MobileMe: Another computer is syncing
I’ve seen this dialog far too many times today. The only saving grace of this error message is that it doesn’t seem to steal my focus. However it is so huge and in the middle of the screen it is quite probable that it is covering up whatever text I happen to be working on at the time. The fact it needs to remind me of this fact (it just did it again then) so often is just crazy.
But why is it even necessary? Will my world come to a grinding halt if I don’t know that my contacts couldn’t be synced in the background right now? Really? Who cares? Can I do anything about it? No. Clearly MobileMe just wants to point out its inadequacies.
Violet iDisk icon
Talking about inadequacies, who chose the colour for the background of the iDisk icon. Violet? Seriously? It’s as if they kept the “transparent colour” and forgot to substitute the real one. Come on Apple, you are all about design, but someone screwed the pooch on this one.
And the way MobileMe was installed, as part of iTunes, now that seems a bit unintuitive to me. (Why would a program that plays music have anything to do with keeping my calendar and contacts synchronised).
Of course, when MobileMe is working it seems to live up to some of the “cloud” hype. I finally have my contacts integrated into Outlook (plus the calendar), which is a big plus, or it would be if I put things in my calendar or opened outlook more frequently than once a week (but that’s my problem (or not)).
So hopefully Apple will fix this stupid error message (I’m happy to have a little notify icon flash or something if it really wants to get my attention). Less importantly I hope they change the background colour of the iDisk icon.
And once that’s done maybe we can focus on real problems.
I’ve been using Visual C# 2008 Express on my laptop (the full thing is outside of my budget at the moment), but it meets my needs quite well. However, while trying to diagnose a problem with one of my tests in NUnit (which I think is fabulous) I went back to Visual C# Express with line number in hand ready to find the problem. Of course, the line numbers aren’t shown by default in Visual Studio.
Fortunately I had dealt with the problem before (in the full version of Visual Studio) and knew that it was a “per language” setting, which I always thought was kind of odd, but maybe most people don’t like seeing the line numbers for all their files (why?). Anyway, I went looking, but I couldn’t find it. Frustrated I jumped on my favourite search engine and quickly found the solution to my problem. Under the list of option categories there is a little checkbox labelled “Show all settings”.
Checking this box gave me a bundle of extra options, including the ability to display line numbers (Text Editor » C#, then the “Line numbers” checkbox under Display). But I must ask, why is this some sort of advanced hidden option??
So in future if I’m expecting an option to be show I will look for the magic “Show all settings” checkbox!
