Troi Coding 1.6

Tuesday 28th August, 2001

Our review of the previous version of the Troi Coding plug-in, (see Reviews, 5 March 1999, p37) noted that some of its functions seemed esoteric. However, with the explosion in Internet use and worries over data-theft and the Data Protection Act, ‘esoteric’ is an unfair label.

The original feature has been expanded and now includes most of the basic functionality you need to make your data secure. As well as the simple Rotate13 function for shifting character values by 13, the Coding plug-in now contains functions for encrypting and decrypting text fields using the new DES-encryption scheme.

There’s also a straightforward compression/decompression pair of functions that use the ZLIB algorithm for compressing the text within your text fields. There are two versions of the safe encoding functions that take a text field and encode it using only characters between ASCII 45 and ASCII 127 to allow data to be emailed without worrying about hi-bit data loss.

There are functions for converting decimal numbers to and from their binary representation, a checksum function (modulo 1024) for checking data integrity and a text signature function that can provide more clear-cut evidence that someone hasn’t tampered with your data. As you’d expect, the documentation is clear and there are good examples of encrypting and decrypting email data for secure transfer over the Internet.

Again, the plug-in is ‘Super Fat’ (read OS X and FM Pro 5.5) and includes an improved version function and a method for displaying registration information to the end user. If you’re storing or sending confidential or sensitive information then this plug-in is the obvious answer.

PRICE: Single-user license $39, Developer Single Platform $250, Developer Cross Platform $400

Verdict

If you’re storing or sending confidential or sensitive information then this plug-in is the obvious answer