1Password 3 is shaping up quite nicely, so we wanted to give you a better idea of all the awesome features we've been working on for the past year. After all, 1Password 2 came out nearly three years ago, so customers are excited and want to know what they're getting when purchasing an upgrade license—the first paid version upgrade we've ever had.
This post is going to highlight some of the most interesting and broadly appealing ingredients of 1Password 3, but there's plenty more where these came from. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll have more posts here that go in-depth on some of these features and reveal other notable improvements. But for now, let's get started with the big features of 1Password 3.
1PasswordAnywhere
Users have been asking for a way to access their data on other computers running Windows and Linux, and the new 1PasswordAnywhere feature in 1Password 3 is designed specifically for that.
1Password makes it incredibly easy to use a unique strong password for every website. This makes things much more secure, but made it difficult to login to websites while away from your Mac. With 1PasswordAnywhere, you can securely access your passwords from, well, anywhere.
1PasswordAnywhere does not store your information on our servers. You can store your 1Password data file where ever you want, and use the embedded web application to decrypt and view your data.
1PasswordAnywhere is also Dropbox-friendly. If you sync your Agile Keychain on Dropbox then you can also access your passwords using its web interface. You will need to know both Dropbox username/password and the Master Password of the Agile Keychain.
Update: Check out our Feature Spotlight post if you want to learn more about 1PasswordAnywhere.
Edit 1Password items in your browser
Sometimes you need to change a Login or delete an old Credit Card that you are no longer using. Right now, you have to stop what you're doing, get out of your browser, launch 1Password 2, and search for the item you need to edit.
Not anymore.
1Password 3 stays out of your way even more now, allowing you to remain in your browser to edit or even delete Logins, Identities, and Credit Cards. If 1Password 3 is installed, you can simply find one of these items from our browser button, then hold the Shift key and click to open an editing interface right from your browser. Use the Option-Shift combination, and you can altogether delete the item without ever opening 1Password 3.
Note that this feature does not work with 1PasswordAnywhere—1Password 3 must be installed and using your Agile Keychain in order to edit items from within your browser.
New Software Licenses category
Many of us now have hundreds of Software Licenses. 1Password 2 stored them in the Wallet and it was difficult to organize them. 1Password 3 adds a brand new Software Licenses section to solve this problem, with some interesting twists.
Instead of showing a simple list of licenses, 1Password 3 will import their beautiful icons. This makes for a better organization experience and proudly displays your application licenses.
You can drag-and-drop application icons from the Applications folder into 1Password to quickly add new Software Licenses.
Completely new UI
More than just a pretty face or "how it looks," every 1Password window has been revisited to improve the overall experience and make it easier to add or find your information. For example: like the beautiful application icons we collect for Software Licenses, 1Password 3 will collect thumbnails for each Login, making it much easier to quickly identify a site from the list when you need it right away. You can even add photos from your iSight to an Identity to help it stand out.
We've removed buttons, streamlined 1Password 3's window, and added a new "Syncing" area to the left sidebar that displays the devices you synchronize with. All of this, and more, is part of our quest to make 1Password an extremely easy and beautiful application.
Customizable Login and Wallet items
Want to get rid of some fields from Login items? Perhaps you want to add extra information to your Wallet items that we didn't provide in the template. With 1Password 3, it's no problem. You can now add new custom fields to Wallet items and completely customize existing fields too.
Improved Wi-Fi Syncing
You can now see your synced devices in 1Password's sidebar, thanks to our completely redesigned UI. Click your device, and you'll get an iTunes-like area for selecting specific folders for syncing, allowing you to choose whether to bring only a specific portion of your items on-the-go.
1Password touch can sync items from the folders you choose, though it does not support folder organization. 1Password touch Pro will sync the folders along with their items. Eventually, it will also let you create folders on iPhone and sync them back to your Mac.
Tags
In addition to folders, tags give you another very flexible system for organizing items in 1Password 3. Tag a couple Logins, a Wallet item, and a few Secure Notes with "work," and you can click or search for that tag to view just the items you need while in the office.
Gestures
Apple brought multi-touch gestures like finger-swiping to make Mac OS X easier to use, so we added this convenience to 1Password 3. It works just like in Mail.app, use three-finger swipe gesture to navigate the items.
64-bit Snow Leopard support
One of the most significant changes in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is a virtually top-to-bottom architectural shift to 64-bit computing. While this basically means that many applications may see improved performance (especially at the high-end like large Photoshop files and video editing), there isn't much to see on the surface for end users. Still, such a large shift is no small feat, but 1Password 3 and its browser extensions are fully compatible.
According to Apple:
With Snow Leopard, Safari 4 delivers up to 50 percent faster JavaScript performance thanks to its 64-bit support.
In 1Password 3 the Safari extension has been redesigned to fully support 64-bit mode so you can take advantage of this performance increase.
In Summary
These are most of the new features in 1Password, but we're still holding onto a couple of the big ones that we'll share with you soon.
Stay tuned for a new series here that begins next week. It will explore some of these features in greater depth, and highlight more changes, tweaks, design perks, and other improvements.
We're really excited about 1Password 3! It is our most significant upgrade ever and has been in the works for over a year. We can't wait to share it with everyone!
David Chartier
Chief Media Producer, Agile Web Solutions
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