With an update out in the wild, I think it’s time to sum up the first three weeks in the life of My Secrets. I have received a lot of suggestions and questions which need to be answered publicly for those of you who did not find time to send an email.

First of all, I want to thank everybody who wrote. Your feedback was very constructive and sensible. As I promised in the previous post, it is your feedback that defines the direction the development of My Secrets is going to head in.

I admit, the feature priorities have to be tweaked in some unexpected ways. That’s good news for you. I’ll try to explain it all in more detail in a minute.

What’s New

The only major change in 1.1 is the template editor. You can now create your own templates and edit the built-in ones, albeit with limitations. The editor is available when you tap the plus button in the upper right corner. The important thing to remember is that notes created with a template are linked to that template. The template keeps the field names, their type and note icon. So if you rename a field in the template editor, the field will be renamed in all notes based on the template. Obviously, you cannot delete a template if there are notes based on it. This design is likely to change in the future to remove all the limitations.

Fixes And Improvements

• Credit card PIN/CVC codes were stored as numbers, so if your CVC began with zero, that zero was lost. The bug is fixed, but you have to correct the codes manually after updating. Sorry for that.
• Fixed a bug when the credit card type picker did not show the current card type.
• Fixed the window background losing its pattern in the folder name editor.
• Fixed the occasional crash when retrieving photos from the address book.
• You can now clear a field’s value with a button to the left of the field. In 1.0 you had to select the field, tap the clear button and tap Save.

Sync And Backup

This is by far the most requested functionality and I knew it all along. It’s still missing in 1.1, but I have an excuse. There are issues with transferring data between an iPhone and a computer for developers like me. Obviously, to transfer data you have to connect them somehow first. The options are:

• USB cable. In my opinion, it is the most user-friendly method because it does not require any setup and does not present security problems. It just works.
• Wi-Fi network. Your computer needs a Wi-Fi card and you have to set up the network.
• Remote server. Your computer doesn’t need a Wi-Fi card, but you still have to set up Wi-Fi on your iPhone and you have to trust the remote server.

The third option is immediately out of the question, because I cannot provide any secure server infrastructure and force you to trust it. The first one involves hacking Apple’s private frameworks and writing additional software for both Mac OS X and Windows. The second option is possible without any additional software, so I think I am going to have to implement an HTTPS server so that you can point your browser at your iPhone’s IP address and access the data.

As easy as the solution may sound, it requires some work to avoid security issues. I’m not sure I can provide a complete browsing experience in the next release, but I hope you will be able to at least back up and restore your notes. For now, use iTunes to backup the database.

In 1.2 you will also get the ability to email your notes. It will take a UI overhaul, which I’m very reluctant to do because increasing the number of buttons you don’t use every day leaves less room for other things on the not-so-big iPhone screen. I haven’t yet decided on the implementation I like.

Other Features

I’m planning to do a private address book. The reason why it’s not there yet is that it involves a lot of UI to work as expected.

To-do functionality has been in my plans from day one. The thing with it is that I don’t use any GTD tools myself, so I find it difficult to understand to the extent when I can present an elegant UI.

Audio notes and photos are waiting too. The prototype I made has some bugs and performance problems, the nature of which is hidden in the depths of Apple’s frameworks. I’m searching for workarounds and alternatives, so don’t expect it for another month or two.

I have a couple of other ideas which are too obscure to mention right now. You may hear about them after the above features are available.

Posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 15:11 under Announcements, iPhone.
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