If you use a Mac with multiple monitors, you’ll no doubt have noticed the distinct absence of the menubar on anything other than the main monitor.

Of course under the System Preferences you can designate on which monitor your menubar sits, but you are not able to duplicate the menu bar over multi monitors (without using a mirrored display).

However now there is a solution in the form of a promising new app called SecondBar which addresses the issue.

It’s early days for the app at the moment, but it is already stable enough for regular use, and well worth a look if you’ve been grappling around for a second menu.

Every now and then you come across a piece of software so simple and so brilliant that you can’t believe that nobody has come up with it before. Connectify is one such piece of software.

Picture the scenario: I’ve just moved into a new office and for some reason that nobody seems to be able to explain it’s going to take two weeks to get my broadband connected. To say that’s a pain is an understatement.

So as a temporary measure I went out and bought a PAYG 3G dongle from T-Mobile. I didn’t want any ongoing contract as once I get my broadband online I doubt I’ll use it, but at the same time I didn’t want to shell out over the top for PAYG top-up data fees. Shopping around I managed to get one from the high street for £39 with 90 days unlimited usage (although a fair usage policy still applies for obvious reasons).

Plugged it in and boom, instant internet, and with pretty good speeds too. Brilliant. However, I have three computers in my office (a Win 7 laptop, a Win 7 desktop, and an iMac), and I could really do with accessing the internet on more than one of them at once, otherwise my productivity over the next couple of weeks is going to be somewhat hampered.

I already had a fixed network between them using static IP addresses so I can access my network printer, so my thinking was that I could share the dongle-based network connection between the other computers. Hmm, nice idea on paper, but a day and a half later mucking about with ICS and Ad Hoc networking I gave up.

Then today, as I was browsing around for something else, I stumbled across Connectify, and within five minutes my problems were solved.

Connectify is an ingeniously clever piece of software which sets up an Ad Hoc network and shares your internet connection over it, all within a couple of clicks. All you need to do is install it, give it an SSID and a WPA2 password and you’ve got a wi-fi network, ready with internet access ready to share amongst whoever you choose. The very best bit about it however, is that it is free.

I installed it on my Win 7 laptop, configured the options and then turned on Airport on the iMac, and seconds later had full internet access on both machines. Simple and seamless.

Hat’s off to the guys over at Connectify. Go grab yourself a copy now.

http://www.connectify.me/

I’ve been doing quite a lot of Windows Mobile development lately coupled with SQL Server Compact 3.5 and the thing that struck me pretty quickly was how shabby the actual Microsoft tools for the job are.

Whilst you can open an SDF database in Management Studio, you can’t edit the data, or script it or do anything useful really. Using Visual Studio is a little better, as you can at least edit the data, but annoyingly despite telling VS to remember the database password, it never does.

One of the most infuriating things that I came across recently is the fact that you can’t change the order or the names of the columns once you have created them. So if you get something wrong, you have to delete the column and add it again. Shabby.

So after a bit of searching around I came across a whole range of tools devoted to working with SQL Compact databases. Most of them do a fair job, but the best one by far in my opinion is ExportSqlCe.

ExportSqlCe is an add-in for Management Studio 2008, which allows you to script out the schema and data from an SDF as well as viewing and editing the tables. Put simply this is what Management Studio should have been able to do from the off. The best bit about it is that it’s free and open source.

So if you work with SDF files, head over to CodePlex and grab yourself a copy.

http://exportsqlce.codeplex.com/

One of the things that has been niggling me with MonoDevelop – and to be fair it’s more an issue with the Finder – is that by default it’s difficult to run multiple instances of it. It’s always useful to have more than one solution open when you want to compare or copy and paste code from one project to another.

A quick search on Stack Overflow found a nice simple solution, which involves kicking off the app from the terminal using -n to tell the Finder to run a new instance. But being lazy, I can’t be bothered typing stuff unnecessarily, so a quick solution is to wrap it in an AppleScript app wrapper.

Fire up Applications > Utilities > AppleScript Editor, type in:

do shell script “open -n /Applications/MonoDevelop.app”

Then select File > Save As, on the save dialog change the File Format to Application and save it somewhere safe (not in the applications folder), using the name MonoDevelop.

Then for a nice finishing touch, go back to the Applications folder and click on the MonoDevelop icon, press CMD + I to bring up the Get Info screen, click on the application icon in the top left of the screen and CMD + C to copy it.

Go back and find where you saved the AppleScript file, bring up the Get Info window with CMD + I, click on the application icon and paste in the MonoDevelop one with a CMD + V.

Then all you need to do is to drag the new AppleScript app to the Dock and you have a quick and easy way of firing up multiple instances of MonoDevelop.

Following on from the post about iPhone development using MonoTouch and C#, I thought I would point out the fact that at the moment MonoTouch doesn’t support Visual Basic for iPhone development. Mono and MonoDevelop themselves do support VB, but just not for iPhone dev just yet. The MonoTouch team say it is on the roadmap, just no date as of yet.

So where does that leave the Visual Basic developer? Well, if they want to write iPhone apps using the .NET framework, then needing to learn some C#.

For many VB developers, who came to .NET from VB6 (and below), stepping up to a fully object orientated language and the .NET framework was tough enough to grasp, let alone taking on dealing with curly braces as well. Whilst VB.NET is not the same language as VB6, Microsoft did a pretty good job at smoothing the upgrade path for developers (certainly with VS2005 and .NET 2.0 upwards anyway).

Many developers will probably have some exposure to other languages, such as PHP, JavaScript, or even Java (remember that?), all of which would make learning C# a bit easier, but if you haven’t then don’t worry too much. If you know the .NET framework, then you’re already halfway there.

Read the rest of this entry »