Switchers' Blog

Macworld Day 3

The 1Password booth was in full swing today but I just had to take a break to accept the Macsimumnews / MacTech magazine Best of Show award.

We are all a bit worn out and called it an early night to get some rest for the final day of the show. See everyone tomorrow for the last day.

Macworld Day 2

As you can see from the photo below, booth 3526 in the North Hall was quite busy again.

I got a chance to get away from the booth and check out the rest of the show floor today and wouldn't you know it, we had the best booth at the entire show. :)


Here's a photo that is probably not going to make any of the other Macworld Expo photo streams.

Finally, if you're looking for all the new hot products at Macworld Expo this year, here they are:

Oddly, no one was ever at this exhibit though. Thanks again to all that stopped by the 1Password booth the last couple of days! We'll be here all week. Please stop by and say hello.

Macworld 2009 Opens

As Phil was doing the keynote address and talking about iLife09, iWork09, and new 17" notebooks we were busy attending to last minute preparations for another 1Password presence on the exhibit floor at Macworld Expo. The doors opened at 11 a.m. and we stayed busy talking to people all day long.

Thanks to all of you that stopped by to visit as well as those who were meeting us for the very first time. The kind words and praise for 1Password really had our spirits elevated today and we greatly appreciate all that made the special trip to tell us how much they love 1Password.

For those that haven't had a chance to stop by booth #3526 in the North Hall yet, please do :)

1Password at Macworld Expo Next Week

Once again we'll be exhibiting at Macworld Expo. This year we will be in the North Hall. You can find us in booth 3526-T which is in the Special Interest Pavilions section. We still have a few free exhibit hall passes available so click here to get yours while they last.

Please stop by and visit us if you make it to the show this year!

1Password touch: "Most Useful App"

We have just been informed that 1Password for the iPhone/iPod touch has been nominated in the "Most Useful App" category of the 2008 Best App Ever awards. Public voting is now open and will continue through 6th January, 2009. The winner will be announced on the 7th at Macworld.

If you'd like to vote for 1Password:
http://tr.im/2sd6

If you'd like more information about the awards:
http://bestappever.com/about/

Whatever the outcome, we are most grateful for your nomination, support and encouragement. Thank you all and happy new year!

Your 1Password Master Password and You

Installing 1Password for the very first time involves creating the initial master password (you can change it later if you desire). This password is used to unlock the 1Password keychain and access all your data contained within 1Password. Without this password, no one can access your 1Password data when the 1Password keychain is locked. Obviously, this is the one password you will need to remember and is the reason that the program is named 1Password. I want to address a couple of issues that arise from time to time regarding the master password.

1. There is no way to recover a lost or forgotten master password so choose wisely

1Password in the News

1Password has been in the news a lot this week!

Just last night while I was listening to the Mac Geek Gab PodCast episode #173, 1Password popped up in the conversation about how to setup a brand new Mac.

The Mac Geek Gab PodCast discussion was focused on the new Macbooks and was very timely for me as my new MacBook Pro just arrived. I decided to not migrate my existing preferences, instead electing to start fresh and manually create everything. I was in the middle of configuring Mail when Dave Hamilton gave some great advice on setting things up when going this route.

Fantastic!!

After discussing how to migrate your Mail and Keychains from your old setup to your new Mac, Dave brought up 1Password. I was ecstatic to hear this:

Might I recommend, and they don't pay us to say this but I'm happy to say it anyway, 1Password from Agile Solutions. it is a fantastic, WAY better than the keychain for web passwords.

It is fantastic!

It is such an awesome utility for managing your passwords, it is cross browser compliant, it will generate strong passwords and all that great stuff.

Allows you to easily have different passwords for every single web site that you visit.

That's it, I'm done my endorsement of 1Password

Thank you Dave! I'm glad to hear you find 1Password awesome! And thank you for the advice on migrating Mail, it saved me at least an hour as I was planning a different route!

Awesome!!

Speaking of awesome, MacLife reviewed 1Password in the November Edition and assigned 1Password a ranking of AWESOME (5/5) and then proceeded to award 1Password with an Editors' Choice award!!

This is a huge honor and I want to thank Ray Aguilera for the kind words and writing such an excellent article.

Ray did raise two Cons, however, namely that 1Password is Mac only and the iPhone version is currently a bit limited. We could not agree more and are taking steps to address both of these concerns.

Update: MacLife posted their review online.

Keeping Your Passwords in Sync with 1Password 2.9

1Password 2.9 is now released!

Those paying close attention will notice that the last version of 1Password (2.8.2) was released on August 1st, over two months ago! We normally publish new releases every 2 weeks on average, so for us this release has taken a lifetime!

The reason this release took so long, quite frankly, is we were all exhausted after the release of the iPhone version of 1Password. When 1Password was added to the App Store things were absolutely crazy here; I have never seen anything like it. I now have even more respect for Apple; the firestorm they must have endured is unfathomable.

Now that we are back at full strength, we of course have some surprises in store for you! Without further ado, let me introduce the solution to our #1 requested feature: Robust Alternative to MobileMe Syncing!

1Password in Cool Stuff on Mac Geek Gab Podcast

I was delighted to hear 1Password mentioned on The Mac Observer Mac Geek Gab Podcast in episode #162.

The original show was recorded on August 4th, 2008, so you can see I am behind on getting this post completed. In my defense, this podcast was released about the same time the iPhone version of 1Password was published so you can probably guess why I'm late :)

1Password was brought up by Dave Hamilton in the Cool Stuff portion on the show, directly following DropBox, a really awesome application that Roustem and I had planned to write but never had the time. We're delighted that Evenflow beat us to it!

1Password is discussed at about the 10 minute mark. Here are some excerpts:

"It's fantastic."

"I have Safari...Dude! The day I checked this out I realized how wrong I've been."

"What it does is it is a password manager, but it is a password manager on rails."

"I don't know how I could recommend it any more."

Thanks for the great show Dave!

Backup Strategies

We've all heard about the importance of having backups and we all believe that they are not empty words of advice. However, a lot of people add that to their lists of things that need to do one day and procrastinate for far too long on this. Sadly, those who are most diligent about backups are those that have previously suffered loss as a result of a catastrophic hard drive failure and had no backups. 1Password has a built in backup method but by default it uses the same hard drive as the main data file. This protects you against file loss but not against a drive failure. You can change this in the 1Password preferences.

However, today I want to talk about a more complete and whole disk backup stategy.