Wed
Aug 27
7:33pm
Things Touch syncing, my home WiFi network and Airport Extreme
Things Touch 1.1 was released a week or so ago via the App Store. And lo, there was much rejoicing in GTD land, as the 1.1 update delivered seamless syncing via WiFi with the Things Desktop application.
Except that I couldn’t get it to work.
I had the latest version of Things Desktop installed, and the latest version of Things Touch on my iPod. I followed the instructions for setting up sync - but it gave me nothing. A donut.
So off I tootled to the Cultured Code / Things forum, where I noticed that whilst around 10% of posters were having similar problems to me, 90% were happily syncing their little hearts out. That frustrated me, obviously. I asked a few questions, responded to a few answers, and tried everything to get my syncing to work. In no particular order, I:
- uninstalled and reinstalled both apps.
- restored my iPod and reinstalled the Touch app
- disabled my MacBook’s firewall
- added Things to the firewall’s list of incoming services
- added my Touch’s MAC address to my WiFi router
- rebooted my WiFi router
- disabled security on my WiFi router
- rebooted everything, multiple times
- tried various combinations of all of the above
- and so on
Once or twice I managed to successfully pair the Touch with the Desktop app, but the joy of sync only lasted 10 minutes or so, at which point either no further syncing occurred, or the Desktop app showed me an “unable to sync” message.
Four hours is a conservative estimate for how much time I spent trying to get Things sync to work. @#*%!!! I’ve got better things to do with my time.
For the record, my home WiFi network was run from a Belkin Wireless G Router, with a second identical router set up as an Access Point in a different part of the house. Ignoring the fact that it took me almost two days to set that up properly (thanks for nothing, Belkin documentation people), my Touch, MacBook, Windows laptop and iMac have never had any problems accessing the internet or talking to each other. The nifty Remote app on my Touch could control my iMac’s iTunes library, I could easily fileshare between the MacBook and iMac and PC, I could print from the MacBook and the PC to the printer connected by USB to the iMac, etc. etc.
Yesterday I decided to take the somewhat extreme step of ditching my Belkin routers in favour of an Apple Airport Extreme + Express set up. (I wanted one anyway so that I could hook up a USB hard drive, get AirTunes going, and upgrade to WPA security from WEP, but Things sync was the tipping point). I also bought a Lexmark WiFi printer.
Literally 15 minutes after getting Airport home it was all working perfectly. Seriously. It took me longer to take the Airport Extreme out of the box than it did to get a new wireless network going and to set up Things syncing. (The WiFi printer took a bit longer though - when are Apple going to make a printer?)
I really don’t consider myself an Apple fanboi. But I will tell anyone who asks me about their stuff that not only does it look and feel good, but it simply works out of the box. You’ll even enjoy setting it up and taking it out of the box. Detractors always say that Apple stuff only works with other Apple stuff, but in my experience Windows stuff only works with Windows stuff, so what’s the difference?
The lesson I’ve learnt? If your core machine is a PC, don’t buy Apple stuff. If it’s a Mac, don’t buy PC stuff. Note that I’m talking about hardware here. The days of file compatibility problems between Macs and PCs are long gone … if you’re using recent software.
I’m off to sync some stuff. ;-)