{"id":15076,"date":"2015-06-11T09:10:50","date_gmt":"2015-06-11T16:10:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2015\/06\/11\/15076.html"},"modified":"2015-06-11T09:10:50","modified_gmt":"2015-06-11T16:10:50","slug":"thanks-to-matt-at-things-custo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2015\/06\/11\/thanks-to-matt-at-things-custo\/","title":{"rendered":"Thanks to Matt at Things tech support"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I've been using the task-list-management app Things<\/a> since 2009. It's far from perfect, but it's the only to-do-list software that I've managed to keep using for more than a month or so.<\/p>\n

One of the things I like about it is that it has an iPhone version that syncs with the Mac version. But a few weeks ago, the iPhone version stopped working. It would start to sync, then get to a certain point and crash.<\/p>\n

I sent email to their tech support people, requesting help. The guy who responded, Matt, did a really excellent job of providing support; I complain so much here about bad customer service experiences that I thought it was worth posting a note of praise.<\/p>\n

Over the course of half a dozen emails and several weeks (my delays, not his), Matt was incredibly patient with me, despite my complaints, and very helpful, and friendly, and polite, and a couple of times he gave me detailed technical answers when I asked specific questions or made suggestions.<\/p>\n

He knew exactly what the problem was: there's a bug that causes sync to time out under certain circumstances when your “Logbook” (the archive of checked-off and canceled tasks) is too big. (Mine went back five years, and had something like 10,000 items in it.) He told me a way to work around the problem: export the Logbook to a PDF. I use the Logbook for historical purposes, to figure out what I've done and when; unfortunately, the PDF export didn't include all of the info in the notes on items, so this wasn't sufficient for my purposes.<\/p>\n

He told me that there were two other options: I could use an unsupported short-term fix (with the help of a third-party application), or I could create a separate copy of the Things database that contained only the Logbook, and then I could open that whenever I needed access to the Logbook. I opted for the first option; he guided me through using iExplorer to copy the database from a working device to the iPhone. Unfortunately, in the meantime I had tried various things I thought might work, leading to his approach not being workable. (I'm pretty sure it would've worked fine if I hadn't tried to fix things myself.)<\/p>\n

So I asked about the separate-copy-of-Logbook option, and he sent me an amazingly good set of instructions. Step by step, precisely accurate, showing exactly what I needed to do, carefully setting things up in each step in a way that would avoid problems later. Really excellent tech writing.<\/p>\n

I managed to still mess things up, by accidentally skipping the very first step. (Feel free to remind me of this next time I bemoan people's inability to follow instructions sequentially.) But I had a Time Machine backup of the relevant files, so I restored from backup and followed the instructions again, and this time everything went perfectly. And now Things works on all my devices again, and I still have access to all my old archived items when I need it.<\/p>\n

So here's a public thank-you to Matt at Cultured Code. Way above and beyond the call of duty; very much appreciated.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been using the task-list-management app Things since 2009. It’s far from perfect, but it’s the only to-do-list software that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[76,35,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-customer-service","category-customer-service-demon","category-software"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}