1Password Review

tonight, i wanted to write a little about one of my super-favorite-most-awesome mac apps… 1password. this is one of those apps, that i don’t know what i would do without it. 1password is so ingrained into my daily life that its almost a digital extension of me. i cannot say enough to express just how amazing the app is. aw heck, ill try anyway.

first i guess i should explain what the hell it is. in its most simple sense its a password manager [mac only]. it is a type of application that allows you to store all your passwords in a secure central location. this allows you to easily enter them on the many various websites one may frequent during the day. i work in the internet field and i deal with a lot of different servers and websites all day long. i used to use 5 or so default passwords for everything. most of those being relatively easy to type and remember. which by the way means they were probably easy to guess and crack via a dictionary attack.

well thanks to 1password i can store highly secure random passwords, that are much harder to guess or crack. yup thats right, 1password also generates nice secure passwords for you to use. the best part is that you don’t have to remember the password. 1password does the hard stuff for you. from the time i wake up till the time i go to bed i probably use 1password over 100 times. being able to press [command-] and have 1password autofill the username and password on the exact site your on makes this thing a godsend. i have recently started using 1password to securely store credit card data, software serials, ftp and server logins, bank account data, IM acct info and my crazy Amazon S3 keys. Oh and you can also add custom secure notes into 1password.

so, you now know basically what it does…

thats all fine and dandy… but say you have multiple macs [as i do] how do you get the data to stay in sync? easy, there are two methods available at this time.

1. .Mac – ahem when it is’t

fubared

2. my.1password.com website [alpha stage & invite only at the moment]

the .mac variant works well, i am however jaded at the moment with .mac and it’s yo-yo like availability. so, lucky for me David [one of the authors of 1password] hooked me up with an invite to my.1password.com. the best part is it works perfectly, it allows me to sync my passwords on my 3 macs [2 mac pros & 1 macbook pro] very easily. it also allows you to access the passwords online in a very secure web environment. oh, and if you have an iphone [im holding out for v2] you can access the same passwords on that device as well.

i highly recommend 1password to everyone who uses a mac. in todays world, with all the scam sites, all the spoofing and phishing. you need to know your data and various online accounts are all secure. having highly secure random passwords different for each site helps. thanks to 1password that job just got a whole lot easier. 1password is really 1coolapp

for more info, check out the 1password blog.