Up and running…

I have been working on a simple Windows Phone 7 application for a few weeks now in my spare time and have made really good progress. It is designed to solve an issue that I think bugs most people, having to remember the ever-increasing number of passwords in everyday use. I have a bad memory for this sort of thing at the best of times but I feel I am drowning in the damn things now.

Just about every web site I use requires a user name and a password to either see content or post information. There is very little consistency between sites and the password rules are somewhat arbitrary. Sometimes when I sign up to a site I don’t really want to use one of my ‘standard’ passwords as I don’t necessarily trust the site enough to compromise even my minimal unsecure passwords so end up choosing something else (which of course I immediately forget).

Logging into a site is a hit and miss affair and when you give up and request a new password you’re in the even worse position of having a random set of letters and numbers which you cut and paste into the web site. If you are like me you then don’t bother to change the password to something more memorable and the cycle repeats again…

So I created Password Vault to solve the problem. It’s quite simple, there is a visible prompt that gives a cue to the password and when this is clicked the password itself is displayed. As it is on your phone you can easily keep the information out of view of other people near by. When I started writing the application I was expecting it to have just a couple of screens but currently there are 8 distinct pages; a couple of which are overloaded to provide different functionality.

I still have the help to write and there are some graphics I need to generate but the basic application is just about complete now.  However as far as I can see the real work is just beginning!

David Middleton
Metamorphosis Developments Ltd.
david@metadev.co.uk

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