Tonight’s updates just went online. There’s a laundry list of minor updates and tweaks, but below are the two primary improvements.

(In case you missed it the first time, connect to the preview at https://m.passpack.com – and leave any feedback in the dedicated forum)

1. Passwords List Pagination

Yes, you can now view more than 15 entries at a time [wink].
Go forth, flip pages, and be merry!

2. Big Steps Ahead in the People Tab

We’ve completed the profile page for the single profiles in your People tab. You can also manage inviting new people, checking their invite chat history. And – for those of you who haven’t done so yet – you can now activate secure sharing directly from your phone.

Connect to https://m.passpack.com
Found a bug? Report it in the mobile preview feedback forum

Remember, this is a work in progress. We’ve still got a few glitches, a couple of bare spots and some items to tick off the to-do list. Here’s a quick run down…

What You Can Do Right Now

• View, add and manage your passwords
• Send secure messages, and read your archived messages
• View and (partially) manage your shared users & groups
• Update most of your account settings

If you’ve set up your mobile favorites, those will be unpacked for you as soon as you login. This will save you lots of memory cycles on your itty bitty device. If you don’t have any mobile favorites yet, then nothing will be unpacked – no worries just click the Unpack all link, or select a tag to unpack entries little by little.

What We’re Still Working On

• Shared user & groups are mostly functional, but still pretty bare bones
• Autologin still in progress
• Sending and receiving passwords via the email encryption deactivated
• Bulk edit & group management not available yet
• The navigation needs polishing (hint: to go back, click on a tab)

We’re also working on a really cool feature to access your account quickly… without typing a complicated Packing Key.

Supported Platforms

The preview has been tested so far on iPhone’s native Safari and Opera Mini as well. Safari is decidedly faster.

Feel free to try it out on your Android or other smart phone and let us know how it goes. Please remember that only phones with browsers fully supporting javascript will work.

Chances are the entries you want to most often access from your smart phone are different than those you most often access from the web (for example, that dang PIN you can never remember while standing in front of the ATM).

No problem, you can set certain entries to mobile favorites so that they are the first ones to load on your phone, instead of your starred web favorites. You don’t have to choose whether an entry is a web or a mobile favorite. It can be both.

Be Fashionably Early

It’s great! It’s groovy! It’s… ready before the mobile version itself?!

Yes it is. We’re releasing this a tad earlier for those of you who adore being the first on the block to get organized. Here’s where to go to play:

1. Entry Window > Options tab > favorites selection
2. Password List > click on your favorites icon
3. Bulk Edit > Apply an Action > Add or remove from favorites

Local vs. Sync-able Entries

In the entry window in Passpack Desktop, tick Set as local entry only if you’d like the Synchronization procedure to completely ignore the entry. That means it will never be available on your Passpack.com account… unless of course you decide to untick that option in the future. [smile]

Whenever you create a new non-local entry, or make changes one, that entry will be clearly marked with a TO SYNC label in your list. Go to Tools > Sync with Passpack.com to synchronize all changes.

What Syncs and What Doesn’t

Any changes made online can sync down to our Passpack Desktop account. Generally, the entry data can be synchronized from Passpack Desktop “up” to Passpack.com. However not all, all, all changes made in Passpack Desktop will sync back to Passpack.com.

Here are the three exceptions for Desktop -> Online sync:

• Whether or not the entry is a favorite
  This is pretty useful since you usually have a totally different set favorites on the desktop as opposed to online. With the upcoming mobile version release, we’re making some changes to how favorites work, so we’re leaving these untouched for the time being.
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  If you have set up your favorites separately on the two platforms, you might also want to deselect the favorites checkbox  under Tools > Sync with Passpack.com to keep them from being overwritten during a synchronization.
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• The entry tags
  Passpack entries, and Passpack tags use two completely different databases – so this is a technical limitation, at least for the foreseeable future. Again, if you have set up your tags separately on the two platforms, deselect the tags checkbox  under Tools > Sync with Passpack.com.
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• Deleted entries
  This is mostly a precaution. If you want to permanently delete entries from your Passpack.com account, you must do that from your online account. Got it? Ok, let me restate that… if you delete an entry from Passpack Desktop – but not from Passpack.com – the synchronization process will plop it right back into your Desktop account.

Give Us Your Feedback

If you choose to download and try the release candidate, please leave feedback. Thanks for the feedback. All seems to work well, so it’s now an official release. Cheers!

Alas, this is a feature is causing panic with Gmail’s  ”Suspicious Activity” alerts. So we’ll be removing it as an option in the near future. Read this Help Center article for more info.

If you have already set up your Gmail as a 3rd party login option, you may continue to use it if you wish. Alternatively, you may choose to switch to Google friend connect.

Since the April update, our database is showing no new entries have been corrupted. While corrupted entries are rare (0.03%), we’re happy it’s become even rarer. This time we’ve buckled down on recovering shared entries.

You may experience some more alerts the next few times you log in. This is because the system is recovering entries which it had previously not been able to recover. Read more in the help center.

What Happens With Shared Entries?

We understand that you share passwords with clients and partners and have attempted to keep the recovery as silent (aka painless) for them as possible.

Technically, only the entry owner can “recover” a damaged password entry. If you have shared an entry with someone, and that someone’s copy got damaged, it will temporarily disappear from their account. The next time you login, your account will silently fix the entry on their behalf and re-share it. At that point, it’ll reappear in their account.

Your Data is Always Encrypted

Undoubtedly one of the reasons you’ve chosen Passpack is because you know our data-privacy technology is top notch. What you may not know is that all of the data in your entry – name, username, notes and even tags, not just the password – is fully encrypted. The whole shabang.

We’re proud to be able to offer you this level of data privacy, though sometimes it comes at a price. For example, if an entry can not be recovered, the system has no way of knowing which entry it is. It knows the internal ID (ex. 67.711), but not, for example, the name you gave it.

This is why the alerts will tell you how many entries need to be recovered, but not which ones those are. Passpack doesn’t know.

Are Any Entries Unrecoverable?

Alas, yes, it can happen – though really, really, really rare (0.006%). If you’ve been diligent in making your personal backups, or use Passpack Desktop, then you may still have some options open to manually recover that entry.

Which reminds us… now is as good a time as any to backup your passwords. Do it as often as you can.

Dollars & Cents

Here’s an interesting stat. On any given month, between 75% and 80% of purchases come from the U S of A. Over in the help center we also get an overwhelming number of requests for pricing in Dollars.

We had considered maintaining separate price lists for different currencies, however the conversion rate is never quite perfect – tell the truth, would YOU want to buy something that costs $12.666666? Or pay a higher, rounded-up price? Not me!

As of now, our premium pricing has been fixed to the US Dollar. We’ll deal with the uneven fractions conversions so that you don’t have to.

Passpack is a European company so your invoice will “officially”  indicate the price converted into Euro based on the current conversion rate supplied by Paypal. For your accounting convenience, the USD price you paid will be noted as well.

You can download a copy of your invoices from within your Passpack account under Account > Billing & Invoices.

Free Trials & Money Back Guarantee

You no longer have to test Passpack with a free account only. You can now sign up for a 15 day free trial directly into any one of our premium accounts. No credit card needed to sign up for a trial. We’ve also extended the money back guarantee to 30 days. In total, that’s 45 days to change your mind. We’re pretty sure you won’t!

Website Redesign

We did a pretty major overhaul of the website – contents and design. You’ll definitely want to check out the new Who’s It For pages. These are great for when you’d like to suggest Passpack to someone – just point them to the page that best suits them, and you’ll have a lot less “why this is so cool” explaining to do [smile].

Also, the link to your Passpack Sign In screen is in the upper left corner of every page. However, by bookmarking https://www.passpack.com/online/ you can save yourself a click.

Fixes and Tweaks

• Streamlined the password suggestions in the entry window. It’s now located directly under the password field when it’s unscrambled.
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• Your password history in the entry window used to be available only via a keyboard shortcut. We’ve now added a link just below the scrambled password field.
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• Moved the Go button in your entry window to make space for a longer Link field, and to match the icon in the password list.
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• Trick: click and hold for a half-second (slow-click?) any name in your password list and you’ll be able to edit it inline without having to open the entry window.
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• We’ve removed the time limitations on archived secure messages. They won’t disappear unless you delete them yourself.
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• The auto-save will now wait two seconds before kicking in. Why? It’s less intrusive when you do a lot of small, quick changes. And for those with an great reflexes, you may also be able to hit “undo all” before the saving kicks in if you realize you’ve made a mistake.

Perhaps the most important part of this release is the invisible stuff.

• In preparation for future (top-secret) developments we’ve optimized some data-formating. Your account will be silently updated.
  .
• Bug fixing on Groups.
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• Fixed some of the false positives in the automatic entry recovery.

As always, let us know if you stumble across any issues.

In the past, when signing into Passpack via Twitter, you were asked you to supply your Twitter username or email and password during sign in. That’s now changed, and you simply need to press Sign in with Twitter.

This is a required upgrade as the previous method, Basic Auth, will no longer be supported by Twitter in the fast-approaching June 2010.

Please Update Your Passpack Settings

Only under one specific circumstance you will need to change your Passpack 3rd Party Login settings.

If…

1. You use Twitter 3rd Party Authentication
2. You previously used it with your email instead of Twitter screen name

… then please contact us for instructions on what needs to be changed.

You guessed it, that’s Passpack’s very own CTO Francesco Sullo looking very suave and Magritte-esque. Notice co-founder Tara Kelly (me) is down there in the corner looking cranky for having been upstaged [wink].

And on TV…

Luckily Passpack was recently featured on news tech spot on Rai 3 as well (Italian, requires Silverlight). Good thing that time I got to do the interview… or I really would have been pouty about the big glossy Glamour shot I missed out on.

Some more news

So since we’re already horn-tooting, The Small Business Idea Generator, just featured Passpack as a “Cool Tool” and a couple of weeks ago, we spotted a raving review by super-momprenuer-blog Mothercraft.

Any other recent buzz we’ve missed? Or should we just be thanking our lucky stars that glamorous webworkers worldwide are finally waking up from their password nightmares and getting hooked on password management?