Switchers' Blog

Leopard Code Signing and Keychain Problems

OS X 10.5 Leopard brings a new Code Signing security feature that helps verify the integrity of an application. Applications are signed by their creators before being distributed using their private key, and then can be verified on the customer's machine using the companies public key.

The OS X Keychain Services leverage this new Code Signing feature to verify the signature of each application before it will allow access to the contents of the keychain. By verifying the signature, the OS X Keychain Services can detect when a potentially malicious change has been made to an application and thereby protect your sensitive data by denying the changed application access.

Since the upgrade to Leopard, many 1Password users have written in to mention that they cannot access their data, usually from within Safari. At first we were confused why the keychain data could not be accessed from within Safari, yet it was accessible from other browsers and the 1Password application.

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:

Update on 1Password Leopard Support

1Password's Leopard support has blossomed wonderfully in the last 4 days. As I mentioned last time, we had Leopard support in the latest developer build given to us by Apple, but the final retail version of Leopard changed things and many browsers stopped working.

After some long nights and some heroics from the entire team, we now have 1Password working on the retail version of Leopard! Best of all, 1Password is now working in every single browser we supported on Tiger.

We are very proud that things are working now, but we owe our users a huge round of applause as they helped us track down issues, report bugs, helped other users in the forum, and most of all had patience and encouraged us as we worked through these issues.

1Password on Leopard

We recently announced that 1Password 2.5 added Leopard support. In 1Password 2.5 we tested with the latest developer build given to us by Apple, but the final retail version of Leopard changed things and many browsers stopped working.

We just released 1Password 2.5.1 which should now have full Leopard support. It has worked for many people so far, but sadly there are a few users still experiencing problem. We are still looking into perfecting things, but if you are on Leopard and want to give it a go, you can upgrade to version 2.5.1 by using the Check For Updates feature of 1Password, as shown here:

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.