Conordjpc.com

It has been some time since my last post but don’t worry I havent been completely idle. First the site has been updated to the latest version of WordPress, not that it affects anybody reading it but its good for me. Also i am working on a new look which will be deployed in the next month or two. Finally there is a game in development. Its a test to see what I and everyone involved are capable of and for the moment the details will be kept quiet. However, on the real reason for this post, Time Machine.

As anyone who knows me will tell you I am not a great fan of Macs in general. I dont enjoy their forcing of the “Mac way” of doing things upon you. Thier interface still feels slightly alien to me even after the past 18 months working on them. their use of space and concentration on form over function irritates me and the unwieldly shapes I bend my hand into in order to do simple keyboard shortcuts is infuriating. That said I can see their benefits and I have found certain aspects of creating software faster and easier, not much though. Today however I discovered something which as swayed my opinion in a big way.

In development I use Subversion to track changes and to give me the ability to roll back any code which isn’t working for me. It worked out great so far and its integration with xcode meant everything was running very smoothly. That is until last Friday evening. In trying to find a way around issues with an application i am currently developing I completely broke everything and when I attempted to use subversion to role back the changes it encountered errors and conflicts. At this point a gave up and went home. This morning I came back and went to try and clean up my mess. I fixed error after errror and cleaned all the unnecessary code away but to no avail. It was at this point I tried to roll back the code again. This corrupted the main project file and I was unable to open anything. Once again I was not impressed. I couldnt remember the command line code to checkout a specific revision from the subversion repository and while having a quick google to find it I spotted the Time Machine Logo. Now at this point I have to stress that the machine I am developing on has a Seperate physical drive for storage of backups so space could be an issue on a standard setup but not here so i am ignoring that. I entered the time machine to be met with a clean fast presentation of the folders state going back several months. It took meer seconds to navigate to the time and location when i knew the project was working. A simple click on the big Restore button and all was well again and I could calmly return to my work or to be more specific, this posting.

You wont hear me say this often but today I really mean it. Thank You Apple