Switchers' Blog

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.

Safari AutoFill for iPhone and iPod touch

1Password brings AutoFill support to Safari on iPhone and iPod touch!

Every iPhone and iPod touch user has cringed when they realized that Mobile Safari does not remember web site logins. Coupled with the fact Copy and Paste is nonexistent on the iPhone, users were forced to type their login information every time they wanted to access any password protected site.

The latest version of 1Password has the ability to sync to iPhone/iPod touch which will store all login information as a bookmarklet. When opened, this bookmarklet will allow automatic login into any website.

"I've Moved" - Go & Fill Link in 1Password 2.5

In addition to the name change from 1Passwd to 1Password in version 2.5 there were significant changes in the user interface. We think most of it has been for the better but there has been some confusion regarding the Go & Fill functionality. In version 2.4.x and prior you could double-click on the web form entry or click on the little white arrow to launch Go & Fill.

Leopard and the Applications Folder on the Dock

Trying new things when you have a lot of users is always a hard thing. People tend to get used to how things are and get comfortable with the way it is. Apple has a huge user base so you can imagine the completely revamped Dock in Leopard is causing some confusion and aggravation, especially the new way Folders are shown.

Overall the Dock looks very nice I think:

Migrating From 1Password Version 2.4 to 2.5

NOTE: The Migration Assistant was included in 1Password up until version 2.5.8. The assistant was removed in version 2.5.9 as we needed to solve an issue it was causing and we had hoped most people had already upgraded. We will be adding a better solution in the future, but in the meantime if you need to migrate your 2.4 data to the latest version, download 1Password version 2.5.8 and run the Migration Assistant. Once migrated, you can upgrade to the latest version.

1Password 2.5 made a lot of changes to the underlying keychain format used to store your confidential information. Version 2.5 uses a new keychain called 1Password, and the Migration Assistant will create this keychain for you and migrate all your data from your previous 1Passwd keychain. When you start 1Password 2.5 for the first time it will present you with the Migration Assistant screen to everything setup for 2.5.

On Demand Keychain Locking

1Passwd gives you several options for automatically locking the keychain. For example, you can have it automatically lock after so a number of minutes of inactivity or when your Mac goes to sleep. However, sometimes you want to lock your 1Passwd keychain right now. (like when your crazy Uncle Alex is visiting and asks to use your Mac to check his web mail)

You could load the 1Passwd application and click on the lock icon. However, for those who want to do this frequently there is a better solution.

Five Google Calendar Tips for iCal Users

I have been a heavy iCal user ever since I first purchased the PowerBook G4 and I still open it every day. However, after Merlin Mann mentioned how much he liked the Google Calendar in one of the recent MacBreak Weekly podcasts, I decided to give the online service a try.

Here is a few tips I found in the first few weeks:

1. Use Keyboard shortcuts

You will be surprised to find that navigating and editing Google Calendar entries in the web browser can be faster than using a native desktop application. For example, press "d/w/m" to switch between Day/Week/Month view, "n/p" to navigate to next or previous Day/Week/Month, "t" to jump to Today and "c" to create a new event.

Firefox: Where's my 1Password Icon?

One of the great things about 1Passwd is the multi-browser support. While I'm content to use Safari others have chosen Firefox, Camino, Flock, or Omniweb as their browser of choice. Lately we've received a bit of e-mail regarding the 1Passwd icon not being installed in Firefox and there does not appear to be one single solution for all cases. Therefore, I thought I would do a knowledge "dump" on the subject and cover all them here. So here is a list of solutions for getting the 1Passwd icon in added to Firefox.

1. Although 1Passwd works with Firefox 1.5 and later, we highly recommend that you use the most current version of Firefox. As it stands today the latest version of Firefox is 2.0.0.6. (Get Firefox Here)

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.