the new one then rebooted. Two hours start to finish for a Mac Mini hard-disk upgrade including drive cloning was a seriously hassle free experience. Could I have performed the equivalent on a PC in as short a time? I really do wonder.

Thanks to Carbon Copy it definitely went smoothly. My donation is on it's way!

Stats...

My blog stats seem to indicate a preponderance of traffic from the Russian Federation. One hopes it's programmers and not spam robots or hackers.

MonoDevelop on Lion

I installed OSX-Lion on the Mac at the end of last week and consequently updated all my Mac dev-tools. The latest version of Xcode 4 is far more of an integrated environment than before but unfortunately, the process of UI development for the iPad or iPhone when used in conjunction with MonoDevelop and MonoTouch isn't a clean one.

XCode has changed the way that outlets are connected and have opted for a code modification system that requires an actual Xcode project to be used. MonoDevelop hasn't as yet taken this into account, they are working on it, but this has rendered my ability to develop for the iPad to a very limited state.

I guess I need to concentrate on the C# aspects and wait for MonoDevelop to catch up.

Scroll wheels

I am now a fully integrated Mac and PC user. I found however that motor planning plays a part in one's Mac/PC experience because I am constantly annoyed that the Mac scroll wheel works counter intuitively. As a UI designer, the concept of scrolling the mousewheel towards me immediately equates with pulling the scroll-bar down, on a Mac, the process pulls the page down, effectively scrolling up.
When I switch from one system to the other with my handy-dandy TrendNet KVM switch I have a moment of confusion before I get reoriented again.

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I reckoned that there must be a setting for this and so there was. On the Mac, the mouse options have a checkbox one can select.

Back to work...

A couple of hectic weeks away in the Rhone Alps and camping with the family for a few days and I'm back to find my web-site broken and a pile of stuff to do.

OS-X Lion is installing on the Mac Mini as I type and I wil probably be upgrading the hard-disk in that machine to something more suitable for requirements. At least one Terabyte, possibly two if I can find a small drive with a big capacity to go in it. I just put a 1 terabyte external drive on it but have decided to use that for a Time Machine drive.

My site is broken because of what seems to be a problem with the global.asax being denied permission to run. That is still under investigation by the admins at Brinkster.

More later. I have to update all my stuff..