1Password

Some software out in the wild is pretty crappy. But, on occasion you find or hear about good products. And some of it is quite good, even great. Take 1Password by AgileBits, for instance. It seems that 1Password has been around for a while, a number of years, at least. The latest version of it is pretty amazing.

I’ve installed it on many of our handheld devices as well as on our laptop. I’m test driving the family plan, which allows you to have up to five members of your family on a single account. The trial gives you 30 days to try out before you have to pay up. AgileBits uses a subscription-based model for the family and team plans; a price which runs $5/month, although I think you get a discount for paying up front for a full year.

I’ve been running 1Password for a few days now, and I finally got Mary on board tonight. So, I have a personal vault with some stuff that really only matters to me and which she wouldn’t have a need to get into. Then, we also have a shared vault. This is really convenient for sites like YNAB, Mint, and TurboTax. After setting up the 1Password app on her phone, we pretty easily got her logged into our joint YNAB account. My only gripe with the iOS experience is that you have to switch apps to get the password copied into the phone’s buffer, then switch back to paste it into the app’s/site’s form. It’s more cumbersome than the desktop experience in a browser with the 1Password extension/plug-in. It makes me wonder if any app publishers will work on seamlessly integrating 1Password into their login experience.

One of the best features of 1Password is its ability to generate all kinds of good, strong passwords for you. Need 20 characters? You got it. Need punctuation? Sure, specify how many characters worth you want. Need random words instead of characters? It’s got that, too. I was cranking out passwords with 25 characters including digits and symbols. Then I ran into a site I use which only allows a 12-character maximum and not many symbols. Seriously? Alright, just use the password generator slider bars and knock it down to the required maximum for the site. Lame requirement on the site’s part, but easily accomplished using 1Password.

Since installing the software, I’ve converted a good 30 passwords from fairly weak, often duplicate ones, into a great list of strong, secure ones. There’s no chance in the world that I’ll remember any of them; and that’s the point. I just need to remember my master password. Or get it from my emergency kit, which is another feature the software helps you generate. I’ve also created a couple of secure notes, and attached some files to them as well. The file attachments are encrypted, too.

Yep, this is really impressive stuff.