Codebook Development Update - Dec 2021
Happy Holidays from all of us here at Zetetic! Time for another update on what we are working on for Codebook Password Manager.
This fall’s version 4.4 update appears to have been quite a success, and the amount of problems identified and support tickets we’ve needed to respond to since has been remarkably low considering the high impact of the changes across all four platforms. All that testing paid off! But time yields the proof, and it appears that the version 4.4 series has been one of our most stable releases.
Thus, last month we had a nice opportunity to pause and consider how to wrap up the year for Codebook. We decided to focus on a few short-term improvements to Codebook on Windows and on iOS, some of which will address long-standing feature requests, others which we’ve wanted to make for a little bit now.
Codebook for Windows
We are working on adapting the Codebook for Windows user interface to the new look and feel of Windows 11. The main window and some ancillary views are getting some refreshed and more modern controls (for instance, the Preferences window will now be using a NavigationView instead of the classic windows tab control for switching between groups of settings).
And–we already have it available on Android, iOS, and macOS–Codebook for Windows is getting Dark Mode support! This has been a popular request and we’re quite happy with how it looks so far. There’s a glimpse of our Dark Mode support in progress towards the end of this demo of the updated Preferences window:
Codebook for iOS
Time for some love for the iPad!
We are finally implementing support for Multitasking (running in split-screen mode). This is no small amount of work, as we need to re-work some of the locking behavior (you can’t use Codebook alongside another app if it automatically locks when it’s not active!) and provide a better experience visually when Codebook is not taking up the iPad’s full screen. When the app is used in half screen or smaller form factor, we switch over to the tab bar UI that you’ll be familiar with from iPhone.
We’re also improving hardware keyboard support for the iPad! This includes new keyboard command shortcuts for common operations that match their equivalents on macOS (for instance, ⌘L is available to Lock Codebook), and support for keyboard navigation and focus.
Another improvement we’re making here is the ability to drag a field’s value out of Codebook and drop it into another app, providing another convenient means of copying an email, password, or TOTP code into another app you’re using.
Have you seen this alert?
Finally, while we’re in here we’re working on some bugs that have been a little tricky to track down based on the crash reports we get from Apple. We’ve fixed a few already, and you may have seen in the most recent update for iOS that we’ve added a new error handler for crashes that allows you to contact us directly with information about the crash. If you get this alert you can go ahead and keep using Codebook, our apologies if it has come off as overly alarming. In the next version we have toned it down a little, and adjusted the action button title to Send Report (as it wasn’t clear previously that’s what we intended with the Email Support button):
Thanks to all who have sent these reports in so far, we really appreciate it! It’s a big win to be able to interact directly with the people experiencing a bug that we haven’t yet reproduced ourselves (the reports we get through Apple are understandably anonymized.)
Beta Testing
We’re just about ready to start beta testing these changes. While they are considerably lower-hanging fruit than the recent addition of the Image Attachments feature, they are still pretty significant changes and we could use your help beta testing them. If you’re interested, and you’re not already set up to receive Beta updates of Codebook, please sign up here!