"I Hate Orphans!!!"

As many of you may know, I recently purchased a Seagate 2TB GoFlex Home NAS.  The device seemed to have everything – gigabit ethernet, USB expansion, UPNP and TimeMachine support! At $149 on sale, it was my dream come true!

That is until I updated all of my computers to OSX Lion.

Unfortunately for me, I was unaware of some changes to AFP and TimeMachine Apple made in OSX Lion; changes that made the Seagate drive basically a paperweight.  These changes should have been no surprise to Seagate who had months to address them before release, but for whatever reason did not.  To make matters worse, Seagate (who is a large, if not the largest, supplier of hard drives for Apple) has completely dropped the ball on releasing a firmware update.  After over 25 days, they have offered no insight to their customers as to when a fix will be released and they have not been forthcoming about the issue both on their site and through online retailers who sell the product.

Fortunately, all is not lost.  For those of you affected by this issue, here are some options that may help you in your time of need:

1. Subscribe to the Seagate support page regarding this issue and hopefully get notified when a fix is released.
2. Put your two cents in on the Seagate forums regarding this issue.
3. Sign the petition to try and get them to deliver an ETA.
4. You can bash them send them a tweet on Twitter.

Hopefully if enough people participate, it will send a nice reminder to Seagate that customers expect proactive, and often transparent, support; especially after shelling out hundreds of dollars.

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The Extensions

CSSViewer – While this won’t act as a replacement for the CSS viewer in the Chrome debugging tools, it is a great way to quick view the styles applied to each element on the page.

Eye Dropper - This is a nice color picker tool that keeps a history of the colors you have selected.

Regular Expression Checker – The title of this one should explain exactly what it does and I will say it does it pretty well. I’ve used this one a number of times recently thus securing its spot on this list.

Resolution Test – This is a nice little extension that allows you to quickly change the window size of Chrome for various screen resolutions.  With the size of my iMac’s screen, this make life SO much easier; a definite must have.

Web Developer – This is the actual port of the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox.  While it doesn’t have all of the features of its Firefox brother, it packs all the ones that I used.

XML Tree - as many of you may have run into, Chrome doesn’t have a great display mechanism for XML.  In fact, it doesn’t have one at all.  Thats where this little extension comes in; it automatically detects XML data and displays it in a color-coded and indented style.

Those extensions combined with the built in Chrome developer tools should get you exactly what you need to transition to Chrome for yourself.  If you have any extensions you use and think I missed or just want to tell me about your personal transition, hit me up in the comments; I’d love to hear about it.

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The last couple weeks I have been working on learning how to develop iPhone and Android apps via Appcelerator Titanium.  The framework is fantastic and really lives up to what it says it can do: create native apps with html and javascript quickly.  I really do want to stress the quickly part; its absolutely insane compared to coding the same app in Objective-C and Java.

That being said, you would expect people to be excited and incredibly positive on the forums and, for the most part, this is the case. However, after perusing the forums for discussion on mobile development I have come to the realization, again, that developers without social skills are jerks.  It doesn’t matter how much time and effort is being put into something that is being provided free and is saving them time, if it doesn’t do exactly what they want or live up to their exact desires – its crap.  And they are going to let you know.

I would personally like to apologize for jerks like this as they really do take the joy out of developing something for free.  It also destroys community moral and can stere a thread away from being positively resolved to being put on the back burner because, quite frankly, who wants to help a jerk? Especially when there are other people who need attention and will appreciate assistance.

To the people at Appcelerator, my hat is off to you.  Thank you for saving me time and providing me with the means to enter into two new markets without having to know Objective-C or Java.

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