It’s been a long time since the last update. That certainly wasn’t intended, but I didn’t expect a pandemic. Anyway, the wait is over and I believe it was worth it! Version 3.4.0 of Secrets for iOS is now available on the App Store, and with it a major new feature.
Remote Access
With this update you can now use Secrets on your iOS device as a remote keychain for filling Logins and Credit Cards on a browser running on another machine, such as on Windows or Linux.
Secrets is, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, only available on Apple platforms. That’s where our expertise and our heart is. Having said that, we do have many requests for other platforms. While Secrets itself won’t run on Windows anytime soon, this feature is the next best thing.
How does it work?
With the updated browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome1 you can now pair one or more iOS devices to serve as a remote keychain. The pairing works by simply reading a QR Code from the extensions’s options page.
Then, when you get to a page with a login or payment form, you just click the Secrets toolbar icon on your browser and a request is sent to your paired devices via push notifications.
On your device, you tap the notification to open Secrets and select the login you want to use. That information is sent back to browser to and the form is automatically filled. And of course this is all end-to-end encrypted.
The 3 steps to auto fill your secrets on a remote machine
We think this will be huge for many of Secrets’s users. Many of them only use Apple devices personally but have a Windows machine at work.
The secrets command line tool
The browser extensions will suffice for many of our users but we didn’t stop there. We’re also releasing an open source command line tool so you can integrate Secrets in many of your workflows.
With this tool you can retrieve not just Logins, but any type of data that you have stored in Secrets. Including specifying which item properties you want. Here’s an example command:
Out at last, out at last, Secrets 3.2 is out last!
This release is a bit tardy but I believe the wait was worth it. This update focuses on iOS 13 and macOS Catalina specific features but also includes many other noteworthy features. So lets get to it!
Dark Mode iOS
Arguably the most anticipated feature of iOS 13. Since adding Dark Mode to Secrets for Mac last year, you have definitely made it clear you wanted the same on Secrets for iOS. We heard you… but we were also expecting Apple to add support for it this year with iOS 13 😉. And we were right!
So finally, Secrets for iOS joins its macOS counterpart with new, beautiful, dark themes!
The Light, Dark and Black themes on Secrets for iOS
Yes, themes… plural. We’ve added two new dark themes to suite everyone’s taste. The new Dark theme – my favorite – uses a few shades of gray with a just a hint of blue and is really easy on the eyes. The Black theme uses Apple’s palette for Dark Mode making Secrets fit right in with the rest of your apps.
And to celebrate all this darkness, we’ve also added a new dark version of the app icon just for fun 😊. But you’ll have to open the app’s Settings to check it out.
Unlock with an Watch macOS
Secrets for Mac could already be unlock with Touch ID on compatible Macs. With macOS Catalina, Apple has added the ability to use your Watch to authenticate yourself and Secrets takes full advantage of that!
Using the watch to unlock Secrets in macOS Catalina
Now, instead of typing in your long passphrase (you’re using a long passphrase, right?!), you can simply double-click your watch’s side button to unlock.
Siri Shortcuts iOS
We introduced Siri Shortcuts with Secrets 2.8 last year. This year, Apple made Shortcuts much more powerful with the ability to return results from custom actions.
This release adds a new Search Secrets action you can use as a step on your own shortcuts.
For example, one request that pops up now and again is the ability to auto-fill credit cards onto webpages. Unfortunately, iOS’s Password AutoFill feature only works on logins, so you still had to copy and paste your credit card details from Secrets. Fortunately, with with the new Search Secrets action we can do this ourselves with a simple shortcut!
Filling credit card information stored in Secrets using a custom shortcut
What you’re seeing in the video above is a shortcut that runs on Safari webpages, searches Secrets for credit cards items, asks you which of the cards you want to use and finally auto-fills the card details in Safari. Pretty neat! Here’s a link to the shortcut so you can try it out yourself.
As some of you may have noticed, you could already install Secrets’s extensions on them but they wouldn’t actually work… Secrets would still think it was talking to Chrome or Firefox. Well… no more!
Auto-filling now working with Brave Browser
Secrets will now understand that it’s in fact talking to these browsers and work as expected.
Accessibility improvements iOS
“Improvements” might be an understatement… We’ve added support for Dynamic Type, VoiceOver and Voice Control.
Dynamic Type: Secrets will now honor the text size preferences you set on the Settings.app. Including the larger accessibility sizes.
VoiceOver: We’ve reviewed all screens so that they’re friendly to VoiceOver users. Your device will now be able to read the Secrets user interface and perform all actions.
Voice Control: New in iOS 13 is the ability to control iOS with just your voice. This is an impressive feat by the accessibility team at Apple, and we’re proud to say can now also control Secrets with just your voice.
As always, we love to hear from you, so let us know what you think via e-mail or on Twitter.
Version 3.0, a major update to Secrets, is now available and packs many new features!
Attachments
This is certainly one of our top requested features. You can finally attach files to any item in Secrets!
A commonly mentioned use case is attaching a photo of your bank’s second factor matrix card so that you can login without taking out your wallet. Of course, you can also use it to store pictures of your driver’s license, national id card, receipts or any other confidential document.
All files are encrypted and synced alongside your items, and can be added and retrieved using either Secrets for Mac or iOS.
Custom icons
Secrets already had support for a predefined list of popular services such as Facebook, Twitter, etc… but now you can set custom icons on any item!
Since the very first version that we’ve repeatedly heard you asking for this. And we could’ve implemented this sooner… but we wanted to do it right. And doing it right meant we needed to have proper support for file attachments. With that in place we’re thrilled to finally add this feature.
Custom icons are transparently stored as an attachment to that item.
Spelling out secrets
An innovative and quite useful feature. Now you make Secrets spell out information like passwords and credit card numbers. Useful for example when you need to share you WiFi password with a guest or transmit your credit card number on a purchase over the phone.
But we believe you’ll find it most useful when you need to input a password on a device where you don’t have a copy of Secrets running. For example on a Windows or Linux machine, or someone else’s device. Instead of having to look back & forth between your iPhone and the device’s screen you can just let Secrets spell the characters out loud while you type them ;)
Secrets can spell in any of the 11 languages it already supports! Here’s a quick look at spelling in action:
Spelling out a password in Secrets for iOS
iPad keyboard shortcuts
Secrets for Mac always had support for keyboard shortcuts and now your iPad gets to have them too!
If you use your iPad with an external keyboard these shortcuts will really improve your workflow. You can navigate with the arrow keys, quickly copy passwords, usernames, card numbers and security codes, switch filters, create new items, etc.
Secrets for iOS keyboard shortcuts overview
Modern encryption
Secrets has always used OpenPGP for its storage format (with AES-128) and it has served it well. But from now on Secrets will rely on the popular Sodium library that employs modern cryptographic algorithms such as XChaCha20 and Poly1305 in a simple and easy to use API.
We still have many features in the pipeline that will make use of OpenPGP, but ultimately, Sodium was a better fit for storing your secrets. You can check the new security page for more details on how Secrets uses this library to protect your data.
Wrapping up
Secrets 3.0 is a free update to all existing users. We love developing Secrets and we sincerely hope you enjoy it… so go update now and let us now what you think!
Secrets 2.8.5 has been released and alongside various bug fixes and minor improvements the Mac version also includes a completely rewritten Safari extension.
The new extension works exactly the same way and continues to serve as a facilitator for Secrets itself. That is, it simply informs Secrets about pages with fillable forms which are only filled at Secrets’s request. Like we’ve mentioned before, only Secrets deals with your passphrase and data. The extension only ever has access to your data – the Login you chose to fill – after you’ve explicitly authorised it in Secrets by clicking the “Fill” button.
So why the rewrite you may ask? Well, this rewrite brought a more reliable filling system but more importantly, it laid out the groundwork to accomodate extensions on other browsers besides Safari. This surely was one of the top three requests we’ve been getting ever since launching Secrets.
At last we’re making available a beta version of both the Firefox and Chrome extensions today. If you want to try them out just make sure you have Secrets for Mac 2.8.5 or above. As always, we love to hear from you, so if you have any feedback on these extensions you can reach us via e-mail or on Twitter.
