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Discussion and FeedbackPlease provide your general questions and feedback below, or review documentation pages and post questions/comments there. For private communication, please email us at
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To clarify…
You mention elsewhere that the database stored on your servers is always encrypted, is transmitted encrypted to my browser window, then decrypted in the browser. (And, I assume, after changes on the browser, is then encrypted before synchronizing back to your server.) Thus the only times the database is actually decrypted are (1) when it has been decrypted by the browser (which shouldn’t be a security risk after the browser is closed, right?) and (2) always on the iPhone.
My question: How easy would it be for an expert to take a lost or stolen iPhone and access the ThreeTags database (which, as I understand it, is decrypted in its native state on the iPhone — only encrypting the data when it is transmitted to your server). Obviously, this can’t be done by just plugging the phone into a USB connector to a desktop, but are there other ways to do so? I’m just a little nervous that only a passcode is preventing people from viewing my unencrypted database. Should I be nervous?
Hi David,
iPhone 3gs has built-in encryption that is supposed to protect user data if the iPhone itself has a passcode set up, but there were reports of the mechanism being easily circumvented by a “security researcher”. Apple might have fixed the hole since then, though.
Thus your concern is valid: a lost iPhone with ThreeTags can be a security risk.
That might be a deal-breaker for me, since I intend to use this with a 2nd-generation iTouch with no whole-device encryption (however faulty it might be). It would seem that a nice enhancement would be for your iPhone app to re-encrypt the ThreeTags database when the app times out, is manually closed, the Home button is pressed, or the iPhone times out. I don’t know how feasible that is, though.
Or perhaps the upcoming OS 4.0 will offer encryption on other than the 3GS iPhone? I didn’t hear that announced however.
Anyway, I want to say thanks very much for the super-quick, honest, informative, and technically not-dumbed-down responses to my several questions this week. Your customer service (and, for that matter, interface design) is the best I’ve found in this market.
I’ve been using ThreeTags for a couple of days now. Excellent work. I’ve been looking for a good note taking system that works on both my desktop plus my iPhone. That, plus your flexible hierarchical organization (vs. the tags or the enforced organization that many others use) is what won me over.
I do have a couple of questions, concerns, and comments. These might be due to my lack of familiarity (it’s only been a couple of days), but here they are.
1. I’m having trouble creating new hierarchies on the iPhone. When creating a note on the desktop, I can easily create a whole new hierarchy from scratch by simply typing the tags separated by a colon in the Tags field(e.g. “new1:new2:new3″). That doesn’t seem to work on the iPhone. It won’t accept the colon.
So instead I have to type “new1″ and hit done. Then I have to hit the Add “+” button, add “new2″, and make sure I put a checkmark next to “new1″ before I hit done. And often times, if I’m too slow, “new1″ has already disappeared from the list before I even get to add “new2″.
Is there an easier way to add new hierarchies on the iPhone?
2. Is there any way to do note sharing with a business partner? I guess we could create a separate shared account that we both could access, and I could just log in to either my personal account or my shared account. But if we do this, how on the iPhone do I log out of one and into the other. I can’t seem to find the “logout” or “login” options.
3. I’m concerned about scalability and access time. About how much data can I reasonably store in my account? Is there a limit? And is there a way to see how much data I’m storing now? As I store more data, will the access time at first login, during sync’ing, and as I retrieve notes to use them get longer and longer?
4. It would help to know more about your company and about the people involved. Putting a “face” (or faces) on ThreeTags would raise my level of trust in the product. You cover the technical details really well on your site. I’m a former software engineer with 11 U.S. patents for Internet technology, so knowing the details helps. But let’s see the people behind this, plus tell us more about the company (even if it’s just a one person company), so we have an idea of the stability.
5. For now, text notes are fine, but do you plan on allowing other data types to be stored, or to allow us to attach files?
I agree with the person who suggested a yearly fee option, but I disagree with him that it should be low ($40 a year). I’d rather see a HIGH yearly fee if it ensures my data is available 24×7, kept safe, and has fast access times. For example, QuickBooks charges around $40 a month for their Plus service. While my ThreeTags data won’t be quite as important as financial data, I’d be willing to pay somewhere around that, since I’d like to expand ThreeTags using in my small business.
Thanks in advance for your help.
- Al
Hi Al,
Thanks for your feedback! Our responses below.
1. There is no easier way to build tag hierarchies on the iPhone, sorry.
2 and 5. We are working on storing other kinds of data (particularly file attachments), and on data sharing. No ETA yet.
3. The online service is fully scalable, and login/access time does not depend on the amount of data stored. The iPhone app’s performance will become slower with more notes added if a limiting filter is not applied. The first sync on the iPhone can take several minutes if you have a lot of notes. All further syncs are incremental. Setting up offline access with Google Gears will also take some time initially when a lot of data has to be stored locally.
Internally, we use accounts with more than 1000 notes in them on a daily basis, and we are not aware of any performance/scalability issues other than the first iPhone sync mentioned above.
4. We would not have started ThreeTags if we were comfortable sharing our personal information online. We are not alone here – see, for example, TrueCrypt. We might change this approach later, when we have paid premium service.
In summary, we understand that our current service is limited in its usefulness, and we are working on expanding it to include more data types (files, contacts, etc.) and secure sharing.
Best regards,
ThreeTags
Thanks for your answers. However, I had a more important problem today with the ThreeTags iPhone app.
Yesterday, I made some changes to a note on my iPhone. I had WiFi sync’ing turned on, and I’m fairly certain (but not totally) that after I made the changes, I saw the note had sync’d.
Today, in my browser, I pulled up the same note, and made some more changes. I saved the note, but as I saved it, I noticed that yesterday’s iPhone changes weren’t there.
So I started the iPhone app, and tried to click on the note. The iPhone app shutdown immediately after I clicked. I tried several times, but clicking on the note made the iPhone app immediately shutdown.
So I went back to the desktop, and made another change to the note (changed the name and tags), thinking the iPhone would resync and get the latest note. I brought up the app, it resync’d, and yes, the iPhone had the new title and tags for the note in the list.
But every time I clicked on the note to open it on the iPhone, the app shutdown again. I tried clicking on other notes and the same thing happened. I could open the notes in the browser, but not on the iPhone.
I tried a number of things on the iPhone – removing the filter, manually hitting the resync icon and waiting for it to complete, making sure I was signed out of the browser before start the iPhone app. I tried these things one at a time and in combinations, but nothing made a difference. A click on any note would cause a crash.
The last thing I tried was going into settings and disabling online syncing. That just made things worse, as you can see in this video:
http://www.al-simon.com/video/ThreeTagsiPhoneProblem/IMG_0035.3gp
It would loop like that non-stop, and I couldn’t click on anything or find a way to get it to stop. I finally had to uninstall the app and reinstall it to get things working again.
I’m now back up and running.
Additional info: This wasn’t the only time something like this happened. On Saturday, I got the iPhone app into a state where clicking on a note would cause the app to crash. But it only lasted for a minute at the most, and then everything was back to normal.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what I did to get it into that state on Saturday. I was freely editing both on the iPhone and in the browser, so I can’t describe the exact steps that put me in the state. And as I said, it righted itself after about a minute or so, so I didn’t give it any more thought.
Thanks,
Al
Hi Al,
re: iPhone app crashing: is your iPhone jailbroken? If yes, this is most likely the reason. If no, we can try to find out the cause and fix the bug. In your video, I could not see the looping message – could you, please, send us what it says? Please use our email (published at the “about” page).
Thanks,
ThreeTags
When will a ThreeTags for Android App hit the Market? Would be really cool…
No, the phone isn’t jailbroken. It’s a 16GB 3GS purchased directly from the Apple Store and not modified in any way.
I don’t remember exactly what the message said, but looking at the video and reconstructing from memory, here’s what I see. At the top it says “ThreeTags”. I think the first line says “Cannot synchronize with”. Second line can’t tell. I think the third line is “Please check your settings” (though settings might not be right) and I don’t remember and can’t see the fourth line.
Hopefully that’s enough to help you identify the error message.
My app also keep crashing, when writing new notes and when trying to synchronize… I have a jailbroken 3.1.3 3GS, there’s problem with the jailbreak? If yes, it’s something it can be worked around?
Cyrus: can be related to your jailbreak. You can try completely removing the app and re-installing and re-syncing. May help.
Thank you for your support. I did the following:
1) Deleted and reinstalled the app.
2) Created a self made ipa from the .app folder and installed it with Install0us.
3) Moved the .app folder to /var/mobile/stash/Applications and changed permissions to 777.
No one did the trick. The app works in all scenarios, but everytime i try to add a notes, to synchronize, or to apply a filter, it crash…
Hi
I notice the recent news about the expiry of your iPhone developer licence. Has this affected the ability of the app to synchronise with the website? I can no longer do this from my iPod Touch – whenever I attempt to synch (which I do manually), the app crashes. I was using ThreeTags a lot a few months ago and it was fine. I updated to V 4.0 of the o/s and downloaded the ThreeTags update a couple of weeks ago, and since then it hasn’t worked. It’s not been jailbroken.
Thanks
Greg: we are sorry to hear that.
Unfortunately, we cannot test ThreeTags on the new OS (4.0), as all our iPhones, fully paid for (~$900 each), are very pretty paperweights since we moved from Toronto to NYC several months ago (the iPhones are locked to a Canadian provider). And of course we cannot simply renew the expired Apple Developer licence as we are now not in Canada, we need to do the whole paperwork cycle again.
With bricked devices and no licence we are shut out of the whole iPhone development process by Apple itself. Otherwise we would have definitely continued supporting ThreeTags on the iPhone.
Best regards,
ThreeTags dev. team
Hi
Thanks for the reply. Your office move has clearly created a lot of issues for you. I don’t want to add to your troubles and I certainly don’t want to complain about a free app, but it would be really good if you could update some of the pages on this website to alert people to the situation – for example, http://support.threetags.com/docs/threetags-iphone-app/ Obviously, the app still works, but the synchronisation doesn’t.
I wish you all the best in your new home. I’ll keep watching this space, as they say.
Regards
It seems that the Sort button is disabled on the “all notes” view. Is there any reason for this?
Riccardo: the sort button is disabled when not all notes have been downloaded for the current view, as notes cannot be sorted on the server due to encryption.
Notes are downloaded in “batches/pages” of 40. So if the current view has more than 40 notes, sorting will be initially disabled. To enable it, download all notes by pressing “Download all notes” button top right (under “sign out”).
Best regards,
ThreeTags
Thanks so much… sorry, I never noticed that button!