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 ]

Updated: 6/6/2012 This blog post is out of date, and the software referenced in it, Strip Sync, has been discontinued in favor of Strip for Windows and Strip for OS X.

As many of our customers have already noticed, we’ve made Strip Sync for Mac OS X and Windows generally available. It serves as a free a companion utility to Strip 1.4 for iOS, the first version of Strip to support our new Sync feature. More accurately, Strip supports multi-device replication, allowing you to safely replicate your data across any number of devices¹. Strip is the first password manager we know of with this kind of awesome and lightning fast sync system.

No longer will our dear customers be relying on and subsequently let down by iTunes for backups and data recovery. Every time you sync your device with Strip Sync, a backup copy of the local database on your desktop is taken for you. You can revert to any of your backups at any time, and the sync service also provides authoritative data restore.

Strip Sync also provides CVS import and export. This allows you to export your database to a spreadsheet that you could print and store in a safe. It also allows you to bulk load new entries, and in the case of the Mac OS X version, you can do bulk updates as well (e.g. export the existing database to spreadsheet, make edits, and import the same sheet).

Now that more folks are seeing what Strip Sync is – or rather, that it’s not a full desktop port of Strip, thus the qualified name – we’ve been getting questions about a full desktop port. We’re working on it! It’s next on the list, Strip Sync had to come first. You can expect minor updates to Strip Sync in the next few weeks as we make some minor improvements (and add bulk-updating to the Windows version).

I should add that there a ton of other improvements to Strip itself in the 1.4 upgrade (free for those who’ve purchased Strip already), including improvements to the display of data, the ability to work with stored data quickly (copying, launching, etc), and better performance to boot.

With regard to iOS 4, things are looking pretty good so far. We have no plans at the moment to take advantage of new features in the SDK just yet, as our primary concern is stability and compatibility. We do have upcoming improvements planned for the 1.4 version of Strip and if any bugs pop up we should be able to address them in forthcoming updates.

¹ When we have a chance, we’re going to post an article about how this works and the technology behind it. Ditto, the replication library, will be made available as open-source software, as was done with our encryption engine SQLCipher, in order to facilitate peer-review and to encourage future innovations from other developers.

Imagine how cool it would be if we had this for the iPhone? Says Github:

For all you Android developers out there, we now will automatically detect when you upload an Android package (.apk) file and will give you a QR code page link on your download page list…. Now you can scan that with your Android phone to automatically download and install that package.

As a hacker, that makes me straight-up jealous. I ordered my iPhone 4, but I’m not going to lie, I sweat this stuff.

Alexis Rondeau tells me that you need to configure the Market app to allow this behavior explicitly. I’ll take it.

Last night we delivered an update to Tempo, our time-tracking service, called Macross. The previous release version had been named Voltron internally. The reason for naming them, beyond internal version control and tracking, is that we want to start providing some more communication going forward about what’s on the road map for Tempo, and having names for the releases makes it a bit easier.

In any event, Tempo release Macross went into production last night. It brings a number of badly needed performance improvements and runs off the latest and greatest stable version of Rails (2.3.8) AND gets us off Ruby 1.8.6 (now we’re on 1.8.7). In particular, users with very high numbers of projects and users will be happy to know that the management screens are way faster thanks to implementing some over-due pagination. There’s still a lot more optimization we’re planning to do, and we’re starting to consider changes we might make to the UI on the Projects and Team screens to make them more useful, in particular for our larger account holders. If you’ve got your own ideas, please get in touch and tell us what you’d like to see.

Another important update in last night’s release was switching our Twitter API interaction over to OAuth from HTTP Basic Authentication, due to their upcoming switch-over on June 23rd now-postponed conversion to OAuth. Whenever they do make the switch, Tempo will continue to scoop up your time entries via direct messages to @keeptempo.

Macross, named after the TV show Macross and the SDF-1, is mainly a stepping stone, to move us off some really old tech and to better position us for further infrastructure upgrades and service and UI improvements. This is now the current version of Tempo.

The next release, Macross Plus, is currently shaping up. The biggest thing I want to tackle there is moving Tempo to Rails 3; we anticipate that this will deliver some really great performance gains, as well as make on-going development far easier. We still need to firm up the list of other improvements and features that will be in Macross Plus – it will likely remain in flux, so it’s not a contract, but I will post it soon.

Updated: 6/6/2012 This blog post is out of date, and the software referenced in it, Strip Sync, has been discontinued in favor of Strip for Windows and Strip for OS X.

Update: Fixed bad link to the beta sign up.

As many of our customers have noticed, Strip Sync is still in beta (you can sign up here). We have a few finishing touches to work out and a final set of builds to run through the beta before we declare it official. Y.T. has to update the documentation, as well. We are planning to do a public release early next week.

I’ve just pushed an update to Strip Sync for Mac OS X (0.2.2), that we hope is a good if not final release candidate for that version. An update to Strip Sync for Windows is on the way to resolve many of the data import issues that were discovered in the last build (turns out that an MSFT data adapter was behaving somewhat badly, and we’ve got a fix on the way). This next update of the applications also provides a minor bug fix for multi-device replication.

Both the Mac OS X and Windows versions of Strip Sync automatically check for signed updates, so you should only need to run the software and you’ll be asked if you’d like to download the latest and greatest.