It was all very easy when you had one iPod and one computer. But what do you do when you have an iPhone, 4 iPods, and three computers in the same household? Can you sync multiple computers to one iPod or vice versa?

There are various third-party applications to allow an iPod to sync with two different computers or to sink the library of two different computers together, but I’m going to talk about how to do it the Apple way…

If you have one computer, you can synchronise any number of iPhone’s or iPods to that computer. Just plug them in and when prompted say yes, I’d like to sync this ipod to this computer. If you select your iPod in iTunes, and select the Music tab, and then under settings select the “Entire music library” option, all the songs on your computer will be available on all your iPod or iPhones. Also, any songs that you purchase from iTunes on your iPhone will be synced back to your computer, and then passed on to the other iPod or iPhones. If for some reason this does not work, if you control click (left button click) on your iPhone in iTunes and then you will find a special menu item to manually transfer the purchased items across.

In other words syncing between multiple iPods and iPhones to a single computer works really well.

Going from one iPod/iPhone to multiple computers is more of a problem. If you have the “Entire music library” sync option checked, you can only sync your iPod or iPhone to one computer. This seems to be Apple’s way of stopping you pirating songs from one computer to another one.

So the Apple way of doing things is to choose which computer each iPhone or iPod will be synced with and just sync it to that one computer.

If you have two computers in your house, and you want to share your music between them, you simply have to go to your iTunes preferences and turn on library sharing as follows (this is with Snow Leopard) :

This will share all the music from one computer to any other computers on the same network – but both computers need to be turned on WITH ITUNES OPEN! This can be a bit of a downer if one computer is happens to be out in your study and it is your main one, so Apple have an option for you to transfer purchases from one computer to the other.

On your second computer, go into iTunes, turn on sharing, and your iTunes library should appear on your second computer like this:

There will be now two new buttons on the bottom right hand side of your iTunes library that control the copying of songs from your first computer to your second computer. The buttons look like this:

You can manually import songs by selecting the song and clicking on import, or you can automatically import purchased songs by clicking the settings button and selecting them:

Once you have this syncing working, you don’t need to have your first computer on to access the songs that were purchased on it. Of course you will have to make a decision as to whether you want all the songs from your first computer transferred across to your second one and taking up valuable hard drive space, or whether you want to manually transfer just some of the songs across.

SUMMARY: You can sync multiple iPods and iPhones to one computer and all the purchased songs will transfer across automatically. You can share libraries between different Macintosh computers. What you can’t do is synchronise one iPod or iPhone to different computers. If you don’t have snow leopard, you can do everything mentioned above except for the sinking of iTunes purchases between computers. The import and settings button were only added to iTunes in snow leopard.

Yesterday Telstra turned on internet tethering for the iphone! (I think they are the only carrier in Australia to do this.)

Tethering is where you use your iPhone as a wireless modem to connect your computer to the web. It’s useful if you are out with your laptop and you don’t have access to the web. Just plug your iPhone into your laptop via USB and it acts as a wireless modem! Here’s how to get it going.

1. On your iphone go to Settings General Network and if tethering is available with your mobile carrier there will be a pane called internet tethering that looks like this:

Turn it on. Tethering is now enabled on your iphone.

If you don’t see this – go to iTunes when your iPhone is connected and click on the ‘Check for update’ Button to download the new Carrier settings from Telstra.

2. Plug your iPhone into your computer via the USB cable. When tethering is on  you’ll get a message like this:

Click on network preferences and iphone will become your modem like this:

You should now be able to surf the web on your laptop. Your iphone will light up like this to show you are tethering.

Speed is great, ping a bit slow… (Make sure you are on a big data plan!)

NOTE: For other carriers (Optus, Vodaphone etc) you can do this too, click here to get the configuration file. (THis is not yet working for iPhone software 3.1 though.)

Here is an iPhone ringtone I made based on the 1980′s Dr Who TV theme.

Right click here to download.

1. Double Click it to put it into itunes.
2. Sync your iphone
3. Select it from settings/sounds/ringtones.

I’ve had a few goes at getting a browsing pack for a Telstra pre-paid iphone, it took a while for Telstra to work out how to get it going, here’s how to do it.

1. Purchase the Telstra pre-paid Next-G SIM card, and get Telstra to put it in your iphone.

2. Purchase a datapack. Do this first or you will waste all your credit on expensive data rates! You do this by sending an SMS that says browsepluspack10 to 1257587

3. Turn off WIFI and try to access the web via safari. Your phone will give a message that says ‘could not activate cellular data’.

4. Ring the Telstra general number, 125111, and say to the computer lady ‘Next G mobile phone” Hopefully the computer lady will say ‘Was that Telstra Next-G mobile and Communic8′ – you are on the right track.

5. If you happen to talk to an operator they may suggest you ring prepaid (1258880). Do not ring pre-paid, you will get put to call centre who have no idea how to fix it. Ask to be put through to Next G mobile.

6. Ask if you are talking to Telstra Next G, if they say no, HANG UP AND GO BACK TO STEP 4!

7. When you are talking to a Next G person, you are almost there! Let them know you have an iphone, and you need it activated so you can access the data network. They will place an activation code on your account that let’s the network know it’s an iphone, you need to turn your phone off and on again, and now it will work.

There is no way to directly ring Next G.

This post is obsolete now – Telstra have just launched great new iphone plans with the iphone 3G S release.

MobileMe doesn’t achieve this. iCal shared calendars via itunes doesn’t achieve this. After much experimenting I found the best way is through Google calendar.

Google calendar allows editing and viewing from iCal on your mac and from your iPhone, plus you can let anyone else edit your calendar if you want them to. So Google calendar becomes the hub. Here’s how it all works:

STEP 1. GET A GOOGLE CALENDAR ACCOUNT.
You can set up a new calendar in Google at http://google.com/calendar

STEP 2. SYNC ICAL WITH GOOGLE.
Google has released a program called calaboration that will automatically put all the settings for your Google calendar into iCal. Download and run calaboration. It looks like this, you just select the calendars you want to add into your iCal account.

STEP 3. SYNC IPHONE WITH GOOGLE

If you have iphone version 3 you can just use the built in CalDAV to access your Google Calendar. Go to Settings then Mail, Contacts, Calendars then Add Account then Other then Add CalDAV Account.
You’ll see a page like this:

Enter the settings for your google account here and that’s it!

NOTE – More than 1 Calendar.
If you have more than one Google Calendar you’d like to sync, you need to copy the URL of the calendar from ical across to your iphone. To do this, AFTER you have used callaboration to put the google settings into ical, go into ical, preferences, Accounts, Server Settings – it looks like this.

You need to type that URL into the ‘Advanced Settings’ – ‘Account URL’ of the Calendar on your iphone. It’s quite a long text so the easiest way is to copy it from ical into mail, mail it to your iphone, copy it out of mail and paste it in.

NOTE 2: Old iphone software.
If you have iphone software version 2 you’ll need to use Nuevasync. You set it up in your iPhone as a Microsoft Exchange server that points to Nuevasync. You can sync directly from google to iphone but all the calendars come across as one calendar. To choose which colors the calendars are on the iphone, you need to enable them one at a time from neuvasync, checking the iphone calendar each time, and they will import into the iphone in order of the following colors: red (first calendar) , orange (2nd) , blue, green then purple. eg the first calendar you enable will be red, and so on.

Well as great as the iphone is, the software is laggign a fair way behind and calendar syncign is one example.

After many hours, here’s a solution I found to sync multiple calendars across different computers, with anyone being able to edit the calendars, and see them on your iphone as well.

1. SET UP A MASTER CALENDAR Your master calendar needs to be in google (not on your mac). So create a google calendar here. Because I wanted to share it among my colleagues and have them edit it, I created a special goggle account just for this calendar. After you create the calendar you can export your existing  events from your mac as an ics file  and import them into google calendar.

2. SYNC IT TO ICAL Download a little google application called ‘Calaboration’ from here which will add your google calendar to ical. You will need to enter your google id and password. You will need to run Calaboration on any mac you want to access the google calendar on.

3. SYNC IT TO IPHONE Your iphone can sync to google calendar via the ClaDAV option on the iphone. Google is basically being an exchange server that your phone syncs to. The instructions are here.

I have a newer post about this here.

Aa good storage system for IDEAS is essential.

Today the iPhone companion app for my fav desktop notes app – SOHO notes was released.

First, the good…

It has a very nice,  easy-to-use interface, including a nice search feature.

Then the not so good…

It doesn’t  have an automatic synchronisation feature like almost every other iphone app. You have to manually go into the preference window and click on the synchronise button!

If you have a note in Soho notes that has pictures or different fonts in it, the moment you edit it in notelife your pictures disappear and so do the fonts. It doesn’t even make a copy of the original notes – you have just lost all that information forever. So it’s only really useful for editing notes that are plain text notes.

SUMMARY:

A great way to access your SOHO notes on the iPhone if you have SOHO notes.

It’s not the one-solution answer to everything.

I’m beginning to think that somehow this is a limitation by apple because so many apps have come near but not quite made it. How hard can it be to have an app that lets you take notes, in different fonts, add a picture, and sync to a desktop app?