Monthly Archives: July 2013

Instant Bitcoin Wallet Creation in Gliph for iPhone

Create a Bitcoin Wallet Instantly with Gliph for iPhoneToday we’re releasing version 1.5 of Gliph for iOS, which makes it easier than ever to get started and offers the world’s first instant Bitcoin wallet creation via Coinbase. Update: Gliph now also supports BIPS wallet.

In this new release we’ve made Gliph account creation and Bitcoin wallet creation an amazingly near-instantaneous experience.

Changes to Signup
We now streamline the Gliph signup process. The app automatically selects a gliph (username) for you, yet allows you to customize your gliph as an option if you want.

Previously, we forced every new person to immediately choose the Artifacts (symbols) for their gliph. While some folks picked up on the idea of building a gliph out of Artifacts, some found it confusing. Gliph has a lot of new ideas in it. This change represents a step toward streamlining the process of getting started using the Gliph identity platform.

Instant Bitcoin Wallet Creation
Another big change in 1.5 is the “instant” creation of Coinbase accounts. If you’ve never used Bitcoin before, you will be prepared to receive Bitcoin immediately after accepting Coinbase’s Terms of Service.

Gliph magically creates a Coinbase account using a free Gliph Cloaked Email address, offering you a strong level of privacy in your Bitcoin transactions.

We believe signing up for Gliph on iOS is now the fastest and easiest way to get started with a Bitcoin wallet on the planet earth.

We continue to believe that Bitcoin is a very important part of Gliph’s future and are making changes to pave the way for this now. The team is excited about the further integration of Bitcoin into Gliph’s core experience. Continue reading →

Cloaked Email and Craigslist: It’s Complicated

Craigslist’s newly implemented email relay service breaks proper delivery of Gliph Cloaked Email. This post explains what happened and how you can work around the issue.

What happened

Our team first debuted Cloaked Email on August 14th, 2012. We created the product in part due to our own frustration with how Craigslist handled email privacy. We performed a survey and found that we weren’t the only ones who felt this way.

Previously, when you created a Craigslist post, their system would protect your email address in the listing itself. However, if you replied to someone who had emailed you about the old stereo you were selling, it would reveal your email address.

Gliph Cloaked Email solved this problem by protecting your email address across both ways of the exchange. It also allowed you to do it directly from your own personal inbox.

Beginning in November, we noticed Craigslist began testing an “anonymized relay” aka “email-relay” that offered similar functionality to Cloaked Email. After some testing, we were able to prove that their new service did not interfere with Cloaked Email.

However, at some point this spring, without notice, Craigslist began blocking email sent using Gliph Cloaked Email addresses as it passed back through their relay service. Then the system moved from optional to required for all ad listings where email addresses are automatically included. Continue reading →

Gliph for Android Update and FAQ

We released an update to the Gliph app for Android today. Our Android users are usually pretty tech savvy, and they seem to be more interested in details than iOS users. So we thought now would be a good time to check in and answer some frequently asked questions we receive on the Support Gliph.

Gliph for Android 1.13

The last major release we did for Android included visual updates and the ability to send and receive Bitcoin. This new release, 1.13 is meant largely to fix bugs and behind the scenes updates:

  • People wrote in that it was hard to send messages because the keyboard was displaying on top of text entry field on some Android devices, making it hard to see what the person was typing. This should be fixed now. Please tell the support gliph if you’re still having the problem. Update 7/19/13 11:19am: Galaxy Note owners are reporting this is still an issue. We are currently looking for a solution for those users.
  • We added a library that helps us determine when the app is crashing and allows us to diagnose and fix that better.
  • We changed out the code that displays the slide-in menu or “drawer” on the left side of the screen. This will prepare the app for improvements in the future.
  • There was a bug where if you did not save a first name or pseudonym, the drawer would say null, null. Whoops. That’s fixed now.

Frequently Asked Questions about the Gliph Android App

Q. Why can’t I send picture messages or delete messages in the Android app? UPDATE: Gliph now has limited support for sending Picture Messages from Android! Continue reading →