As I wrote in an earlier post, my iMac recently had a well overdue reinstall of everything. Whilst this is good news for the most part, it does cause problems with things like iTunes. I was particularly concerned about losing my iPhone backups. I needed to get my iTunes library back to how it used to be, including all my preferences, iPhone applications and backups. How do you do this though? The only bit of information Apple provide on their website is how to migrate your data from an old mac to a new mac, when you have both machines available. What if your old mac is your new mac? I didnt want to restore a Time Machine backup, as I wanted to ensure this was a fresh start, and not be bringing a load of stuff over that I wanted rid of. The migration assistant was of no use either.
Google wasn’t much help initially, but I did eventually come across this gem.
Whilst, like Apple, that article does discuss the process of copying from one physical machine to another, the process described works just as well when copying from a backup. In my case, I backed up the entire hard drive contents of my iMac using SuperDuper! before I wiped the iMac clean. So I had every file I’d ever need, including old system files.
A friend of mine recently bought a new MacBook Pro, and asked me how he could transfer his iTunes stuff to it from his G4 iMac. As he was not familiar with the Terminal, or Unix/Linux commands, I gave him an expanded version of the above article. If you’re in the same boat, here is the full process he followed to ‘restore’ iTunes:
Continue reading 'Migrating iTunes/iPod/iPhone from Old Mac (Backup) to New Mac'»
Updated 22/06/2009
As with most of the rest of the Worlds iPhone owners, I updated my iPhone 3G to the long-awaited OS 3.0 on Wednesday 17th June 2009. Surprisingly, it seemed to take far less time to complete than any of the other software updates I’ve applied to my iPhones. As to be expected from what we already knew though, most of the new features are subtle ones. The most obvious is the Messages app, which has replaced the old SMS app. Other than that, theres nothing remarkably obvious to differentiate it from 2.2.1. Not that thats a bad thing.
I’ve been reading about the 100+ new features, both known and hidden, but I wanted to note down the ones I’ve experienced which I particularly like or dislike. I’ll keep adding to this list as time goes on. Continue reading 'Exploring iPhone OS 3.0 On My 3G iPhone'»
There’s not much in this part of the site at the moment.
In an earlier post, I mentioned that Hotmail was now able to be configured in the iPhone’s Mail application, using POP3 access, directly to the MSN Live Hotmail service. No 3rd party tools required. No Hotmail Plus required.
After adding my Hotmail account to my iPhone, I dug into the settings to find out what the server details are. These should then be able to be used with any POP client:
Incoming Server
Server: pop3.live.com
Username: user@hotmail.com
Password: your hotmail password
Use SSL, port 995
If the option is available, ensure ‘delete messages from server’ is disabled.
Outgoing Server
Server: smtp.live.com
Username: user@hotmail.com
Password: your hotmail password
Use SSL, port 587
Finally, Microsoft have opened up free POP access to Hotmail users. No 3rd party tools required. It’s come too late for me, as the lack of POP access (free or paid) to my Hotmail account forced me over to GMail some time ago, and I’ve never looked back. However, my Hotmail account is still active, so I gave it a try out of curiosity.
Adding your account on the iPhone is simple enough – Just go into your email settings, add a new account of type ‘other’, fill in your credentials and the POP server settings will be configured automatically.
Maybe I’ve just become used to GMail’s IMAP access, but the Hotmail offering, whilst welcome, is a bit lacking. For example, you only get your main Inbox, so any folders you have set up are inaccessible. Also, it’s painfully slow, even over O2′s 3G. I haven’t tried it on WiFi yet so your mileage may vary.
Of course, this should work with any POP client, and the lack of folder support may be an iPhone limitation. However, I’ve not experienced this before with other POP accounts. I’ll be checking it later on my desktop client to see how it fares there.
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