Nontrivial Exercises

My Pitch to Roboform - Turned Down

One of the PC apps that I grew to depend on was Roboform, certainly the best password manager for the PC. Roboform moved me from having a few passwords that I spread across all my different logins, to having a unique, very secure password for each login. Of course, Roboform managed each of the passwords and logins, stored them securely (encrypted) and would automatically fill in userids and passwords when you went to a site that you had a login for.

When I switched to the Mac, one of my first problems was how to store all my passwords. On Roboform’s website, they specifically say that they don’t support Mac. I understand that if you’re focused on developing PC apps, it’s not easy or even desirable to try to port or rewrite your software for Mac OS X. I give the Roboform team credit for at least making the explicit decision not to have a Mac version.

I thought I would just make a pitch to them, however, of the gap in the market and the opportunity that is just waiting for them. My pitch goes like this.

With the advent of the Intel Macs and the ability to run Windows apps from the Mac - either through Boot Camp or a virtual machine like Parallels - the number of people starting to use Macs for the first time will increase. Many of these people could be existing Roboform customers, but they will have to use an alternate app for the Mac.

The features that would make Roboform stand out on a Mac would be:

• direct browser integration - Safari, Camino, Firefox, OmniWeb just like you have on Windows browsers with Roboform
• a Pass2Go-like app (the lightweight version of Roboform that you can install on a USB thumb drive and take with you to plug in to any computer and instantly have your passwords available) for the Mac that would run on the same USB drive that you use for the Windows version. When you plugged the USB drive into a Windows machine, the Pass2Go app would autorun and you’d have Roboform running with all your passwords. When you plug the USB drive into a Mac, the Mac-equivalent portable Roboform app would run and read the same encrypted password files on the USB drive that the windows version reads. Voila - you have a device that allows you instant but secure access to your password info on a PC or a Mac.

Taking a cursory look at a couple of the Mac password management apps shows:

• Pastor which is DonationWare,
• Passwords Plus which is $30, has a Windows and Mac version, and allows you to (manually) export and import encrypted files which you can transfer between PC and Mac platforms
• Password Wallet which is $18 Shareware.

None of these three Mac apps above appear to have the direct browser integration that Roboform does, but Passwords Plus from Dataviz seems to come closest to the current functionality of Roboform, plus it has a Mac and Windows version. By using FolderShare or some other remote storage capabilities (e.g. Box.net, Foldera), one could pretty easily sync Windows and Mac passwords with Passwords Plus.

You could offer an advantage if you had the Pass2Go-like portable functionality and made the price point for a Windows+Mac solution less than the $60 it would take to get set-up on PasswordsPlus Windows and Mac platforms. Just imagine the marketing - show someone working at a PC, then standing up, pulling out the USB thumbdrive, walking over to a Mac laptop, plugging in the USB drive, then get right on back to work, e.g. banking on-line.

I offered this pitch to Roboform privately and they responded that they have no plans to create a Mac version. So, I offer this now publicly to anyone who would like to fill this gap in the market.

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Note, since I initially put this together, I’ve found 1Passwd, which was born out of the exact predicament that I find myself in now. Dave Teare switched to a Mac last year and eventually created 1Passwd to fill the Roboform-shaped hole on Macs. I’ve just (finally) begun to check it out, Dave, and it looks extremely good so far. I’m going to work with it a bit more then I’ll write my review, but I can already recommend at least trying it out. There is an excellent screencast of 1Passwd in action that Dave has just recently posted on the site.

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