//dennisbloete

A few months ago, after the birth of our daugther (yeah, Lotta!) and during my parental leave, thoughts arose about realizing an idea I’ve carried around with me since I finished my studies: Going solo, working on my own projects and earning a living as a freelance software developer. A few weeks ago I realized that plan and decided to quit my current job at neuland, though it wasn’t an easy decision: working for neuland has always been fun, especially because of the nice environment and the multitude of different personalities of the people working there – some of which are now close friends of mine. Nevertheless I felt that deep urge of doing something on my own and having sold venteria in summer makes taking the plunge a little less risky.

Alright, so where am I heading? A new focus will be iPhone/Cocoa app development and I’ll keep on working with Ruby on Rails – I’m really looking forward to all the great enhancements planned for Rails 3.0 and I just love doing web development, so that I won’t burn all the bridges

The bootstrapping went pretty well so far, I joined a really nice coworking environment and got an office at the infamous Abfertigung. As far as I can tell I’ll be surrounded by a bunch of very nice, creative and innovative people. Furthermore it’s good to know that I can, but don’t have to work from home – that makes meeting clients and finding quiet hours to get work done (I’m lookin’ atcha, Lotta) a lot easier

Hopefully I’ll find the time during the next weeks to write about some of the aspects of becoming a freelancer as I know some of you are interested in that and I’d like to take you along on that journey. I think it will be a pretty interesting time and I’ll learn tons about myself, meet nice and interesting people (including clients ) and most important of all: still have the time to enjoy my family… we shall see

If you are working on multiple Macs (i.e. having a personal and one at work) you probably know this problem: You would like to sync some application data between these machines, so that you don’t have to manage separate todo-lists, items in your inbox that you’ve already read on one machine but are marked as unread on the other, etc. I’m using Dropbox (disclaimer: If you sign up using this link, I’ll get some more disk space, thank you!) to sync various applications (Things, Billings and Socialite for example), but you can use any other cloud storage solution if you like.

In this little tutorial I’ll explain how to sync the data with Dropbox and I’m using Socialite as an example. It basically works like this for any app that stores its data in an Application Support folder, but Socialite requires some extra steps people are frequently asking about, so here we go:

1. Go to your Dropbox folder and create a new folder called Synced Application Support (or whatever you like)
2. Quit any running instance of the application you would like to sync (in this case Socialite).
3. Got to your ~/Library/Application Support and move the Socialite folder into the Dropbox folder you just created (Synced Application Support)
4. Open your Terminal.app and symlink the moved folder:
   $ ln -s ~/Dropbox/Synced\ Application\ Support/Socialite/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/Socialite
5. Start the app and see if it worked

After this five steps you should be up and running with most of your apps (syncing Things is as easy as that). Unfortunately Socialite requires some extra steps if you are using Twitter (and who isn’t these days), because it keeps the OAuth authentication tokens in the keychain, so that you need to sync them too. Fortunately this isn’t a big deal, because now you know how to sync your data, so go ahead and…

1. Quit Socialite
2. Open your Keychain and create a new keychain called Socialite and save it within your Synced Application Support/Socialite folder
3. Right click the new Socialite keychain, edit the settings and uncheck the checkboxes so that you won’t be bothered with authentication request every now and then
4. Use the search bar at the upper right corner to search for twitter.com and move all items used by Socialite to the new Socialite keychain
5. Start Socialite and see if your Twitter services are still working – if not: Delete all items in your Socialite keychain, remove the Twitter services from Socialite, restart Socialite, add them again and move the freshly created twitter.com items in your Login keychain to the Socialite keychain.

Okay, that’s it, I hope it’s helpful to some of you and I also hope that someday syncing will be baked into Socialite, though Realmac Software currenty doesn’t have any plans for implementing that.