Here at Parse, we're always looking for ways to make it easier to manage and protect access to your users' data. Today we're rolling out an update to our data browser that allows you to view and modify ACLs for your objects stored with Parse.

You can read more about ACLs in our docs. Remember to protect your users' data using ACLs, and thanks for using Parse!

The main idea behind Parse is to simplify developer’s lives by offering tools to make building apps easier and faster. We keep this goal in mind with everything we build.

Every day, we continue to add more features to our APIs. But making a successful platform isn't always about adding new features. It can also be about improving the design of the workflows.

Today, we’re introducing a redesign of our application management console. We’ve dramatically improved and simplified the experience, while keeping all of the great features you love. Specifically, it’s now much easier to manage the various settings on your app.

But, this is just the first step. We’re already working hard on some of the next iterations. Stay tuned!

Parse users love our password reset and email verification features, but some customers have asked for better control over these experiences. Perhaps your customers don't speak English, or you have a well defined brand that you want these experiences to adhere to. Or maybe you just don't like your users knowing that you use parse.com as your backend. Today we unveil a series of tools to give pro and enterprise customers unparalleled control over their brand with Parse. The following new features are accessible from your app settings page today:

Mail Templates

Password resets and email verifications require us to email links to your users. Last month we unveiled the ability to set the email address we use to send this email. Today we announce the ability to customize the email text too. Email templates use a simple markup language that replaces %username%, %email%, %appname%, and %link% with their appropriate values.

For example, the body:

Thank you for joining %appname%. We're excited to have you onboard. To access our premium features, please verify your email address by clicking this link: %link%.

Would send the following email to your users:

Thank you for joining AnyWall. We're excited to have you onboard. To access our premium features, please verify your email address by clicking on this link: some link

Custom Pages

We've rewritten our password reset and email verification features with a novel approach to the Model-View-Controller design pattern. The Parse server is the "controller" for your app and provides default views. Developers who wish to control the design of these pages can tell Parse to use modified versions of these pages instead. Each view is a simple and clearly written HTML/CSS/JavaScript page. Download any user-facing page and modify it as you wish. Put your modified version online and give us its address to replace that view in your app.

Consider the Password Reset workflow:

1. A user is mailed a link with which he or she can choose a new password
2. The user clicks the link and is forwarded to choose_password.html to select a new password.
3. The user submits his or her new password & is informed that the new password has been successfully set by password_reset_success.html
4. If malicious users attempt to reverse engineer the password reset link, they are sent to invalid_link.html

Each of these three pages can be replaced in the app settings page. You could add a corporate logo or stylesheets to each page. Parse will use your pages as a replacement for our defaults.

Parse Frame

Password resets and email verification require us to email your users a link to parse.com. Some of our developers would prefer this link point to their domain instead of ours. The Parse Frame is an HTML page that will let you host these experiences from your domain.

If you upload the Parse Frame file to your server and give us its link, we can email your customers URLs to this page instead of URLs that point to parse.com. This feature can be used in conjunction with Custom Pages to control both the look and address of your user experience.

One More Thing...

We are excited about these new features for Pro and Enterprise users. To celebrate, we are offering a free month to all new Pro account upgrades.

Things move fast and furious here at Parse. Our philosophy is centered around quickly shipping new features to our platform on a daily basis. We're laser focused on continually improving our platform so that you can focus on building your mobile app and not on building the infrastructure.

All this means we ship new versions of our iOS and Android SDKs pretty often. Today, we've released a new downloads page that includes a changelog so that you can keep up with the releases we're pushing for our SDKs. We hope you'll find this useful especially as you decide when to incorporate updates to your apps.

You can also subscribe to the changelog RSS feed, which will be updated whenever we push out a new release.

When a device registers for push notifications via the client SDK, the push service works behind the scenes to manage the device's subscriptions. Although the Parse push console allows you to send push notifications from your browser and gives some visibility into this subscription data, developers occasionally need to access this data from outside of the client SDK for operations like uploading iOS device tokens.

Today, we are introducing the ability for developers to view and modify their app's subscription data through "Installation" objects, each of which corresponds to an installation of your app on a device. Installation objects are automatically created and modified when SDK push methods like subscribeToChannel and unsubscribeFromChannel are called, and are fetched by the getSubscribedChannels SDK method. You can now read and write this data from outside of the SDK by visiting your app's data browser or by using your master key in the REST API. For example, by creating new installation objects you can import existing iOS device tokens into your Parse app, and by doing queries against installation objects you can see how many devices are subscribed to a given push channel.

As always, let us know what you think at feedback@parse.com!