Here again

I’m writing this on the freshly-released MarsEdit 1.1.4, the Mac OS X blogging tool I’ve used for posting since the beginning of this blog. MarsEdit is awesome, but it’s also an application I had given up on ever getting major new updates for.

Now, after Daniel Jalkut’s purchase of MarsEdit less than three weeks ago, there has already been two new point releases. There’s nothing like seeing one of your favorite applications flicker back to life like this.

We hope 2007 will mark a similar resurrection for Knox. Version 1.1.1, the current release, is soon ten months old, and the Knox feature set has stayed substantially the same since 2005. This will now change.

The beta version of our next release, 1.5, is going out to testers tomorrow, but it’s only the first of many significant updates we have planned for the year. If you are a licensed Knox customer and want to participate in the beta, please email helpdesk at knoxformac.com. (If you already did, thanks — you’re in on the beta.)

The headliner feature in Knox 1.5 is full disk encryption of non-boot volumes. It is by far the most requested feature addition for Knox, and it really is amazingly useful: imagine USB sticks being transparently encrypted, the vault appearing automatically when you connect the memory. It’s awesome.

As a small teaser, here’s a screenshot of the New Vault dialog in Knox 1.5:

We hope to have a fairly quick beta cycle, and aim for a release really soon. Knox 1.5 will be a free upgrade to all Knox owners. Watch this space.