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Last post Author Topic: OneNote now on Mac as well, +FREE everywhere, + Cloud service powered.  (Read 38152 times)

Innuendo

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The reasons for the Mac's apparent decline seem to hinge mainly on over-pricing (so reducing quantities sold as demand is price-elastic), an insistence on remaining a relatively closed black-box/proprietary system (so these two points led to fewer applications being developed), and considerably slowed forward technological development. The Mac thus appeals to a relatively narrow market nowadays.

The PC, on the other hand, seems to have evolved rapidly to generally catch up and then eclipse the Mac. It has become the lowest common denominator for computer technology. Especially important here is the growth in the domain of applications development - making the PC appealing to a relatively wide market. The PC has become a ubiquitous commodity with a progressively reducing price (in real terms) due to economies of large-scale production, produced to meet a correspondingly increasing demand (which is price-elastic).

Now it's time for Fun With Words!!! The rules for playing are simple. Just take the excerpt from IainB's response above and replace the word 'Mac' with the word 'iOS', replace the word 'PC' with the word 'Android', and the term 'computer technology' with the term 'mobile technology'!  Aren't words fun?  8)

It's a fascinating study in technological evolution.

Apparently, it's also a fascinating study in history repeating itself. :)

IainB

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@40hz: That was it - Aldus, not Adobe. Thanks.
...Apparently, it's also a fascinating study in history repeating itself. :)

Eggsaggerly. Evolutionary technology innovation/churn. A recyclable process that has no doubt made many people rich.
It was probably all Samuel Crompton's fault, when, in about 1779, he invented the spinning mule and spinning jenny, thus sparking the Industrial Revolution.
Made Britain what it is today..Oh, wait...

40hz

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I sometimes suspect my mother's father was correct. He felt that American technology reached its peak with the Model-T Ford and began going steadily downhill shortly after that. ;D

40hz

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@40hz:[/b] That was it - Aldus, not Adobe. Thanks.

Yep. Some of us remember Aldus.

page.jpg

free.jpg

I also left out the other Mac biggy: Aldus Persuasion - a "presentation graphics" program. (Programs are what we called executables before the term "applications" came into vogue). Persuasion was the undisputed industry leader which blighted corporate meetings with superfluous bar charts and bulleted text long before Microsoft released PowerPoint.

Persuasion.jpg

hqdefault.jpg

 8)
« Last Edit: March 23, 2014, 12:18 AM by 40hz »

IainB

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I sometimes suspect my mother's father was correct. He felt that American technology reached its peak with the Model-T Ford and began going steadily downhill shortly after that. ;D
I don't know about its technology going steadily downhill shortly after that, but its ethics, national integrity and support of the Constitution certainly might have, by all reports...

40hz

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I sometimes suspect my mother's father was correct. He felt that American technology reached its peak with the Model-T Ford and began going steadily downhill shortly after that. ;D
I don't know about its technology going steadily downhill shortly after that, but its ethics, national integrity and support of the Constitution certainly might have, by all reports...

I suppose it's only to be expected when you're dealing with a national schizophrenic condition brought on by the pairing of an aggressive global-mindset Executive Branch with an electorate that has a fundamentally isolationist and "live & let live" mindset. In this case, the public has unwisely walked away from what its government is doing - and the government has chosen to interpret (i.e. lie to itself) that the public's indifference (or disgust) over its behaviour is a green light to do whatever it wants. Knowing that's a lie further increases the level of aggression and paranoia on the part of this government.

And now the whole thing is feeding on itself. As the NSA/CIA debacle exposed by Snowden so clearly illustrates. When your own people are being viewed and treated as "The Enemy," something has gone seriously wrong.

I'm sure it will only get worse (much worse) before it starts getting better. At least if earlier US history is anything to go by. :tellme:

Sad really. "But there you have it," as Mark Twain once put it.  ;)
« Last Edit: March 23, 2014, 07:35 AM by 40hz »

IainB

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...I installed the Clip to OneNote button in my toolbar, and pressed that, after logging in to Live, and waiting for the desktop app to sync the note after clipping it, the result was this:
 (see attachment in previous post)
_______________________

At the time you posted this, I didn't have any idea what you might have done (to get the image placeholder with the red "X" in the upper LH corner), and couldn't reproduce it at my end.
However, I was reminded of your post when I had a heart-stopping moment the other day - all the images clipped to my largest OneNote Notebook appeared to be just that - i.e., the image placeholder with the red "X" in the upper LH corner.

Background:
__________________________________
This was after my HP ENVY 14 laptop (Win7) had died and I bought a new (refurbished) Toshiba Satellite L855 laptop (Win8).
As part of the process of migrating to the new laptop under Win8, I copied all my OneNote notebooks from the previous (Win7) laptop's drive/user directory to the new laptop's drive/user directory. This was a straightforward process, though it took a little time to copy across.

Previously, all my OneNote Notebooks had been client-based only, except for the free trial OneNote Notebook as per this discussion thread - that was on my OneDrive (was SkyDrive), and had appeared (been automatically synced) amongst my client-based OneNote Notebooks.
If I had had all my OneNote notebooks on my OneDrive in the first place, then I would not have had to worry about manually migrating them to the new laptop. So, recognising the value of having them accessible on the web and on any client I was using, and having read up on it to establish that the technology was very sound, I used the OneNote functionality to "move" all my client-based Notebooks to OneDrive. The location of the Notebooks then changed from a directory under my Windows User ID to https://skydrive.liv...edit.aspx/Documents/… and these all started syncing.

When the initial syncing had completed, I could open my Notebooks on my laptop whether I was online or offline, and could operate on the offline cached copies as though they were client-based, just as before. However, whenever I was online, syncing was active, and any offline changes/updates to the Notebooks promptly automatically synced to the Cloud. According to what I had read, syncing whilst online is incremental and in real-time (not necessitating high bandwidth consumption). It all worked a treat. Perfect.
__________________________________

After my heart had resumed beating, I did some frantic investigation/searching and discovered that:
  • (a) Not all of my Notebooks were affected.
  • (b) All of my Notebooks contents/images seemed to be intact, correct and available via access to the OneDrive on the web (Phew!).
  • (c) There were many forum posts about this problem where all the images in a OneNote Notebook had been replaced by image placeholders with the red "X" in the upper LH corner.
  • (d) In Notebook Sync status view, one of my Notebooks (the largest one, which was the one with this problem) seemed to be stuck in syncing and kept instantly restarting syncing as though it were making no progress.

From the forums, apparently this problem only occurred where you had the Notebook resident/synced on OneDrive, and it was apparently caused by corruption/failure problems in:
  • A: The client-based folder: C:\Users\[UserID]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0\OneNoteOfflineCache_Files
  • B: the client-based file: C:\Users\[UserID]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0\OneNoteOfflineCache.onecache

The recommended fix was to delete the contents of the folder in A and delete the file in B, and initiate syncing (it should start automatically anyway). So I went offline and closed down OneNote. I then moved A and B from their home directory to a backup folder, and created an empty older per A in the home directory.
Then I went back online and started up OneNote again and opened the problem Notebook. The image placeholders with the red "X" in the upper LH corner were still there, but, as I watched, they were progressively replaced with the correct images as the syncing fetched them to the client and rebuilt the deleted caches. Eventually syncing stopped/completed.
Folder A as moved to backup was 70.8kB
File B as moved to backup was 80.1MB.
The newly rebuilt caches were of the order of 665MB (!) and 80MB respectively.
Looking in the folder A, I found thousands of files which are actually image files (irfanview tells you this from the record header, and you can view the record header yourself to see that is the case), but with names and an extension like this: ff046756-6c2d-419f-a52f-575638a5560a.onebin

Conclusions:
  • The cause is corrupted/broken offline caches - possibly caused by an erratic or interrupted Internet connection interrupting the syncing process, resulting in incomplete caching syncs.
  • No data seems to have been lost, and this problem is thus not a showstopper.
  • The fix is as above, and a repeat occurrence could probably be avoided by ensuring OneNote Notebook syncing has completed before shutdowns.
  • It might be worth experimenting - I don't know - to establish whether breaking down very large Notebooks into smaller ones could make for a quicker recovery if/when this happens again. This would probably require a good understanding (which I don't have) of the actual syncing process.
  • Everything about OneNote (so far) seems to be rock-solid and reliable otherwise.