Switchers' Blog

The End of the Input Manager and Pimping Mac OS X?

There has been a lot of talk lately about Input Managers and whether they will be completely removed in Leopard. Just recently David Watanabe (who is using Input Managers for his popular Safari extension) blogged about the uncertain future of Inquisitor. It would be a shame for such an awesome Safari extension to become extinct.

Thankfully, it is not that dire a situation. After spending weeks on this problem, we have found a way to make our 1Passwd Password Manger work on Leopard without using an Input Manager.

Read on to find out how we accomplished this, the bumps we ran into along the way, and why we believe the future is bright. But first, some background information.

Running Leopard and Tiger Together

The new version of Mac OS X operating system, 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard is getting ready to be released in October this year. From developer's perspective it comes with large number of improvements and Apple provides members of ADC (Apple Developer Connection) with early access to the system.

I tried to run a few preview releases of Leopard on my MacBook Pro. As much as it is exciting, it is also a pain to reinstall the system. Also, I found that it is not possible to support our current users who still use Tiger. After a few Leopard—Tiger roundtrips I decided to look for a better configuration and run both Tiger and Leopard on my laptop using multiple partitions.

Handling Multi-Page Logins

Some times we are asked how 1Passwd can handle web sites that have multi-page logins. Often these are financial sites such as banks and brokerage sites. With the ever increasing scrutiny on corporate security procedures, many of these institutions have decided to implement new types of security measures. A multi-page login to their web sites is one of the most popular of the new procedures. They have also resorted to asking "random" questions that are not so random as they only have a limited amount of information on you. While I believe it would be much better if they just required two or three 32 character passwords this would not be convenient for a lot of people. (of course 1Passwd users could handle this easily)

Until banks change their login procedures or we figure a way to make 1Passwd better at dealing with these sorts of things, the workaround is to save multiple forms for the site. While this may sound like a real pain, it really isn't that bad and once you have the few random questions saved it can be quite fast to restore with the ⌘-\ keyboard shortcut.

Fix Available for 1Passwd in DEVONagent

Eric from DEVONtechnologies contacted us to let us know a DEVONagent 2.2 customer had been experiencing a crash, and that they suspected it might be related to 1Passwd. After some digging Roustem found it was indeed coming from 1Passwd, and created a new build that fixes the issue.

Those using DEVONagent should upgrade to the latest build linked to in this forum thread. For those who haven't tried DEVONagent, I recommend you give it a whirl, it has many great features to help you organize your research while browsing the web, and intergates flawlessly with DEVONthink.

Oh, and last but not least, Thank-you Eric for sending us the crash logs and keeping us in the loop! They were very helpful :)

AppFresh: Helping Your Mac Applications to Stay Fresh

Today we updated 1passwd.com web site to make it compatible with AppFresh — great little utility that helps to keep your Mac updated with the latest versions of the programs you use.

One of the interesting features of AppFresh is the integration with iUseThis a popular web site for Mac OS X users.