ChromeMarks updated - 2011.11.13

A long overdue release of ChromeMarks today. As normal, the highlights:

1. The app can now handle Chrome encrypted bookmarks. This was originally  expected to be a pro only feature for some time next year. But recent releases of Chrome have started enabling encrypted bookmarks by default, so I had to accelerate the plans. There were a large number of challenges to implement this (see previous blog). And before the inevitable 1-star review and complaints appear on the Market - you need to enter your account password to decrypt the bookmarks. There is no way around this - and when you ticked the option to encrypt your bookmarks in Chrome when setting up sync, it clearly states "your account password will be used to encrypt your data". The password/passphrase is not stored on the device. It is encrypted to create a hash in exactly the same way that Chrome does.

2. Upgraded the database to the same as the current stable release of Chrome. Unfortunately this does mean you will need to re-download all your bookmarks again. Sorry!

3. PRO APP. Someone involved with the chromesync service contacted me and mentioned that some of the icons being created by this app were "larger" than expected and the sync service would soon stop accepting them. Since icons are normally small in size, something that was >2kb could only come from one of the external icon providers that the app uses. So a mild fix to ensure the app doesn't sync something that big again. Plus, this is the first time some acknowledgement of this app from Google!

4. PRO APP. For users integrating their bookmarks, some may have been experiencing "corrupt database" errors. Some of these were due to a hard coded limit of 1mb in Android for the amount of data it could retrieve. If you had a lot of bookmarks and most of them have icons then you may have hit this limit and android wouldn't go any further and return a data corruption error. I've tweaked things to no longer retrieve the icons themselves (since they are the majority of the data) and retrieve the icons seperately when need be. This may make a "sync local bookmarks" slightly slower if you have a lot of icons - but it should be more reliable.

5. Added a new menu entry to "contact developer". This allows you to goto my Twitter page (@chromemarks) or send me an email. The email option will also attach a zip file with some info about the device you are using such as language, screen size, orientation, etc. Nothing personally identifiable.

6. The app now works on x86 devices, and also devices with an ethernet connection. I'm not sure if there are many such devices out there - but I'm using x86 android in a virtual machine for a lot of my testing now as it's sooooooo much faster than Google's android emulator that it made sense to upgrade the compatibility.

7. Partial Russian translation. Tons of thanks to Kirill Simonov and Evgeny for all the help!

8. Partial Finnish translation. Tons of thanks to Patrik Selin for all the help!

9. Remember - if you want to help with the translations from one word to several phrases, just drop me a line!

10. Some tweaks for Honeycomb users. This may or may not fix the crashes you keep getting when restarting the app. But without the Honeycomb source code, I can't tell for sure what the bug is/was or how to correctly fix it. Complain to Google!

Some screenshots for the new release can be found in the previous blog posting.