Sweet Home! can’t find the share? Use the IP.
by AndyMac

I love my Droid phone, but certainly one hassle with it that hasn’t been perfected is the need to physically connect to the computer to sync up data.

There’s tons of apps that will help you sync music, but until recently I hadn’t seen many that worked for the pictures and films you take on the phone, and certainly hadn’t seen one that worked automatically and was free.

Enter Sweet Home!

Now, I thought this was a great idea. I take pictures with my phone, and my wife is often complaining that I haven’t shared them with her quickly enough. Honestly, I just forget to sync up that part of the phone with any regularity. So with that in mind, I was pretty excited to get an app that would do all this for me when it detected I was on my home network.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I couldn’t get it to find my main computer. I’d had a similar problem connected my Ubuntu machine to my Windows 7 share points in the past, but didn’t know what the solutions was I’d used so long ago (and had since un-fixed).

I got in touch with the creator of Sweet Home! and we went through a couple rounds of questions and he finally found the answer. I needed to use the IP address of the computer rather than the computer name. For whatever reason, Samba and Windows 7 (or Vista, I hear) don’t play nice in some name resolving cases, and the resolution is to use the IP address!

So I set up the Windows machine with a static IP, pointed Sweet Home! at that IP, and voila! My files started downloading instantly.

I couldn’t find this tip online, so I thought I’d share it with all of you!

And if you haven’t heard of Sweet Home!, but want it, here’s the QR code: