There’s one app on my Mac I could never, ever live without: 1Password. I basically store my life in it: my digital life in the shape of logins and accounts, and my real life as credit cards, bank accounts and secure notes - it’s all there. Can a single application handle the most important aspects of your work, your life? Sure it can, and 1Password is designed to do this exact thing, handle things for you and make you feel safe about it.
We all know that the Mac and iPhone versions of 1Password are great apps, but what about the iPad one? Agileweb Solutions was one of the first development houses to announce plans for the new device and publicly release early mockups of their new app, so maybe someone feared the first iteration of 1Password for iPad would be buggy, slow and not so well developed after all. Couldn’t have been more wrong. 1Password for iPad looks and works great, just as you saw in the screenshots weeks ago - but most of all feels good on the iPad.
Overall, it’s the 1Password you know and love, just ported to this new device.
For those who don’t know what 1Password is and does (seriously, where do you live?) it’s a great form filler and password manager that takes away from you the stress of remembering all your passwords, logins and other important data by storing everything in a single, secure database that uses advanced encryption. You just have to assign a “master password” (thus the name 1Password) and forget about everything else. Every time you’ll want to log into a website you know you saved into 1P, just hit a shortcut and the app will fill the necessary fields for you.In your browser. It’s great, and my digital life depends on it. But 1Password isn’t limited at passwords. You can store software licenses in it, credit cards and bank accounts, secure notes and even multiple identities to use as templates for your future signups.
Basically, if you’re not using 1Password on your Mac, you’re doing it wrong.
Even if 1Password for the iPad app comes a universal, free download app for previous 1Password Pro customers, it is actually more similar to the Mac version than the iPhone one. You can use it both in landscape and portrait mode, without any visible changes beside a different orientation of some elements. Just like on the Mac, there’s a sidebar with all the options to navigate through your logins, accounts, identities and so on, but first you have to sync it to the Mac app if you want to get all your previously saved data. The sync process is fast and requires seconds to be set up. As you can see from the screenshots, the app looks good and it’s very elegant , though it doesn’t sport all the eye candy of the Mac version. I guess it’s one anyway, considering that it has to be a functional app in the first place.
To retrieve a password for a specific login you can either search or scroll the list. There’s really nothing much to say about this. What you may be wondering is how the app actually manages to let you login using its database into MobileSafari, considering that Apple doesn’t allow extensions of any sort to be loaded in the background. Well the method is quite clever: all you have to do is generate a logins bookmarklet from your 1P for Mac, sync the bookmarks to the iPad and boom, every time you’ll have to login into a website tap on the bookmarklet and you’ll be presented with this beautiful black window that lets you choose logins from the database. It’s one hell of a workaround, it works great and it’s dead simple to install.
1Password for iPad is complex and structured application, but it’s easy to use and enables you to have a better, faster, smoother browsing experience. If you don’t have it yet, you should go buy it now in the App Store. A Mobile Safari without 1Password doesn’t feel like Mobile Safari at all to me.
1Password Pro (Universal App)
