Tag: ios

Backing iOS up to a secondary drive on macOS

So my wife got a new iPhone yesterday which of course means me playing tech support and me backing the old one up and restoring onto the new one. My wife has a Mac Air with a somewhat limited internal drive to there wasn’t enough space to back up the old iPhone (128gb). Easy I thought! I’ll just move the iTunes library folder to an external USB drive and the backup will go there. Wrong! The backups are not kept in the iTunes library so that didn’t work.

After a little research it turned out that iOS backups are kept in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup with each backup being a folder in that directory. Hmmm… Maybe a synlink would work? Oh yes! So here’s what I did:

  1. Delete older backups from iTunes using Preferences/Devices
  2. Quit iTunes
  3. Break open a terminal
  4. Move to the folder containing the Backup folder: 
    cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync
  5. Remove the folder (now empty): 
    rm -rf Backup
  6. Create a symbolic link (synlink) to the directory on the external drive to hold the backup (here the USB drive is called MM): 
    ln -s /Volumes/MM/iOSbackups/ ./Backup
  7. Open iTunes and backup the iPhone and restore onto the new iPhone
  8. Quit iTunes
  9. Reverse the process (after having ejected the USB drive): 
    cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync
rm Backup
mkdir Backup
  10. Done!

 

IBM THINK – the app

Explore how progress happens with the THINK exhibit app, for kids, innovators and forward thinkers.

From the very beginning, we’ve sought to improve the way we live. We’ve worked to make our world more efficient, accessible, and safe. While each leap of progress has required its own intelligence and hard work, many seem to follow a distinct, repeatable pattern.

The app is available in the Apple AppStore.

Customizing the feature titles for IBM Connections mobile plus new URL handlers which are (almost) useful

Luis Benitez already blogged this (How To Customize the IBM Connections Mobile App for iOS, Android & BlackBerry) but I think it is so important that it bears mentioning again. With the latest update to IBM Connections (version 3.0.1.1 CR2) you know have the option to customize the mobile apps using a new mobile-config.xml file. It allows you to configure settings to do with login and the general configuration of the app. An important point is also that it allows you to change the title of the features in the app which is great if you have change feature names in the web UI. We have customers that change some of the Danish translations (especially for Community because they feel that the Danish word really isn’t representative of the feature) so making that feature name change apply to the mobile UI’s are great.

To install the fixes simply download the IBM Connections 3.0.1.1 CR2 jar-files and follow the steps from the technote (technote 1595154) to update IBM Connections. Please note that you need the newest update installer to perform the update.

As if this wasn’t enough Chris Reckling recently blogged (Custom URLs in IBM Connections Mobile Apps) on the new URL handlers that were added to the Connections mobile apps for iOS and Android. This means you can add a link in an email to take you directly to Profiles or a profile as well as Communities or a community. The URL’s are easy to use and pretty straight forward – to open John Does profile one could use ibmscp://com.ibm.connections/profiles?email=jdon%40example.com from anywhere on the app. Pretty neat.

There’s also a URL handlers to configure the app for a user to allow for easier set up of the app.

The URL handlers are great but I think it is too bad they didn’t add support for all features now they were at it. For instance having a direct link capability into Activities would be killer as it would allow you to add links to the email notifications that would take you to the mobile app instead of the web UI. Would have been soo cool and would have been something I could use now – having the Communities part is nice but I receive way more Activities notifications by email so a link capability there is worth much more to me. I hoping it will make it into the next update.

OMG! Apple to allow other appdev languages than XCode

OMG!! On ZDNet Ed Burnette writes that Apple are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to develop applications for the iOS platform. Now isn’t competition a nice thing?!

“Temperatures dropped about 30 degrees in Hades this morning when Apple announced they were relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps. They will also be allowing 3rd party advertisers such as AdMob, but not analytics software such as Flurry.

The changes bring iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch development a bit closer to the laissez-faire policies of Google’s Android Market. Though the latter still does not require any kind of review or approval process before developers can upload new programs, Google can and does sometimes remove apps after the fact if its policies are violated.”

Apple lets in Java and Flash; should Android be worried?