My Blog

Today I installed Windows 7 on a MacBook 13″ Aluminum in order to do .NET development with Visual Studio as my Virtual Machine was getting slow. The experience was painful, first because I had to free a lot of space from my hard drive and second because Boot Camp 3.x x64 is not officially supported in my Mac.

I wanted a Windows partition with a size around 50GB so I had to free some space on my hard drive. After I got 70GB free I decided to start the Boot Camp assistant and to my surprise I couldn’t make it complete the first time due to an error: “Files cannot be moved…”. The only solution recommended by Apple was to backup everything and reinstall OSX and I was not happy so I decided to google for an answer until I found two that worked:

1. Free more space, I got 100GB free.
2. Defragment the hard disk with iDefrag

I tried the first one and it didn’t work until I did a quick (online) defrag with iDefrag.

After doing both steps I was able to create the new partition and install Windows 7 x64 and when I tried to install the Boot Camp drivers and utilities in Windows 7 I got another error saying that my MacBook wasn’t supported with any 64bits version, WTF? I had to run the BootCamp64.msi manually as Administrator from my Snow Leopard DVD and in order to update it I had to first decompress the BootCamp 3.1 Update and do the same with it.

Now everything is running fine even though my MacBook is “unsupported”.

I have been looking for an application to sketch the UI of an application I am working on and I finally have the perfect solution for me:

• Application – OmniGraffle for OS X.
• Stencil – Konigi.com OmniGraffle Sketch Stencils.

I am currently using the OmniGraffle trial version but I will definitely buy the commercial version as soon as the trial expires although I still don’t know if it will be the standard or pro version. This app is like Visio for OS X but better.

The Konigi.com stencils that I am using are not free either but the price is really cheap, only US$10 bucks. They have a free version but is not as complete as the paid one and it only contains one sketch stencil and a few others that are not really sketches. The customer service is also great as  yesterday I sent a suggestion to request a couple of controls that are missing and I received an answer today with the answer I was expecting – the controls are going to be included in the next version. I recommend these stencils for anyone that design/develop UIs and needs an easy and fast way to do draft prototypes.

I know I can use paper but I don’t like wasting it when I can do it in my PC and only print the draft when needed.

BTW in my previous work they should have used something like this instead of NetBeans which is what A&D used to create the sketches that we, the developers, received to start our development tasks.