"Emergency Kit" Production

Today when I was updating to macOS 10.12.4, and iOS 10.3, the first thing iOS requests after a major upgrade is to log in with one’s Apple Id. Which is of course located in my Codebook, which is not-yet-accessible …

Anyway, I was thinking, I need to create some kind of Emergency Kit, which I can print out and store in my safe at home or at work.

I can use a note field to tag entries I need with “Emergency Kit” but, it’s a pain to print them out for storage at this point, since I need to copy each part piecemeal. I can export the whole db, then search for Emergency Kit and print just those bits. But I’d rather not have my whole db sitting around in plaintext.

What about:

  • being able to Export only those selected? That way I can tag, search, select and export a limited subset of all my entries; just the ones needed for the Emergency Kit.
  • having some way to store a set of entries as a password protected PDF, or something.
  • simply being able to print an entry?

Any way to make this easier?

Kind regards,
Rick

LOL !

Yup been there done that – about 15 minutes ago.

Not sure what the workaround will be for the Catch-22 but I was lucky to have my iPhone w/Codebook and was able to enter my obnoxiously long passwords from the excellent password generator.

Sometimes I have to type them 2 or 3 times to get it right with all the special symbols - but ok by me.

My vote is to increase password generation from 32 to 50, or 100 chars - why not ?

It’s awesome !

1 Like

Hey @rickcogley

Thanks for posting with this feature request, we’re discussing a solution for this use case internally and i’ll post back here when we’ve got an update.

@jsmith

We’ve had a few requests for increasing the password generation length, but in general we’ve decided to leave it as is. A workaround for now would be to use the generator multiple times and paste onto the end of the password field. As you mentioned, occasionally we have to enter these randomly generated passwords in manually, and anything above 32 would be somewhat unwieldy. We’ll continue to consider increasing the length moving forward.

Cheers,
Micah

I would not look forward to having to manually type a 100-char password with symbols. But it might be fun to make border agents enter such a password, given the recent trend toward them demanding access to social media accounts! :wink:

@mmoore, really appreciate the attention to this concept, since it would be extremely valuable in cases like one’s death, or, giving access to one’s offspring in the case of dementia (of myself, not of my offspring!).

I think it would have real value for Codebook users, to be able to easily print out a set of records filtered on some string, for external storage. In fact, it’s such a simple and important concept, that I think there is an obvious marketing play here, for selling Codebook.

Had the same problem, but had it stored somewhere on a piece of paper- luckily.

So there are a few ways for us to provide a feature like this (I say like this because there are a few ideas in the above thread):

One, as noted, is to use the current selection (or the search results) in the Main Window as the list of records to export. This is complicated by the Views, however. The interface validations required add up quickly and become confusing because it may not be obvious what selections are and aren’t valid for Export.

Another would be to update the data model to support a flag like is_vital or similar, and provide some interface on each record for you to mark it as belonging in an emergency export / backup. The problem with updating the data model is that the app with the update will no longer be able to sync with previous versions of the app. We try to limit breaking changes like that to major version updates.

Finally, we have an interface that may already be suitable—Favorites. We often already have our most important records in there (e.g. Apple ID, Google Account), and it would be very simple to update our current Export feature to allow an Export of your Favorites list in either Codebook CSV or Plain Text.

Since we think this would be really helpful to have available soon, we’re rolling with the third option, which has the lowest impact and can be provided right now in beta. Please give it a shot and let us know what you think.

Yeah, thanks! I can confirm exporting Favorites works for this (and for me). Is there any way to specify the most critical fields that you’d want to print, be situated at the left in the CSV?

Kind regards,
Rick

1 Like

@rickcogley

Thanks for testing it out. We just released 3.2.3 this morning Codebook for macOS 3.2.3 Released which includes the export favorites functionality.

Is there any way to specify the most critical fields that you’d want to print, be situated at the left in the CSV?

Currently the fields are ordered alphabetically during export (after the Entry/Category/Favorite columns – Entry, Entry Icon, Category, Category Icon, Favorite).

Although I did notice that this sorting is currently occurring after escaping the field names for CSV (i.e. any field that has a space in it needs to be surrounded by quotes) so those fields are currently getting alphabetically sorted first. We’ve made an adjustment to sort the fields prior to escaping so it should be more consistent in a future update.

You should be able to manually move the “critical” columns using Numbers or Excel after export.

At this time, we don’t have plans to adjust this behavior, although we appreciate your feedback and will take it into consideration.

Cheers,
Micah

Thanks @mmoore. I’ll figure something out. I’m just happy to be able to easily get at these items so I can do something with it.