Air Connect [was] offline

UPDATE: we neglected to update this post, but the outage was fixed a few days later. All has been good since then.

Our Air Connect servers have been offline for several days and will be offline for several more. Our sincere apologies to to Air Login users and Everydisk backers.

Here’s what’s going on. First, some background: Like our Air Login app, Everydisk uses the Air Connect server as a gateway to connect your local devices with your remote devices. For the Everydisk beta, we had planned to have a separate Air Connect server running in parallel with the regular Air Connect. In retrospect, that’s what we should have done. But when we got to the end, we thought it would be trivial to combine the two and avoid an annoying extra transition for our beta testers. (Seriously, “It will be trivial” must have its own chapter in the Famous Last Words book, just after “Hey Mom, watch this!”) Anyway we did the integration and thought we were just flipping a switch and making the Everydisk beta go live, but we discovered upon doing so that the current Air Login app was still pointing to the old server. So we just needed to quickly change the Air Connect URL in Air Login to point to the new one, and we’d be good. (“It will be trivial.”) But what we had forgotten that Air Login was built with an older Apple SDK, and we needed to bring it up to the latest. But it didn’t build anymore. And so on. But meanwhile the Air Connect server is still down.

Anyway. Some days later, we have now finished the Air Login app and are testing and preparing to upload to Apple. The server is ready to go as soon as the new Air Login is approved by Apple and available for sale in the App Store. At that point, we will flip a whole mess of switches and release the new Air Login app, the new Air Connect server, and the Everydisk beta.

So that’s all embarrassing and we apologize profusely. We plan to give some free time to all of the Air Connect subscribers when this is all behind us.

But there’s some good news: the new version of Air Connect will give all of the Everydisk features to all Air Login users. That means that if you have installed Air Connect on two Macs, you will be able connect from one to the other to do remote file sharing, screen sharing (VNC), and command-line (SSH) access. Even if your other Mac is behind a corporate firewall or has a dynamic IP address, and without using a VPN. Hopefully it will all have been worth the wait because it will significantly ease the headaches of working on more than one computer.

Thank you all for your patience! We’re almost there.

Dave