Want a sneak peak at some of the changes to Passpack in the upcoming Beta 6? Here you go!
Tags
Thanks to all your feedback, we brought the tags up and on the right – they should be much easier to see and use this way. The screen was rearranged to accommodate:
(it’s a work in progress)
Favorites
You can star your most used entries to get at them faster. For those of you with hundreds of passwords, you can choose to load just your starred items when you startup Passpack everyday.
Let’s face it, most of us only use the same 10 sites everyday. By loading only these at startup, you’ll save many precious seconds of unpacking during sign in. Should you need one of your non-starred items – no problem, they’re just a click and a few more seconds of decryption away.
Not interested? No problem, it’s optional.
Security Level
One, two or three padlocks? You can choose the encryption level you prefer for each and every entry. The default is Passpack’s top AES-256 (three padlocks) encryption. AES-256 is strong, but it’s also fairly slow. For less critical sites, you may want to lower that to AES-128 (two padlocks) or for the really “who cares” websites go with xxTEA-128 (one padlock).
Again, if you have lots of passwords, you can save some packing and unpacking time by tweaking the encryption levels – one padlock is 20 times faster than three padlocks!
Can’t be bothered? Ok, just leave everything as-is and you’ll enjoy full AES-256 encryption on all your entries.
Undo Changes
This is my new favorite feature. Once you’ve made a change to any one of your entries, you can decide to press the Save All button, or to revert it back to the way it was.
How does this save time? Well, it doesn’t. But the change in architecture behind it does.
Currently (in Beta 5) all of your entries are packed up and are saved when you press Save All. In Beta 6, only entries that have been modified will be saved. That’s a huge chunk of time you’ll be saving.
(These icons are first-draft, we’ll likely change them)
Just ask, and I’ll answer.
Technorati Tags: Passpack, password manager, online privacy, privacy, security, lifehack, web2.0, tech, hostproofhosting
12 Comments
The undo feature is outstanding as well as the multi-level encryption. It will help people who have larger passwords lists to manage and use their passwords. Keep up the great work.
Awesome, can’t wait to try it out!
@srcasm – Thanks. I’m pretty excited too.
@Diwaker – Yup, we’re working on it.
Can’t wait to get my hands on this. Keep up the great work.
I hope that the new interface will be compatible with existing ‘packs’.
I love the tagging placement since I use tags religiously! Also, the favorites can be a great help to see the most used ones!
@Reedy
Yes, it should be… thought I’m not entirely sure what you mean. Can you rephrase the question so I can try and answer better?
@K-IntheHouse
Me too :)
Tara, I mean that I hope we will not have to type-in all of the entries again when we upgrade, because some users have 70, 80 or even more entries.
I suppose that if there were compatibility issues, this could be achieved by exporting from ver5 and importing the entries into ver6.
@Reedy
Oh no – that would be terrible!
Your account and all of your entries will be automatically updated the first time you sign in after we release the upgrade.
No retyping. Promise.
Very interesting! I am looking forward to the performance enhancements. With over 80 passwords saved, I have had some speed issues and it’s actually making me use Passpack less because I don’t want to wait for it. I have many less-than-critical passwords stored (isn’t that the point? :-) and dropping the encryption level for a savings sounds excellent!
It might make use on the Nokia N800 bearable, as well.
And favorites will definitely be beneficial. Actually, can’t think of anything I don’t like…can’t wait!
One question…will the new “lazy loading” of non-favorites affect one-click login for those non-preloaded sites?
Hi David,
Thanks, I’m looking forward to the enhancements too. I have 200+ passwords in my account, so I can sympathize with you.
On lazy loading, yes this will effect what’s loaded into the 1 Click Login mode. There’s internal debate here on how to handle that – so suggestions are welcome.
Cheers!
Tara
Interesting (one of my favorite words :-)
So, with the lazy loading, will it request the packing key again to expand all entries?
I don’t know enough about the internals (or especially the lazy loading, since I’ve not seen it), but I’d like to see this user experience:
When in one-click mode, it would be nice if just the URLs of all entries (not just favs) could be loaded so when a user hits Passpack It, it can still know that there are password(s) that could be used on the page. At that point I’m not sure if you’d have to request a packing key before allowing the login to continue, or if you could just take a little extra time to unpack that password in the background or what. What specifically are you debating? I might have a better idea if I know more. Feel free to email me if you’d rather take it offline (ironically, on blogs “taking it offline” means using email (most of the time), while in email “taking it offline” usually means…offline, as in on the phone or in person :-)
I do know that because I have so many passwords, sometimes when I have one-click turned on, I actually click the Passpack It bookmarklet to find out if I have that password stored already or not, because I can’t remember! So either my memory’s bad or I have too many passwords…maybe both?
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