kent's posterous

make a da world go round

Mac App store hints at future sync plans

So after downloading the Mac App store on my desktop as well as my laptop, I noticed something that confirms, at least for me, what Apple is doing with that billion dollar data centre.

Mac-app-store-sync-plans

The screenshot show three Apps that I have downloaded (I know they are all free, I am cheap right now okay ;)  As you can see, Twitter and Alfred are installed on my Desktop but MindNode is not installed.  I downloaded it yesterday on my laptop.  This is huge!

Why is this so huge?  Because Apple has never let you see the Apps that you have bought regardless of the device you bought them on, and let you re-download them onto your current device.  

If you are like me, you probably have multiple machines running fragmented iTunes libraries.  Different libraries, different songs, different movies, different apps.  This screenshot shows you that Apple is listening to that feedback and working to make syncing a native experience.  I know that songs and movies have their own DRM issues, but Apple controls everything about Apps, so I don't think it's far off for Apple to finally let us sync our apps over the air or through the cloud, or input any buzz word you want here.

So what about this billion dollar data center?  Well, I think some of it will be too keep all of this App data straight.  My account will now fetch my apps from the iTunes Cloud or iShelf and let me install those Apps on my phone, iPad, laptop or Mac.

If this is what they plan to do, they are rolling it out perfectly.  The Mac App store is big and lots of people have already downloaded possibly millions of Apps but compared to the iPhone or iPad App store it's a drop in the bucket.  By trying this out on a smaller more constrained domain they can work out the kinks and then streamline the process and unleash it to the Millions of iPhone and iPad users.  Hopefully, seeing the positive response they will sort out this DRM crap on music and movies and we will finally be able to sync your iTunes library over the air without using any plugins, other apps, or Dropbox hacks.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading.

Kent

OmniAuth, Rails 3, Heroku, Google Apps, tempfile

Yes.  I am trying to SEO this post.  I think this is a common snag that some people might miss on first glance.
If you are using OmniAuth with Rails 3 on Heroku and are trying to use OpenID or Google Apps for login, OmniAuth will attempt to write a file into the /tmp directory.  Heroku won't allow this and you will get an error that looks something like this:

RuntimeError (cannot generate tempfile `/tmp/temp/tmp20110106-25490-1imqg6z-9'):

It's very simple to fix this.  

Simply change the following in your omniauth,rb config file

 provider :google_apps, OpenID::Store::Filesystem.new('/tmp')
to

 provider :google_apps, OpenID::Store::Filesystem.new('./tmp')

Yup.  That's it.  Just a period and you are good to go.  Heroku let's you write to the ./tmp directory.

Just thought I would share this little tidbit of info.

Finally for the sake of SEO purposes.

And that ladies and gentlemen is how to avoid a "cannot generate tempfile" error when using the OmniAuth gem, with Rails 3 for Google Apps authentication on Heroku.

Thank you and have a great flight.

Kent
Posterous theme by Cory Watilo
  
​