/epsilon Public Preview

April 01, 2024

We are very proud to announce the Public Preview of the brand new /epsilon version of our Password Manager application.

Heritage

Clipperz Online Password Manager has been online since March 2007.

Since then, the application went through a few major revisions:

  • /beta, the very first public version

  • /gamma, a version that we never really officially released, even if the UI was great, thanks to the help of Taddeo. It took us a LOT of effort to build it (thanks Marco for the help!) but when we were getting ready to release it, we realized it was almost unusable on the new touch devices that were being released; so we got back into crunching mode and started working on /delta.

  • /delta, this is the current version of the application, online since July 2015 whose UI has been designed together with Roberto and its implementation finalized with the help of Dario.

One little technical detail that we have been very proud of, is that all these three different applications are just different ways to access the same data, managed by a single backend system; this has allowed us to provide a very smooth transition to our users.

Reboot

A few years ago we realised that the code base of the application was getting harder and harder to work with.

So we decided to fully reboot the project and work on a completely new implementation of the application, that would –hopefully– become the new base on which to build new functionalities that we were never able to implement in the previous code base (eg. “sharing”, something we have been thinking about since Clipperz own inception, but were never able to finalize).

So we started nurturing our new development team and we are finally ready to share the outcome of the great work that has been done so far.

Enter /epsilon

The new application is build using a completely different stack: instead of Javascript and Java, we are now using PureScript for all the frontend and Scala 3 for the backend code.

The strongly typed nature of both languages lets us build code in much more confident and robust way; it took some deep rethinking on how the whole application logic is structured, but we are very pleased with the current outcome.

The initial focus for the new application was to be just a clone of the previous version; and we did manage to make it look and feels just the same, so much that we had to pick a completely different color schema (still not finalized) in order to be aware of what version of the application we were actually using.

/epsilon new color schema

In order to avoid weighting down the new application with all the intricacies of the previous ones, we are asking our users to migrate their data to the new application. Being all the data encrypted, there is not much we can do to help with this transition.

Fully open source

The original Clipperz backend, written in Java, was never publicly released; we had some initial thoughts on making some money out of it; when we realised that that was not a viable option, its code was already encumbered with some legacy parts that would have been very hard to relase with an Open-Source license.

We had an interim solution with the PHP backend, but that was always ment to be just an option to play with the code locally, and not a fully fledged deployment option.

The new Scala backend code is now available in the public repository, with a full open-source license AGPLv3, just like the PureScript code for the frontend.

This is the same backend powering the online version of the service we are providing.

Status

We have long been thinking about sharing the new version with our users, but we had a few major issues that made its use too cumbersome. Since a few weeks we have been using the new application daily, and although there is still something missing, its current status is pretty bearable.

But it’s still a Preview; if we hadn’t use Greek letters to name our main versions, we would have called its status alpha.

Data stored on this new version are still at risk, so DO NOT store your valuable data only on this application. We have put a flashing warning on top of the application to remind everybody that it is just a Preview.

We have found a way to easily synchronize our internal tracking system with GitHub, so but it is possible to track the status of the new developments here.

The time we have available to work on this application is still pretty scarce, so we do not have a solid timeline to finalize its release.

Feedback

Any feedback on the new application is very welcome; you can use the usual channels to get in touch with us: