Switchers' Blog

Dave's Birthday Surprise

Subscribing to the newsletter has its benefits as those on the list found out when they starting receiving the e-mail Dave sent regarding his surprise sale earlier today. Now through Sunday you can pick up a 1Password license for 25% off the regular price by clicking on the cupcake.

If you are not subscribed to the newsletter yet, enter your e-mail in the box below Join Our Newsletter at the top right of this page and click the Go button.

Finally, feel free to "roast" Dave in the comments for this entry as part of the birthday festivities. :)

Carl S.
Chief Evangelist

Add your MacHeist 3 Serials Numbers to 1Password Fast

The MacHeist 3 bundle sale came to and end last week and the results were pretty impressive. Over 80,000 bundles were sold and close to $850,000 of the proceeds will be distributed to the charities as determined by bundle purchasers. As a bonus they added an application named AppShelf to the bundle to help people store their software serial numbers and packaged all the MacHeist 3 bundle serials in an AppShelf property list file. A lot our users already store all their software serials and registration codes in 1Password so we wanted to make it easy for 1Password users to do this too.

Version 2.9.13 of 1Password adds a new importer that makes getting your MacHeist 3 bundle serials into 1Password fast and easy.

Once you have have updated to version 2.9.13 of 1Password, here is what you will want to do:

1. Visit the MacHeist page, view your bundle receipt, and download the AppShelf file that MacHeist provides.

2. Start 1Password, click on the File Menu, and select Import

3. Choose AppShelf from the list of available import formats

4. Click the Choose File button and select the downloaded file

5. Click on the Start Import button

6. Select the Destination or accept the default

Note: The default uses the name of the file as the folder name and make that folder a sub-folder of Imported in 1Password. Changing the field to a blank value will cause 1Password to import the entries without assigning them to a folder.

7. Click the Import .. Select Items button and you now have all your MacHeist 3 bundle serials in 1Password wallet items.

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Carl S.
Chief Evangelist

Quick Tip: Creating a Strong Yet Memorable Password Redux

It's no surprise that we've mentioned this before, how to create a secure password that you can remember. But, I want to share a quick tip that has helped me create a strong password that I will be able to remember for aeons. (Well, maybe decades, but that's good enough.) 

Think of a song that you know the lyrics to pretty well. It helps if it has a number in it. Here are some examples: 

• December '63 by The Four Seasons
• Eight Days a Week by The Beatles
• 16 Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford  

  You get the idea. So, how does this help you? Well, if you know the lyrics to the song and can sing it in your head, you're half-way there to having a mnemonic that someone else created for you and that you've known a lot longer than this password.

Creating the Password

The way to approach the password is as a hybrid acronym. (I say hybrid because you should spell out at least one of the words so that it's that much more difficult to guess.) So, let's take 16 Tons as an example. You know the lyrics, "You load 16 tons and what do you get?" etc. So, what does that look like as a strong password? How about "Yl16tons&wdyg?" ? That looks pretty strong to me, but let's see what 1Password's strength meter says:

Excellent is really good for a master password! So, now we have a 14 character password with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. And, it's going to be easy for me to remember. All I have to do is sing the song in my head. 

You might prefer to avoid ambiguous characters like l (ell), 1 (one), I (capital i), o (oh), and 0 (zero), but for a password that you created, I don't think this is as much a problem as when using generated passwords. If that's the case, choose another song!

That's all for this quick tip. Now, go and create a strong, memorable master password!

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

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.

New 1Password DMG, Including Custom Applications Icon!

Dan has been going through the various parts of 1Password and freshening up the design of each element as he makes his way around. The Disk Image icon and background were in getting a little 'long in the tooth' and thankfully Dan had some ideas (and the skill!) to fix them.

The Disk Icon of the 1Password.dmg file is now much nicer; it it shown above in the top-left of this post. Not only does it look better than our current one, Dan added many more sizes so it scales up nicely in Finder. The old one scaled so bad in Finder I did not even want to include a screenshot.

As for the Disk Image image itself, there are many wonderful existing DMG designs for motivation, but we of course wanted something unique.

Macworld.com: The new rules for buying a Mac

If you are in the market for a Mac, you need to read the new rules for buying a Mac.

Jonathan Seff and Jason Snell from Macworld posted revised rules for Mac buyers and busted many of the common myths:

• I’m a power user; therefore, I need a Mac Pro.
• I need a Mac Pro because it’s the only expandable Mac, and I need an upgrade path.
• I need a really fast Mac so I can run Windows.
• I’m a power user, so I need a desktop system, not a laptop.
• I need a desktop Mac for serious work, and a laptop for travel.
• Macs are just as expensive as they’ve always been if you want good performance.

"I want to update a site to use a stronger password. Can 1Password do this? How?"

UPDATE/NOTE: Starting with version 2.6.1, 1Password includes the automatic detection of change password pages! This article is describes a workflow in the older versions of 1Password.

The title of this post represents a paraphrase of e-mails that we often receive from users of 1Password who are wondering about the process of changing a weaker password to a stronger secure password. This topic was actually one of the original topics in our original user guide and we have referred people to this article on many occasions. However, since the time it was written we've added some more tools to 1Password that simplify the process and make it easier to do. Therefore, I wanted to expand on the original article and throw a real-world example into the mix.

Some of the features I will mention are covered in my previous blog post about "Dealing with Rejection" so check it out if you have not already done so. However, this post presumes no previous reading. Before we get started I do want to point out a couple of points of confusion in this area. First, you still have to follow the web site's normal password change procedure. These can vary greatly from site to site. Next, 1Password will not automatically update any previously saved web forms you may have for the site. You will need to manually update them or use the procedure I am going to use below. Finally, the process is not automated by 1Password so you will still need to do a little work but it is will be very easy as I will show in my example.

So, let's get started!

Dealing with Rejection

Face it, no one likes to get rejected, but when you use 1Password's strong password generator to generate a secure cryptic password and the site rejects it for some reason it can be a bit frustrating. Sometimes the password is just fine but that username you picked was already taken. Who knew R2D2Rulez would not be available on the Star Wars message boards? However, 1Password has some features that help you deal with the craziness that is the world wide web when it comes to registering at new sites and saving the login information in 1Password.

1Password Interchange Format

From the Wikipedia Article:

John Dennis (1657 - January 6, 1734), was an English critic and dramatist, born in London, the son of a saddler.
...
His other works include several plays, for one of which, Appius and Virginia (1709), he invented a new kind of thunder. The play was not a success and the management of the Drury Lane Theatre withdrew it. But later at a performance of Macbeth there Dennis found the thunder produced by his method and said, That is my thunder, by God; the villains will play my thunder, but not my play.

According to Brewer's entry (under the headword thunder), this is the origin of the phrase, "to steal one's thunder".

Outside of possibly saving me if I ever get to appear on Jeopardy, it reminds me of a new feature that we implemented in 1Password a short time ago that has pretty much been overshadowed by the new Sync to iPhone feature. The new functionality comes in the form of a new import/export format named 1Password Interchange. I really bugged the development team hard for this feature and I am very proud of how it turned out. So in an attempt to get some thunder back for the 1Password Interchange format I wanted to explain what makes it so great and how it can be used.