What I was looking for: an app to store my passwords

I stuck with Lockbox Lite for a long time on my iPhone. Then I got fed up about not being able to have the same data available also on my two Macs (not to mention the stupid ads). So I started looking for something that had these features:

  • quick 4-digits general password to access all the rest
  • sync between iPhone and mac

About the first point, I know that it’s a weak point and raises the question “why using AES 256-bit encryption if you rely on a 4-digit number to secure all your confidential data”. Well, I’m not overly paranoid about this stuff — and then the alternative is to keep my passwords in a text file somewhere on my computer.

It seems that there is lots of apps and systems to do this, and most of them come with a price. Hefty price for some, more reasonable for others.

Overkill: 1password

Option number one was 1password. Wonderful program, very effective, easy to use, lots of options but:

  • it’s expensive
  • it’s supposed to ease your life by making 1-click logins to ebanking sites and stuff like this but it doesn’t work so well with Chrome (I can’t even do the 1-click thing with Gmail !)

So I got fed up pretty quickly (it was an all-in-a-night research), especially considering that I had to shell out how much ? — about $35 for the Mac app and another $5-6 for the iPhone app. And on top of that, i don’t even have that many passwords or bank accounts. So it was like using napalm to fry a fly.

The alternatives

Then I looked at other options. Well it’s actually hard to find any alternative to 1password on the net. Everybody seems to have bought that friggin’ app, so if somebody asks: “Hi, can you recommend a cheap alternative to 1password”, everybody replies like this: “Hey no you MUST get 1password”. Thanks (you moron), but I did just say that I was looking at an alternative?

Anyway, after another couple of hours of googling around, I’ve found that the options out there are the following:

  1. free but just for 30 days
  2. free but just if you use the computer app
  3. free but just if you use the mobile app
  4. free but butt-ugly and no sync (Password Safe)
  5. free but too complicated and no apps (KeePass)

The italian route: iAccounts

So I went down the italian route; I mean I chose this app programmed by fellow italians; smooth, simple, with a neat little Mac application which is free and gives you the ability to do basic records editing, backup/restore and import/export of data in csv format.

It’s called iAccounts and I thoroughly recommend it. Only 4 euros, and it works like a charm. The free Mac companion is iBackup, it gets the job done and the only thing I don’t like about it is the name.

Some nerdy stuff to make it work between Macs

But the reason why I started writing about this is that I had to geek around a little bit, first to import the data, then to try and setup a sort of sync between computers (I have a macmini and a macbook air, and I wanna be able to access the same database from both computers). And I thought this could be of interest to somebody out there.

So what I did is simply to create a symbolic link on both computers that redirect iBackup to use the same database; such database is of course stored on my Dropbox (I know you were all expecting it; I mean, who does not use Dropbox these days ?).

For you guys who are command line-impaired, here’s how to do it:

$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/iBackup2.data ~/Library/Application Support/iBackup/iBackup2.data`

Oh and the the import of csv data ? It’s great, I played around a little bit with awk and Textmate to adjust the file exported from Lockbox, and at the end I created two .csv files, one for web passwords and various logins and the other for my credit/debit cards.

This is a sample of the main .csv:

Group Name,Record Name,Username,Password,Note
Websites,photo.net,dummy@gmail.com,1234,better when there was Greenspun
Computers,macbookair,genius,qwerty,login to my macbook air 11"

And this is the second file to import credit cards details:

Group Name,Record Name,Issuer,Number,Holder,Valid From,Valid To,PIN,Note
Cards,Pig VISA,Pig Bank,4444 3333 2222 1111,NAME,01/10,01/13,0000,CCV=999

That’s it, have fun with your passwords (me, I’m going to do some proper mountain biking this weekend).