Memorial Holiday Update
It’s been a little while since we’ve given any updates on the goings-on here at Zetetic, so a wrap-up is in order.
Apparel!
First, some fun: there’s a brand of clothing apparel in Taiwan that shares a name with us. Accordingly, we need to print some rad t-shirts of our own. I could use a thuggin’ trucker hat for FutureRuby:
FutureRuby
We don’t attend that many conferences, but we’re looking to change that. And last year’s RubyFringe was just fantastic. It’s hard to describe, but they’re not kidding: it’s a conference for Rubyists, not a Ruby conference. FutureRuby looks just as promising, and Stephen and I will be there. If you will be, too, make sure to say hello! This is what we look like.
Tempo
“You gotta tame the beast before you let it out of its cage.” ~ Derrick Zoolander
We’ve undertaken a massive design and interface overhaul for our time-tracker, Tempo. Designed by nGen Works, it’s supra-suhweet, and near complete. We’re hammering out final issues with styles and cross-browser compatibility, and hope to offer a beta test to our users very soon. Hopefully we’ll have this live and out of beta by mid-June.
Strip for iPhone
Our encrypted data vault and password manager, Strip, and the accompanying Strip Lite, have been submitted to the iPhone App Store for review! We’ll let you know when it’s out there, and we plan on offering vouchers to our beta testers for being such a great help. It will be launching with a ton of great features, and it’s been heavily tweaked to make common operations quick and easy. Assuming we get through the approval process without refusal or pocket rejection. Fingers crossed.
We still have to work out a solution for users who want to bring over their Palm Strip databases. One of the reasons we haven’t provided a quick hack just yet is because this requires a secure solution. In fact, it probably requires a desktop-based solution. We’ve got a lot of people asking for a desktop version of Strip that syncs with the iPhone version over a local network connection. That goes hand-in-hand with our development road-map; we intended to provide some back-up/sync capability in the next major revision of the app. So I think it’s time to get cracking. Hopefully if you’ve been waiting for an exporter, you won’t mind waiting just a bit longer. In the meantime we’ll see if we can update Dave Dribin’s strip-dump to support Palm Strip v2 databases (currently it only supports up to v1.1).
SQLCipher
SQLCipher is our fork of SQLite that provides page-level database encryption. A lot of people are asking us how to compile SQLCipher in an Xcode project in order to use it in iPhone apps like we’re doing with Strip and Codebook. We’re putting together an article that we’ll publish soon documenting the process step-by-step. In addition, Apple first required that we go through a munitions export approval process with the Department of Commerce and the NSA to get our app reviewed at all. That in and of itself is a really complex process, but we’ve got documentation on that, too, describing how to crank it out. We’ve even got some Google docs we can re-use for filling out the paper work quickly. So there’s lots coming in this area, stay tuned!
Open Source Development
Steve Kradel recently posted Zetetic.Chain to Github, a .NET implementation for the Chain of Responsibility design pattern.