For the past 5 years most of the development of Panorama X has been done on my Late-2011 17” MacBook Pro. This model has a known design defect that causes the logic board to fail. Those of you that participated in the Panorama X classes may recall that the logic board on this computer failed just a day or two before the first class was scheduled, and we had to delay a week. The logic board also failed in 2013. Fortunately Apple had a special program because of the design defect and in both cases they repaired it at no change (new logic board).
With this background you won’t be surprised that over the weekend, the logic board in this computer failed again. Apple’s special repair program for this defect has expired, so I’ve ordered a new MacBook Pro, which is scheduled to arrive in 5-8 days. In the meantime, I’m using an 11” 2010 MacBook Air.
In the long run, this should have little effect on the Panorama X project. The old computer was sitting idle when it failed, so I believe both the local time machine backups and the cloud backup we use are completely up-to-date. (If it came down to it, I could also remove the internal drives and put them in an external case, but I don’t think that will be necessary.) So once the new computer arrives I should be able to restore and pick up right where I left off.
In the short run, however, I’m not going to try to restore the backups to the MacBook Air I am using as a stopgap. So that means that for the next week or so I won’t have all the information at my fingertips that I usually have, including the source code for Panorama X. So I may not be as able to answer questions, and definitely won’t be able to fix bugs. Fortunately the 0.1.031 release went out right before this happened, and seems to be working fairly smoothly.
As it turns out, I was planning on writing documentation this week, and I can do that on this MacBook Air (and did quite a bit of that yesterday). So I’ll get back to that now, but I just wanted to keep everyone appraised of the situation.
Jim Rea
President, ProVUE Development