Interview With Fränz Friederes
The Developer of Cryptii Answers Questions from Fun With Cryptography
Our next interview is from the developer of one of Fun With Cryptography’s favorite web applications, a modular encoding, encryption, and conversion tool called Cryptii. Fränz Friederes is a 24 year old web engineer from Luxemburg. He’s currently living in Berlin and is a graduate of Interaction Design.
FWC contacted Fränz via email to ask him for an interview and to our great pleasure he agreed to answer our questions.
📧Interview📧
When did you first find yourself interested in cryptography, encoding, and/or encryption? What inspired you to create cryptii.com?
When I was a child I wanted to be an inventor. I had a lot of science experiment books and the workbench was my playground. As I grew older my interests shifted to code. Cryptii was one of the first apps I've invented. Back then it only offered translation between text, decimal and binary. Because it gained the most attraction among my projects I decided to continue it. While working on it I learned more about cryptography and developed a dedication for all things hidden.
One of the features Fun With Cryptography loves about cryptii.com is the modular user interface. What inspired you to take the modular approach?
In the previous version (v2) of cryptii.com the conversion process consisted of a start (interpret as) and end (convert to) format. It was easy to understand but felt very limited to advanced use cases and different methods of translation and interaction.
The modular approach took over 3 years to develop from sketch to the living object, skipping a few iterations along the way. Involving both code and design challenges it turned out to be a great interdisciplinary exercise. It was a balancing act to provide a modular interface and advanced features to pro users while not scaring away others. Furthermore I wanted to find a good common denominator for all the means of translation and viewing to come.
Can you tell us any future plans for cryptii.com? Also, are there any plans to turn cryptii.com into a mobile android and/or iOS application?
The short term goal includes the ability to share pipes (workspaces) and the introduction of modern encryption methods building upon the Web Crypto API.
In the long run I want to grow cryptii.com into an open platform and framework allowing everyone to create and publish own methods of translation and viewing. This would result in a playground offering a wide variety of building blocks to experiment and learn with. That’s why I currently focus on evolving the web app rather than pushing out native apps for desktop and mobile.
Cryptii is a web app that encodes, decodes, encrypts, decrypts, converts, translates, simulates and views content online offering a variety of ciphers, formats, algorithms and methods.
Fränz Friederes ~ Web Engineer at Taikonauten
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