Tag: iphone

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!

 

iWhat?! Should iNotes be renamed?


Thursday I returned a call from a customer. The customer called because he had heard about Lotus iNotes and since they had iPhones at the company he thought it would be a perfect match for mail on the phone. Well yes – sort of… While iNotes does have three modes and one of them (iNotes UltraLight) works very well on a mobile web browser it’s far from ideal. It actually took me a while to explain that what he was looking for for his “iDevices” wasn’t Lotus iNotes but Lotus Traveler.

Now I know the product names so it was hard for me to understand why it would confuse anybody but after thinking about it some more it’s actually starting to make sense to me. The product name Lotus iNotes is confusing as it suggests that it’s a solution for iDevices which it really isn’t.

I never thought that I would make a case for renaming iNotes but it actually makes sense now.

Now I know that iNotes has been around as an IBM Lotus name long before the rise of the iPod/iPad/iPhone devices but the mind share isn’t on the IBM side. It’s probably confusing more customers than it’s benefitting. Should we return to calling the Lotus iNotes something else? We could probably come up with a shorter name than “IBM Lotus Domino Web Access” but maybe it’s actually quite a good name as it explains what it is. Maybe “IBM Lotus Web Mail” would do. I think I for one will stop referring to Lotus iNotes but that name.

What do you think?

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?

How the new iPhone OS may expand the use of Lotus Traveler

For all us iPhone affectionados today was a day of joy as iOS4 arrived in iTunes. There are numerous nice features in iOS4 but the most important from a Lotus perspective is the fact that iOS4 allows multiple ActiveSync accounts (or as the iPhone calls it: “Exchange accounts”). This means that you may use you iPhone with multiple mail systems whether that be multiple Lotus Traveler systems or Lotus Traveler and another mail system such as Google mail or Exchange. Very nice.

I just tried it out with the demo Lotus Traveler from Greenhouse at traveler.lotus.com and it works like a charm.

Why iPhone OS 4 is interesting for Lotus Traveler customers

Today on my commute I was reading about the iPhone upcoming iPhone OS 4 (Multitasking tops tentpole features in iPhone 4.0). Much, and probably way too much, have already been written about the iPhone and iPad lately but one feature of iPhone OS 4 is important to Lotus Traveler customers.

As you might know the iPhone uses the ActiveSync protocol for communication with the Lotus Traveler server. On the iPhone this is called an “Exchange account” of which you could only have a one. For many this is not an issue but it’s really a frustrating and silly restriction (among other things it made it difficult for those of us with multiple e-mail accounts). Reading the run down I was very happy to read that this restriction will be lifted and you now may have more than one ActiveSync account. <insert waves of joy here>

As to the other features being added I guess one can only say that competition is healthy and is advantageous to the customer.

Lotus Traveler calendar invites on iPhone caveat

Just after we had our main Domino servers in the office upgraded to 8.5.1 FP1 I looked into doing to Lotus Traveler configuration updates required to be able to process calendar invites on the iPhone. I did the changes, restarted Lotus Traveler but were unable to see invites on my phone. I messed a little around with it but with no success. Today however I heard other iPhone-enabled colleagues mention that they processed invites on their iPhones. WTF!!

Tonight it hit me why. I have been using the Notices mini-view in my Inbox to show calendar invites for easy processing. Having invites show up in the mini-view apparently blocks the invites from reaching my iPhone because after disabling the use of the mini-view in the mail preferences and sending an invite from my private e-mail/calendar system the invite appeared right away on my iPhone. So there it is – problem solved.

Managing my calendar workwise and personally – this is how I’m trying to do it

So I have an iPhone and work with calendars on a daily basis so I’m constantly looking for new ways to work with them. For a long time I have been pondering the separation of calendar usage between my work and private life. Ideally they should be separate but viewable together. Up to now I haven’t really found a solution that worked and have been using my Notes calendar for everything using it both from my Notes client and my portable device (aka cellphone). The main problem with that was that there was no easy way to allow my wife, family or others to peek into my calendar on an adhoc basis. I know there’s stuff like Tungle but lets face it – it’s still in beta and it will be some time before it’s Wife certified… 🙂

As of yesterday I think I have the solution though.

Part of Notes 8 is how easy it is to federate calendars into the product calendar by adding either iCal, Google calendars or the like into the calendar using calendar overlays (much has been written about that so Google away if you need more info). I have been perfectly happy with my current setup (using my Notes calendar and Lotus Traveler for everything) up to now but using an iPhone finally pushed me over the edge. The reason? Well there is no way to mark an appointment on the iPhone as private. It does however have the concept of multiple calendars. Whether that’s a shortcoming in the iPhone I’ll leave up to you.

However much I like my colleagues I don’t think they necessarily should have the possibility to see, or be burdened with, what I’m doing on my own time so not being able to mark appointments from the iPhone as private has been an issue for me. When I created appointments on my iPhone (during my weekly calendar sync with my paper-calendar using wife) I had to remember to edit the appointments afterwards in Notes and set the private flag which was cumbersome and a hassle. Plus forgetting it made me ripe for ridicule from my colleagues when they saw what my wife made me agree to!

Yesterday I decided to do something about it and investigated it again. I moved my private calendar to my Google calendar after discussing it on Twitter with members of the community incl. Per Henrik Lausten (who is also my new McDaddy and Mac pusher). Now I’m using CalDAV to federate/sync my Google calendar to my iPhone. My Notes calendar is already there using Lotus Traveler and appointments are easily distinguishable as work appointments are in red and private appointments are in blue. In my Notes calendar I simply use a calendar overlay to display my private calendar alongside my work calendar using the same color scheme. My private calendar is even available offline by checking a box – does it get any sweeter? For me it’s as near to perfect as seems possible now.

I want to thank the community on Twitter for pointing me in the right direction. If you want to see how to configure CalDAV on your iPhone I suggest ‘How to Sync Google Calendar With iPhone Calendar‘ as an easy way to get started. Happy Friday!

Lotusphere 2010: Improvements to the web app

Based on the overwhelmingly positive reception of our web application for planning your Lotusphere 2010 attendance (see Lotusphere 2010: Check out this killer Lotusphere planning web app!!) I wanted to update you on the application and the suggestions to functionality you have made. Based on feedback from YOU we’ve added the ability to navigate between days in the “tracks”-view, made sure that all the BOF sessions are imported and that sessions with multiple speakers list all speakers and not just the first speaker. Since BOF sessions start at 7AM a small change to the timebar was also necessary but that should hardly be visible.

As shown below we’ve also added a menu item on the frontpage describing the different ways of reaching us while at Lotusphere. On this page you’ll see e-mail addresses, mobile phone numbers and of course Twitter handle for those of us on Twitter.

As always keep the suggestions coming.

Lotusphere 2010: Check out this killer Lotusphere planning web app!!

Since we in IntraVision are not having a booth at Lotusphere this year we thought we would spend our time and resources a little bit different and what’s better than helping YOU get the most from YOUR Lotusphere experience. So one of the things we’re doing this year is an iPhone web application to help you plan your Lotusphere schedule. You can find the application here: ls2010.ontimesuite.com.

And yes I know the Turtle partnership has an iPhone application as well but we really wanted a different approach to planning the Lotusphere attendance so one of our senior developers created this solution. Also note that just because I say it’s an iPhone web application doesn’t mean it doesn’t work on other phones. It works perfectly on an Android based HTC phone we also tested it on. A standalone browser will also work just fine.

About the application

At IntraVision we do group calendaring and meeting management software so we like to think we know how to do planning. We think that it should be easy to see what you’re doing, when and where. The iPhone application lets you do exactly that using a straight forward interface. Oh and as you can see there’s also a drawing for a number gift cards… 🙂

From the main menu you can choose to see the sessions by date, by track or you can search. The search is a very powerful feature as it allows you to easily, and in sorted date order, do a listing of all sessions on a particular topic. Here I have searched for “sametime” to easily see all sessions having to do with Sametime.

Once you have starred the sessions you would like to attend you may use the “My Schedule” to see, again in sorted date order, the sessions you have chosen to see.

Additional screenshots (click for bigger versions)