I decided to finally make the jump to some sort of information manager after a talk I had with someone at work today. When working for so many companies , managing so many devices, and being a member of so many web communities it is almost impossible to remember login information, IP information, and random other notes about every installation, web site, etc. I started looking for a solution where I could at least store devices, I could access this information from anywhere (at least on my Touch), and it was secure. I was pleasantly surprised by SplashID which will allow you to store all sorts of information in all sorts of ways. The best part is that when it boils down to it this information is going to be more secure in a solution like SplashID, which uses encryption that tops banks, versus being spread through out various notepads, documents, emails, and other places on numerous computers and possibly even on paper.
SplashID will allow you to store pretty much anything depending on how you organize it from Drivers License info, to Web Site information, Network Data, etc. You can create various templates and then enter information from there. The best part was I originally was going to do all of this on my iPhone and sync to just my desktop however they also offer an online solution so you can sync between the web, your iPhone, and your PC. Now I will be able to access this information from anywhere and nobody else will have access to the data except for me. If I lose the password then all of the data is lost.
So I downloaded the SplashID application from the iTunes App Store, installed and started entering some data to test. Next I downloaded the Windows iPhone Desktop application to sync to my desktop but that is where I started running into issues. The iPhone (in my case Touch) would not find the PC it was supposed to sync with. I tried everything that I could think of all the way down to creating an Ad-Hoc network for one to one communication but the iPhone would still not find the Windows desktop. Finally I remembered I had customized my Windows services recently and basically stripped everything down so a minimal amount of services were running on the computer. Sure enough I looked at the Windows services and Bonjour, which is required for the communication, had been disabled. Below there are some tips to verify Bonjour is running on your Windows PC to provide the ability to sync SplashID.
- Open Services: Click Start and select Run from the pop up menu. Type services.msc into the Run window and click Enter. This will open the Windows Services window.
- Verify Bonjour: Scroll down until you get to Bonjour and make sure that it is first off not disabled. Next make sure it is set to start automatically and last make sure that it is currently running. All of these settings can be modified by right clicking the service and go to properties.
- Sync SplashID: Now start SplashID again and attempt to Sync.
In my case it found the desktop in less than a second and I was able to successfully sync. SplashID is a really cool product and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to consolidate everything into one secure solution that uses 256-Bit Blowfish Encryption. In addition to Blowfish Encryption SplashID also uses Government approved AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) as an extra layer of encryption on key data. They also use numerous other security features such as SiteKey to verify your account when logging into the SplashID product.
