Cards – lightweight card manager for iPhone (and iPod touch)
So, a few days ago I released Cards, a freeware application for the iPhone to manage credit card. Is really easy to use and has little features, I have mostly coded it for myself but then I’ve been asked to put it on the AppStore. So, I lazily posted it on the AppStore, without doing any webpage and stuff like that.
Worst decision ever.
Apparently, a lot, and I mean a lot of people thought about something which didn’t even cross my mind: that the application may call home and report data! Indeed, there was no good reason to trust “Michele Balistreri” (I was sure I used Briksoftware name, but whatever). Now I quickly setup a page and wrote this blog post in the hope to stop triggering paranoid alerts. Thanks to the (few) ones who decided to just trust Michele Balistreri and probably Apple’s review procedure. I hope those enjoy the benefits of the application.
For those of you wondering about the purpose of the application, I’ll just say one thing: I kept my PIN codes in my addressbook under strange names because I would forget them. Not only thats not secure, but I kept forgetting which card had a certain PIN, which created awkward situations in stores.
August 19th, 2008 at 12:41
Hi Michele,
I was going through your code for the Cards.app and trying to understand how the encryption was implemented. I was trying to see if the same logic could be implemented to encrypt and decrypt a single field value being written to and fetch from a sqlite table. I setup break points to understand how it was flowing but got lost. I think your code decrypts and encrypts user data into a single flat file.
Could you please be kind enough to point out what part of your code should I look into to get some help. I could not figure out which functions were called to pass the value to be encrypted and then viceversa to decrypt the encrypted value fetched from the database.
Regards,
Nero
August 19th, 2008 at 14:55
rijndael.c is where the encryption is done. The function rijndael_chunk_encrypt and rijndael_chunk_decrypt are the ones used for encryption of arbitrarily sized chunks. Those functions take a buffer of bytes as input and output another buffer or bytes. In my case the buffer of bytes is just saved to disk and restored from disk, in your cause you could store each chunk in a binary column. Take also a look at CardController.m as it may help you.
August 19th, 2008 at 16:56
Thanks a lot. I will check those functions.
October 29th, 2008 at 23:59
Hi, thank you for your nice work 🙂 could you implement a function for changing the order of every card ? Regards, Murasaki
January 14th, 2009 at 12:14
Hi Michele,
Very nice app, just one gripe: The IBAN format requires that the letters are in Upper Cae, but the app does not allow for it. They can only be populated in lower case. It would alo be nice if the card numbers could be spaced (XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX) for redability.
Thanks for listening.
Ciao,
Pasquale
August 8th, 2009 at 19:21
Michele:
Cards has a problem with the … Master password” not working to open the program. the iTunes web app blog for this software is full of complaints about this issue. I’ve tried the Cards app twice now. Same results, in that, I cNt open the program after I’ve put a lot of information into the Cards program.
Can you give me any guidence? Also, just a sime idea, if you read the iTunes web app reviews of the software and hear everyone complain g about this issue, why not pull the app until you fix it? The bug not allowing you to access your stored data creates a huge headache for the end user & you’re getting bad reviews. I encourage you, especially since your name is out there as the creator, to PULL the app or fix it. That’d be the decent thing to do since the complaints from many frustrated users sound harsh.
If you can help my situation with this software, I’d be grateful! Steve
January 10th, 2010 at 23:49
Michele:
I had same problem with Steven Carey as he just wrote. I have been putting alot of inforamtion spening a few hours. Then cannot access to the program saying the Master password is incorrect. I have seen alot of these complains from app reviews. I think you should try to answer this questions since many people have wasted their time.
April 22nd, 2011 at 12:23
same problem