Chapter 9
Hot Syncing and Displaying The Game In It's A Hit! Desktop
Now let's Hot Sync the game onto your desktop machine and look at it in the It's A Hit! Desktop Application. After you install It's A Hit! the It's A Hit! conduit should be ready to run at the next Hot Sync. A quick way to verify that the It's A Hit! Conduit is installed and ready to go is to right click on the Hot Sync icon in the lower right of your Windows computer's task bar. When you do you get the Hot Sync menu. Select the "Custom" item in this menu.
When you select this item you'll get the following dialog:
If the It's A Hit! Conduit is installed correctly, it will appear as a line item in this dialog.
Now you simply connect your Palm device as usual and perform a Hot Sync. When Hot Sync runs it creates two files in your Hot Sync user directory named "Current.gms" and "Archive.gms". These are the files that the It's A Hit! Desktop looks for when it runs. Since we just Hot Synced the World Series game that we scored we'll now open it up in It's A Hit! Desktop.
The installer creates a new Program Group for you so you can find It's A Hit! Desktop by simply clicking on the Start Menu, Programs, It's A Hit!, It's A Hit! Desktop. When It's A Hit! launches you'll see the following window:
Now you simply click on the folder icon at the far left under the Game
menu to open up the current games (the games in the file "Current.gms").
When you do you are presented with the following dialog:
Double click on "World Series Game #2 - Home" then click the folder icon again, bring up the Game Selection dialog again and select "World Series Game #2 - Visitor". When you've opened both team's scoresheets, the Desktop application will look something like this:
You can use the Desktop application to zoom in, zoom out, print and move the games around between your current and archive game lists and to and from your Palm Device. More details are included in the User Manual including descriptions of each menu item and button in the application.
One thing that is worth mentioning in this tutorial is how to back up your data. Once you've invested the time to score a game on your Palm device you'll want to make sure that you back your data up to ensure that you won't lose it in case something happens to your desktop machine. Doing so is very simple. You simply navigate into your Hot Sync user directory and copy the file "Current.gms" to some external media such as a floppy disk or zip drive. Probably the easiest way to locate your Hot Sync user directory is to use the Window Find File utility. Here's a procedure to back up the World Series game that you just scored:
1) Click on the Start Menu
2) Click on Find
3) Click on Files or Folders...
4) Enter Current.gms as the file name
5) Choose My Computer for the drive to search which will search all
the drives on your machine
When the Find Utility finds the file make a mental note of the directory it is located in for future reference. Now you can use standard Windows file copy techniques to copy the file Current.gms to some external media. When you do you'll probably want to rename it to something more descriptive such as "WSeries98G2.gms".
You can aggregate many games into single file for archiving purposes and then back up the archive file. You do this using the "Move Games" tool which is the folder icon with two arrow on it. When you click on this item (or choose "Move Games" from the File menu) you are presented with the following dialog:
By clicking on the arrows you can move games around between your current
and archive files. Games in your current file are transferred down
to your Palm Device at Hot Sync time if they are not currently located
in it. Just as we described copying the file Current.gms and putting
a renamed version of it on some external media, you can aggregate several
games in the file "Archive.gms" and back it up as well. We recommend
doing a procedure similar to one of these on a regular basis to make sure
that you do not lose any of your data. We also recommend that you
don't keep all your games in your Palm device either. Since It's
A Hit! Desktop provides a convenient way to work with your games, you should
move your games over into your Archive and back it up on a regular basis.
This way you have only a handful of games on your Palm device at any time
which speeds up the It's A Hit! Palm application and your Hot Sync operations.
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