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A bold state­ment in the title, I know. The pass­word & soft­ware license man­ager as well as form filler though is one of the apps that no Mac user should lack. It not only helps to dras­ti­cally improve secu­rity, it gives you peace of mind know­ing that even though you might for­get your pass­word or mis­place a soft­ware license, 1Password has the infor­ma­tion stored away safely.

I had planned to write this review for quite some time now. Iron­i­cally enough, the most recent Mac OSX updates (10.6.2 + what­ever else was released in the last 7 days) com­pletely nuked my iMac (45 min­utes boot­ing time and app crashes wher­ever you clicked). After the clean re-install of Snow Leop­ard, I had to set up all my apps again. 1Password proved absolutely price­less in that sit­u­a­tion and allowed me to fin­ish set­ting up my iMac in a frac­tion of time it would have taken oth­er­wise (yes, I had a Time Machine backup and no, I could not use it since it rein­tro­duced the errors).

With that hap­pen­ing just one day ago, you can bet that I got down and dirty with 1Password. In the fol­low­ing arti­cle, I’ll be lay­ing out what the app does, how you can even max­i­mize its use­ful­ness and how it can help you to ease your workflows.

So, what does it do?

In all hon­esty, I asked myself the same thing when I got a license of 1Password in 2008 through the MacHeist Giv­ing Tree. ‘A pass­word man­ager, big deal’, I thought. In short: it stores away the pass­words to every online login (if you per­mit it) and when you visit the site the next time, you can have 1Password fill the login with your user­name and the pass­word. No need for you to remem­ber any­thing or type anything.

Like many of you, I didn’t feel com­fort­able stor­ing away my pass­words in another app that was so tightly inte­grated into a browser. Secu­rity was a prime con­cern, but I real­ized that I was fool­ing myself: I had the same pass­word or slight vari­a­tions of it for vir­tu­ally all my email accounts, online mem­ber­ships and what else. There were just too many to remem­ber dif­fer­ent logins and I was too lazy to type long pass­words all the time. And hey, really, who can remem­ber some­thing like ‘GKoh1%$nRFT12$)/’?? (if you are not a genius, that is) So, maybe, it was worth giv­ing that app a try?

Couldn’t I just do with a list on my com­puter, then?

‘course you could. Do you? I guess for most of you, the answer is no. Some may have tried it, but it’s cum­ber­some and after a while, you grow tired of all the copy & past­ing, of hav­ing to hunt down the list every time you want to log in some­where. 1Password sits in your browser (Safari, Fire­fox, …) and with just two clicks, you can log into every online account that 1Password has saved the login data for. You don’t need to remem­ber your user­name or pass­word. You can even for­get it. 1Password won’t. That beats your list. Hands down.

With one click on the browser bar exten­sion you are pre­sented with mul­ti­ple options for login. If you have more than one pos­si­ble login for the site, you can pick.

Take Away

Option 1: iPhone

If you are still not con­vinced enough to give up your ‘list’ approach or to give 1Password a try, here’s another rea­son it will rock your world: if you are trav­el­ing a fair bit, or at least use your iPhone and Mobile Safari, the iPhone App will pro­vide you with the same ben­e­fits as the desk­top app. Just sync the data wire­lessly between the two and wher­ever you are, you have all your login infor­ma­tion, soft­ware licenses and — if you chose to do so — bank­ing infor­ma­tion safely encrypted in your pocket. Nor­mal ver­sion // Pro ver­sion (iTunes US links)

Before you can see any­thing on your iPhone, you have to enter your 4 digit unlock code in the iPhone application

You can browse your online pass­words by title or domain

In case you are not really secure about stor­ing this kind of infor­ma­tion on your iPhone: there are two lay­ers of secu­rity. One is the unlock code (above) and the sec­ond one is your mas­ter pass­word, which can be of any length and strength. Only with both you’ll be able to access your data.

Before you can actu­ally see any impor­tant infor­ma­tion, you have to enter your mas­ter pass­word in 1Password Pro

This is how soft­ware licenses are stored

Option 2: Dropbox

Now, what if you travel a lot with a sec­ond Mac? Me, I have my iMac at home and when I am on the road (usu­ally 1 week at a time per month), I have my Mac­book. Of course, I need all my 1Password data with me and I need the most cur­rent file. I could just man­u­ally copy the data file. But there is a far more ele­gant solu­tion: Drop­box. I sim­ply put my 1Password key­chain file on my secure Drop­box account and pointed the iMac desk­top app there. When I am on the road, 1Password on the Mac­book accesses the same file. This way, there is only one file and it is always up to date.

Set the loca­tion of the 1Password key­chain in the preferences

Dis­claimer: Every one of you has to decide him– or her­self it you regard Drop­box as secure enough to store this file there. It is encrypted (the file) and can only be opened with 1Password and your per­sonal pass­word, but still — it’s online stor­age and that can never be 100% safe. If you don’t trust it, you can still use the man­ual options, but Drop­box has worked per­fectly for me so far.

Ok, I’m intrigued. How does it work?

Sim­ply enough. Install 1Password and allow it to add itself to your browser (no, it won’t work with IE. Don’t. Even. Con­sider. Ask­ing.). Nav­i­gate to what­ever site you want to log in to — your Word­press blog, a forum, Ama­zon, eBay … you name it. Enter your user name and pass­word into the fields pro­vided by the web­site and then click to con­firm. 1Password auto­mat­i­cally detects that you are log­ging in some­where and asks you if it should save that username+password com­bi­na­tion. It offers you the option to name the com­bi­na­tion (‘Word­press Login Admin’ or ‘Twit­ter Pri­vate’, for exam­ple) so it will be eas­ier for you to iden­tify. The next time you want to log in, just click on the 1Password icon in your browser and let it fill in the infor­ma­tion for you. That’s it. No kidding.

Bonus

As men­tioned above, most of us are not ter­ri­bly cre­ative when com­ing up with pass­words and when we do, they are often not as safe as we would like to think. 1Password offers a solu­tion for that as well. It’s called ‘Strong Pass­word Gen­er­a­tor’ and it does what the name implies: accord­ing to the pre­sets (which you can deter­mine) it will gen­er­ate a safe pass­word and fill that in for you. By now, almost all my pass­words are gen­er­ated by the desk­top app and yes, now I really need it because with­out it I could not log into 99% of my accounts.

It not only gen­er­ates them for you, it also saves them right away along your picked username

Sort­ing, Stack­ing, Fil­ing, Retrieving

So far, I’ve been talk­ing about the magic that 1Password works right within your browser. But since I have men­tioned it’s a desk­top app, let’s take a look at that too. Since the new ver­sion 3, Agile Web­So­lu­tions have pol­ished the user inter­face quite a bit and you will only be able to access your data after enter­ing your per­sonal pass­word (you will be prompted to set up one dur­ing the first run of the app).

Enter­ing your mas­ter pass­word into the startup screen

In the main win­dow, you can select whether you want to have a look at your online pass­words, soft­ware licenses, iden­ti­ties, notes or bank infor­ma­tion (wal­let). You can sort logins into fold­ers and when you select one, you can have 1Password open it directly in your browser.

Yes, I am a geek and BSG fan. Guilty. Proudly.

If you are quite active con­cern­ing com­ment­ing on other people’s sites or if you need your per­sonal infor­ma­tion often, you can store those in an ‘iden­tity’. You can cre­ate as many as you like (one for work, one for pri­vate stuff,…) and then have 1Password just fill the fields on a site by pick­ing that identity.

Fill out once and from the on just pick the iden­tity you need from the browser exten­sion. No need to type the same infor­ma­tion all over again.

Apart from all this good­ness, the new ver­sion of 1Password (v3) also allows to store soft­ware licenses. Yes — one app for all your stuff: bank­ing, online iden­ti­ties, pass­words and now even soft­ware licenses. Keep­ing track of your stuff has never been so easy. And when need­ing to re-install your com­puter (see begin­ning of arti­cle *cough*), it’s all handy in one place. No need to wade through your email waste­land and search for licenses, try­ing to remem­ber the soft­ware company’s name etc. Sim­ply click on your name or email and the ser­ial to copy it into the clip­board and paste it then into the appli­ca­tion. You can even attach license files, which are being stored within 1Password.

Click on the image for a larger view.

1Passwords han­dles soft­ware licenses beautifully

Con­clu­sion

Whew, you made it down here! Thanks for read­ing all of it. I hope I could show you the value of 1Password and how it can make your dig­i­tal life a hel­luva lot eas­ier. Never again worry about los­ing soft­ware licenses, for­get­ting pass­words or being tired of enter­ing the same infor­ma­tion over and over again.

Is it worth the money? — Yes, def­i­nitely! I bought a full license early in 2009 when 1Password was updated, but the free license from the Giv­ing Tree was not eli­gi­ble. I have come to rely heav­ily on 1Password and it’s — next to iTunes and Mail — prob­a­bly the app I use most on my Mac.

In a recent dis­cus­sion on a Ger­man Mac forum, the ques­tion was raised if the app wasn’t too expen­sive. The user wrote that there was not enough free­ware and apps for €10 or less. Sum­ming up my lengthy response: con­sid­er­ing the amount of time saved by not hav­ing to enter every­thing man­u­ally or look­ing up infor­ma­tion, con­sid­er­ing the increase in secu­rity by actu­ally hav­ing long, dif­fi­cult and dif­fer­ent pass­words, con­sid­er­ing the ease of mind know­ing you can for­get with­out worry … con­sid­er­ing all of this, I think the app is a bargain.

Also, check out the video tuto­ri­als on the offi­cial web­site for more infor­ma­tion (really, you’ve come this far and you still don’t have enough?).

1Password from AgileWebSolutions

This review was nei­ther spon­sored (I wish) nor did I get any­thing from the com­pany. Just one happy user here.