If you’re quite into the Mac and iPhone software scene you should probably know that there’s one application that everybody loves when it comes to passwords management: that’s 1Password by Agileweb Solutions. I reviewed 1Password 3 a while ago, and things just haven’t changed as I’m still using 1Password and its database it’s growing bigger and bigger everyday. I guess I just couldn’t work without at this point. 1Password is great because it offers a lot of features packed in a well designed and gorgeous interface, yet doesn’t overwhelm the user with weird commands and submenus. You can automatically save logins, save credit card details in the wallet, store apps licenses and generate passwords.
Now, I’ve stumbled upon this application called uP@ssw0rdz! which, icon and name aside, could really come in handy to those people who don’t need the multiple features of 1Password and just need a simple, dictionary based password generator and manager.
uP@ssw0rdz! can generate dictionary, word or character based passwords, store them in a “safe” and enables you to create profiles for set of rules. I’ve been using the app for a few days now and I’m pretty satisfied, though I believe it could be a lot better (more usable) if only the developer paid attention to the user interface. Anyway, there’s a bottom toolbar organized in 5 tabs: Passwords, Rules, Safe, Profiles and More. Let’s focus on the Passwords tab, which is the one I used most: here, you can generate a set of passwords based on the rules you entered in the Rules tab. You can choose between 3 different kinds of rules (Dictionary, Word and Character). Each of these rules is actually good to generate a strong password, but I definitely recommend to use the last one, Character-based. While Dictionary and Word simply generate a password starting from a random word or adding stuff to a word you have to enter in the Preferences (see the screenshots), the Character rule doesn’t follow any dictionary / user input and generates totally random sequences of letters, numbers and symbols. Though uP@ssw0rdz! lets you create a password up to 30 characters longs while1Password can go up to 50, this app offers more features than Agileweb’s creation when it comes to serious password generating. You can set character types to include (lowercase, uppercase, numbers, symbols), repetitions, sequences, substitutions and .characters added after / before. It’s feature rich and powerful.
So, once you’ve generated a password in the main screen, you can select it and it gets copied to the iPhone clipboard. Very useful if you need to quickly generate a password for a new website you’re subscribing to. But, what if you’d like to permanently keep that password? uP@ssw0rdz! lets you send a newly created pass to the “safe”, basically a library of previously generated passwords. You can enter many additional details like Name, Description, Username, Password,Url and Notes. Sure it’s not as pretty as 1Password, but it gets the job done. There are also some settings you can play with in the More tab, like PIN code to lock the app, how many passwords should the homescreen generate each time and shake mode.
Overall, uP@ssw0rdz! is a good application which just needs a more polished UI and a new icon. If you can over this and you need a powerful password generator with a *lot* of options to choose from, uP@ssw0rdz! is aimed at you. And $1.99 it’s a fair price for your security.
