We’re planning to do some preventative server maintenance tonight to ensure the reliability of our systems and the security of our customers’ data. At 11pm EDT on Sept 22, our various websites will become inaccessible for a short period of time (should only be 10 or 15 minutes, max). This affects our time-tracking system Tempo, as well as zetetic.net, getstrip.com, and getcodebook.com.

To find out exactly when this will happen in your time zone, click here. If you have any concerns about this, please get in touch!

There’s an updated version of Codebook in the App Store, v1.3.0, which fixes a bit of a nuisance bug with regard to timestamps.

For customers of our time-tracking system, Tempo, the web interface will be temporarily unavailable starting at 11PM EDT tonight, Wednesday September 1st.

Just a couple of small fixes, service should only be offline for a few minutes while we make sure nothing’s amiss. Reporting time entries via Twitter and Email will continue to function without interruption.

We’ve received a few requests recently to provide an online or cloud-based backup/sync solution for our password manager Strip, in particular as to whether we plan to add an integration with Dropbox, so we figured now is a good time to provide a statement with regards to what direction we’re going.

We do not have plans to provide an integration with Dropbox for Strip at this time. While we agree an online backup would a really cool and useful feature, we’re uncomfortable with tying a core part of the product to another service that might change without consultation. That’s not to say anything at all about the utility or stability of Dropbox (it’s a really useful service done very well), but decisions made at Dropbox will always be out of our control.

Any online backup would require that the database file be stored remotely in an unknown location, with unknown security risks. That scenario makes us and many of our customers nervous, so we are reluctant to move in this direction without serious planning and risk evaluation.

We’ll continue to investigate the possibility of an online backup for Strip, but in the mean time, Strip can be backed up to the desktop with Strip Sync, providing multi-device replication. Our implementation requires authentication, and the files are always encrypted and secured on your local computers.

A new update to Strip, our password manager for the iPhone, has been approved by the Apple iTunes App Store, version 1.4.8. This is mostly a bug-fix release for version 1.4.7, and makes the changes list below. While this is a minor update, all users are strongly recommended to backup their data and update to the latest version to ensure compatibility with future versions of Strip.

• Fixes crash on auto-save of Note during fast-app switching on iOS 4.
• Autosave is now enabled when editing Notes with a hardware keyboard.
• Displays GUID of data entities to facilitate sync support requests and debugging.
• Corrects icon display on import.
• Fixes a couple of NIB-related crashes introduced by iOS4.
• Corrects a typo in one of the dialog prompts.

More updates are on the way, but they’re still a few weeks out, so make sure you get the latest and greatest. [ Get it on iTunes ]