Time Machine Saves Another Mac... Thanks to WOW

Well, a member of my family has had their MacBook die again (twice this month) but I am not complaining. It had a hard life and it was covered under AppleCare. This time it's the hard disk but we were very lucky because I have a complete backup (for once). The family member in question was not really a fan of hooking the external drive up often... until ... I moved World of Warcraft onto the external drive to make room.

What a co-incidence this was because now, every time they played WOW, Time Machine would silently do a update of the backup image of the Macbook. When Apple replaces the hard disk I will be able to restore it 100% thanks to Time Machine and the best Time Machine enabling software on the market, World of Warcraft.

How Easy is it to Run an OpenSocial App on Ringside?

Well now I have gone and made a video and its on OpenSocial Application Deployment. This is actually my first screen capture video made with Screenflow and there will be more to come. The process is relatively easy as long as you can handle looking at yourself on camera.

People around here felt I should get the word out about just how easy it is to develop OpenSocial applications using the Ringside Social App Server. In this first video you can watch me deploy the LastFM gadget inside the local Ringside server on my Macbook. Its as simple as creating a new app using the developer tool and then specifying the Gadget Specification XML as your callback URL.

This is by no means a guarantee that all your off the shelf gadgets will run unmodified in our Shindig based container. I am finding such a wide variation in OS versions (0.5,0.6!) and server customizations (if server=='orcut') as I have been testing off the shelf components that I am beginning to think that many of them will need to be modified before they will run cleanly. If you are interested in OpenSocial development try it out and let me know what you think.