Interview with Thorsten Zoerner about a neat deployment of the Clipperz Community Edition for the eyeOS platform. Clipperz Community Edition allows you to host on your own server a web service identical to Clipperz online password manager. It’s open source and released under an AGPL license.

Thorsten, you’ve developed an application called “h3oPass 4 Clipperz Community Edition”. What’s that application about?

h3oPass 4 Clipperz Community Edition allows people to use Clipperz from within eyeOS. Web Operating Systems are getting more and more common these days and for any WebOS user it is common to rely on several web applications by different providers. So you need login credentials for each of those – as they do not share one common authentication platform. Users of h3oPass can now manage their passwords within Clipperz and they can access any web service with just one click.

Why Clipperz?

There are password managers around. Some of them come as browser plugins, others are installed on the server. In both cases, the user faces a challenge: either the passwords are not available when moving to another computer, or the user has to blindly trust the server where the passwords are stored. With Clipperz it is different: all the protection is done within the browser while the encrypted data gets stored on the server. Or, in other words, the role of the server is just to store scrambled bits and bytes, while the browser does all the work. This approach has several points of contact with the overall WebOS philosophy and provides better security and privacy.

Why h3oPass leverages the Clipperz Community Edition and not the hosted service at clipperz.com?

Because of the way to handle windows within the eyeOS environment.

On the hosted version of Clipperz, when you click on a direct login link, a new window or tab is opened to show the page you just logged into. Running the application from an eyeOS window I had to patch the JavaScript window.open function in order to let eyeOS handle the opening of new windows within the very browser window where eyeOS lives in.

If you look on the screecast below, you quickly recognize, that the applications has two windows: one is derived from the “Clipperz Compact” version that is usually displayed in a browser sidebar, the other is the full version of Clipperz, usually displayed in a regular browser window. I think that this is a very convenient way to use Clipperz within eyeOS.

However, there is another application, that will get released in a few days: h3opass 4 Clipperz Offline Edition. In this case you just download the offline copy generated by any Clipperz instance (a single HTML file) and upload it to your eyeOS account. The application than ensures the windows handling.

What makes a WebOS so fascinating for you?

For me a WebOS is the right tool to create my personal information mashups. It allows me to built my personal view of the world. It brings together my personal CRM page, my IM client, my weblog, my weather forecasts, my phone, … There are thousands of helpful applications out there and Clipperz can log you in with just one click in most cases!

And eyeOS in particular?

One thing I really like about eyeOS is that it was designed to be installed on your own company, school or university server. This gives you control over what people are doing with it - without building a vendor lock in.

Is h3oPass 4 Clipperz your only eyeOS application?

No there is h3oUpload, allowing users to upload documents to an eyeOS server using drag and drop from the real desktop. h3oLaunchr extends that: you are able to open a document directly on the server and edit it on the client.

**Why do you develop eyeOS applications? Which are your motivations?

I like to spend one hour of my life, if what I achieve can save me one minute on every working day. With this in mind, one year ago I started to play around with eyeOS and figured out that it could be used to implement a lot of time saving solutions, hacks that can saves you several clicks every day. For the very same reason I got interested in Clipperz as well: accessing my bank account, remember-the-milk and several other sites with just one click was awesome. h3oPass saved me those magic minute a day (actually even more).

Last question, where could I test h3opass 4 Clipperz or eyeOS?

h3oPass is freely available for download from the eyeOS application repository. You can install it on your eyeOS server or, if don’t have a server, you can get a free one from my homepage. And the quickest way to test it is on my demoserver (username: demo / password: demo).