Sunday night a slightly restyled Passpack rolled out, along with a new Passpack It! button improvement, and a bunch of other stuff under-the-hood.
Restyling
Perhaps the most visible of the changes. We’ve been steadily adding features for the past year without any re-designs, so we’re now working to declutter the interface a bit. Let in a little fresh air.
For the moment, we haven’t actually moved anything on the screen, we’ve just set the stage. Expect to see continuous tweaks over the coming weeks and months. And, of course, if we move something, we’ll let you know where it went [smile].
Auto-login, Reinstall Your Button
The most significant changes are here, with your Passpack It! button. If you haven’t been already, you’ll soon be prompted to reinstall it.
The new button will work on approximately 30% more sites thanks to some tweaks we made to the handling of websites using certain jQuery plugins on their login form – previously they failed, now we support them.
If you’ve had problems training a login form in the past, you might want to try again now. We’ll continue to wheedle away at them too.
More Auto-login
Beyond the performance of the button, we were able to work in additional Host-Proof Hosting support to the auto-login process. In short, this explanation of a proxy server for key exchange now only applies to browsers that do not support HTML5 (aka: older browsers).
Bug Fixes
We had numerous minor improvements and fixes. Too many to list. But if you’ve written into help in the past month or so about a bug, have a look again. It may be fixed now (and if it isn’t we’re still working on it).
There are still plenty more coming too.
More Under the Hood Stuff
Behind the restyling is the beginnings of a complete CSS / HTML refactoring (aka: we’re cleaning up the code that runs the site, not just what you see on screen).
Down the line, this will chip away and load times and make Passpack everyday a little faster. Some people say it feels faster already. Maybe it is magic [smile].
3 Comments
passpack has become so slow! every time I make a tiny update to one of my entries, the save takes forever. Everything in the same instantiation of IE is unavailable (all other tabs) and there is no progress indicator to tell me if the save is working or if IE is locked up.
I have IE 7.0.5730.13 on XP SP3 running on an IBM Thinkpad T60 (Intel Centrino Duo T2400 – 1.83GHz) with 2.5GB RAM
please help – I may need to abandon passpack if simple updates take so long.
@Vinod – The problem is most certainly IE. It is more than twice as slow as other browsers (with Chrome the absolute fastest!). So sorry, but there’s not much that we can do about that. I’ve heard the latest versions are faster.
If you have a lot of entries, you may want to set up favorites and only load those to speed things up. Here’s how that works if you haven’t set that up yet:
http://help.passpack.com/knowledgebase/idx.php/0/143/
Hope that helps!
Tara,
could you publish your intentions to Internet Explorer? I can accept that Chrome is faster and I can certainly install it on my home and laptop computers. But Chrome is not authorized in my workplace so I’ll continue to have to use IE for half my passpack accesses.
By the way, I do use the favorites and that is helpful. But if I need to go to any entry outside my favorites (such as to update notes or the http link for a non-favorite item) it takes forever to save the update. The unpacking process is helpful as it shows the progress (“xx of yy entries unpacked”) but any subsequent save, whether under bulk editing or single tiny updates takes forever with no progress indicator…so I don’t know whether I should expect to wait 3 minutes or 10. The big issue in this is that every instance of IE whether a tab on the same window or a separate IE is locked – preventing me from doing any other browsing or work using IE. I have found increasing the IE priority in task manager to help speed things up but I’m not pleased with having to do that.
Could you add a progress indicator for the save/update process?
Could you separate the processing for a passpack operation from other IE activities – of course I could accept a longer time for a passpack save/update in exchange for letting me do other IE things.
Could you publish your future intentions towards IE? – for some of us IE is the only option.
-Vinod