Welcome to Agile Web Solutions!

I’ve been using 1Password from Agile Web Solutions for a couple of months now. I got it as part of one of those Mac software bundles that show up periodically (not MacHeist, but similar; I can’t remember the name of it), but didn’t start using it until I realized how many times I was using the same 2–3 passwords for my online memberships and accounts. They’re good passwords, but reusing them again and again seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.

What I will say is that 1Password works like a charm with Dropbox, since this password manager automatically detects any changes and updates your keychain the moment a change is made to the Agile Keychain file. That means you're much less likely to end up with any sort of conflicts or lost information.

We may have mentioned it one or two (dozen) times, but 1Password is a great solution for securely managing passwords, credit cards and notes on a Mac (and recently the iPhone). If you're a 1Password fan, be sure to check out the 2.9 release from last weekend; it has a pretty huge new feature. For quite a while now there have been grumblings about the OS X Keychain being a bit of a beast, especially when handling large amounts of data. Rather than waiting out Apple for new improvements to the Keychain system, the stalwart coders at Agile Web Solutions decided to write their own.

Rather than use a single password for all of the websites I access, or try to create a convoluted password algorithm to have a list of unique passwords, I use 1Password to generate long, nearly impossible to guess passwords that are unique to each website. In the off chance that someone figures out one of my passwords, they will only have access to that one site instead of everything.

In these days of constant security issues with both commercial and open source software available the most simple and first line of defense is to have many passwords and change them often, this also applies to any other time you enter personal information on a webpage. However how many of us really do this? Ummm… not me until now. I discovered 1Password yesterday in my search for a commercially available password manager. Obviously it had a “very Mac GUI”, which was hard to overlook, but once I did get past that it was pretty obvious this is exactly what I was looking for.