1Passwd: Password Manager + AutoFill for Mac OS X

Originally downloaded January 31, 2007. If you switch browsers a lot or use applications that don’t natively support Apple’s Keychain, 1Passwd may be just the thing to help you out. It not only provides unified password support—while still utilizing Keychain—but goes beyond that in a number of ways. 1Passwd lets you set up multiple identities for its autofill functionality, through which it can automatically fill in forms on various websites. You can specify how much or how little of the requested information is supplied by picking the appropriate user. There’s more, but at this point I’ve done nothing more than read the website info and watch the developer’s screencast. At the developer’s request, I’ll be trying 1Passwd out myself and will post a review of it here in a couple days, so stay tuned! One other factoid of interest is that you can use 1Passwd for free within certain limits, which is a very nice way of publishing shareware. Without registering ($30 for a single user, $40 for a family license), you can have 1Passwd handle passwords for a single user identity and for up to 12 web forms.

Update 2/2/07. Unlike most reviews here at Software Addicts, this review of 1Passwd is being paid for by the application developer through ReviewMe.com. This explains why I’m getting the review done so quickly rather than waiting months (sometimes)… But I assure readers that 1Passwd is subjected to the same scrutiny that all the Mac software we evaluate is, and I’ve shown the developer no mercy in putting 1Passwd through its paces. Fortunately for me, the developer, and the Mac community at large, 1Passwd is a delightful application that will does a great job of extending the Mac OS X keychain to several web browsers that don’t natively support it.

At first, I was skeptical, mainly because most of the apps I use and care about already support Keychain. But in fact, there are several big ones that don’t. Although I don’t use Firefox, Camino, Flock, or OmniWeb, I do use the nightly WebKit browser, which, like those other apps, doesn’t use the Keychain and doesn’t leverage Safari’s saved forms functionality. So I can see right away that 1Passwd would take away my main misgivings about putting Safari aside: It would let me use WebKit while still getting Safari’s form-filling and password-remembering smarts. The application lets you import all relevant Keychain entries from Safari, thus making them available to the other browsers as well. (I believe 1Passwd also imports Safari’s saved forms, but I wasn’t able to test this.) The only caveat here is that the process requires you to approve 1Passwd’s use of each and every Keychain entry, and if you have hundreds of these (as I do), it could take awhile… longer than you may want to spend, in fact.

I should note that one thing I didn’t like about 1Passwd is the demo restriction you work under, which limits you to 12 passwords and one identity. This restriction limited my ability to fully test 1Passwd’s scalability, or to see how it would handle import of information from multiple browsers. On the other hand, you can freely use 1Passwd with this restriction if it’s no problem for you… there is no time limit.

Besides its use in enabling Keychain for other web browsers, 1Passwd also has a unique feature that lets you set up multiple identities for yourself. This is useful if you want to set up specific profiles for web logins, or to specify what information you want to provide about yourself to a given website. Using a toolbar icon that 1Passwd places in your browser (different, customizable icons for each browser, by the way…), you can tell the software to log you in as “Bob” on this website and as “Dick” on another. On one website, you can log in with an identity that provides your address details, while using a different one elsewhere that provides only your name and email address.

Like Keychain, 1Passwd runs in the background, and it requires you to authenticate its use of information entered into web forms. If you decide to use 1Passwd, you may want to turn off your browser’s native support for this functionality… otherwise, you’ll end up authenticating several times. Fortunately, 1Passwd appears to have robust export features, so your data won’t be locked inside in case you decide to stop using it at some point. You can export your information to Passport Wallet format, plist format, and for use on a Palm or Treo, for example.

I did run into a few problems while testing 1Passwd, but none that significantly affected usability or functionality. Mostly, the list of Cons in the table below are suggestions for improving the user experience… They’re features I like to see in all A-Class Mac OS X software, so I try to encourage developers to adopt them. Especially for the family license, which covers your household’s use of 1Passwd for $40, this software is a good value. The following is a list of the pros and cons I noted during my evaluation.

Version as tested: 2.3.5.