1Password 8 Mac Electron App Experiment

Using 8 since it launched. My biggest frustration is just inconsistency. I never am quite sure what sort of thing will work for a specific website. Sometimes it wants a keyboard shortcut. Sometime it seems to work fine. I am not a programmer and don't know if this has anything to do with Electron, but things just do not seem nearly as seamless as they were in the past.

Thanks for the response. To answer your question: if i select an item below the search box, rather than just Open & Fill, it would be nice to have Copy Password (or make this option user-configurable as to what to have here). I'm usually already in an app or on a web site and want to copy the password (if autofill is just not recognizing the site URL, which does sometimes happen based on certain sites and isn't really 1PW's fault).

Hi folks:

Thanks for your feedback here.

dtoub:

I now click the icon and get a dropdown for Quick Access and Open 1PW. This is stupid; if I wanted to open the app, I’d click on 1PW in the Dock (or simply type 1PW in Alfred).

I can definitely see how this would be frustrating, so I've added your feedback to an issue around this.
ref: dev/core/core#10768

Too many keyboard shortcuts to memorize, and why should I have to do this to copy a password?

Clicking the menu icon on a row result will take you to the page to take actions on an item. Would you mind elaborating on how you'd prefer to copy a password from Quick Access?

As I have mentioned in another thread, the new search functionality in Quick Access is terrible and is different from that of the browser extension (which uses the previous, correct, search methodology).

As mentioned elsewhere, we're still fine tuning the way search works to both behave as expected and give you the results you expect, while also working across multiple languages.

Ivan_K:

As Peter mentioned above, our goal is always to make the best experience we can, regardless of the engineering or or design decisions behind it. We're happy to discuss and converse about specific concerns you may have.

Jack

Another +1 to viswiz and @tomjepp mentioned issues.

I am a 1Password user since 2014 (v4). In fact I bought my first iOS device (iPad) knowing that 1P is running great there and loved it already on my Mac.

Do I miss any functionality in v7? Nope. Nothing.

It has all the collaboration features I ever need from this application, it runs great on the shiny M1 machine with macOS 12.1 on it.

The only thing I miss from the v6 days is light color on the left sidebar with categories. I hoped that dev team just change the behaviour so that 1P v7 has light/dark UI just as macOS supports for some time now or at least provides an option to change it, but that just did not happen.

Overall though - for sure I am much more happy with v7 at the moment as with v8. It still feels much less intuitive and polished in actual use, requiring more interaction and keyboard shortcuts. Have not used keyboard shortcuts with 1P at all, so this all feels like pushing me into a strange territory.

Moreover, being IT admin for years, I see that generally, the less tech savvy person is - the less he/she uses keyboard shortcuts. No doubt that this whole "shortcuts" push will be much less preferred way of interacting with the app as it is possible with v7.

1Password is one of the very few apps that I am completely fine with paying subscription for and I am really glad to support it's development in this way. Even though my main vault is still "standalone" one resting on iCloud (with all different attachments, that just started to gain similar support in 1P vaults) - I will be also fine fully moving to 1P vaults due to years of experience with the application and full trust on the devs.

Pushing a subpar experience with v8 however is not something I am looking for at all. I am using Macs since 2013 and enjoy the extra polish of the apps written for this platform. I really don't care what happens in the Windows world since, well... Microsoft does not seem to care much about Windows at all (never-mind polishing user experience) - all releases I have tested and administered after Windows 8 was released feel like beta software. Unlike Apple who is always pushing for maximum polish. Seriously apps in Big Sur / Monterey just pleasure to use in many ways because of the great attention to detail and one design language.

I really feel like Mac community who is for sure the most loyal 1Password users and customers really deserve to get as polished experience as ever and if for one reason or another v8 is not able to provide it, than it only makes sense to allocate appropriate resources to continue polishing v7. Clearly 1P is a financial success so from the long term user side of things - I see no real "excuses" not too.

I hope AgileBits crew sticks to it's roots and continue to provide the best password manager out there, not allowing for some serious compromises.

1Password 7 functionality wise is already amazing. There is no point in rushing and pushing "changes for the sake of changes". I doubt that today most users utilise even half of the functionality v7 already provides.

1P does not need chat functionality, project management features, integrated audio player or video editor. Today, with even external item sharing that was added in v7.9 - 1Password is literally "can do it all" application that it should be.

I am even surprised that AgileBits team even considers to "drop" such amazing native macOS application / experience that 1Password 7 is today in favour of compromised solution that clearly cannot be a homerun as things stand now, since the core tools are still missing the important bits that native Apple development tools provide for it's own platform.

I wish all of us 1Password 7 users will be able to hold to the native experience for years to come and that if at the end of the day AgileBits teams decides to pull it - the shift will happen only when v8 (or other version) will compromise nothing.

v7 is literally a historical achievement in app development with a long history and trackable evolution path. It is a native citizen in the Apple world. It does not deserve to end up in the bin.

Totally agree with all the above. I’ve complained about many of the same things re: (not so) Quick Access. My biggest gripes are:
* I now click the icon and get a dropdown for Quick Access and Open 1PW. This is stupid; if I wanted to open the app, I’d click on 1PW in the Dock (or simply type 1PW in Alfred).
* Too many keyboard shortcuts to memorize, and why should I have to do this to copy a password?
* Once I’ve found the item I need, I now have to either click to get to the point of being able to copy a password, or else invoke three keys as a keyboard shortcut to do this.
* As I have mentioned in another thread, the new search functionality in Quick Access is terrible and is different from that of the browser extension (which uses the previous, correct, search methodology).

I’ve been a longtime user of 1PW like many folks here, and want to keep using it. I got past my revulsion of subscription models and have been a subscriber for a few years now. I get that 1PW 7, while still in use for some time, is eventually going to be deprecated (certainly it will get fewer updates than 1PW 8 as one of the devs mentioned in another thread). So I want 1PW 8 to be better. While it has evolved from the earlier versions of the beta, it still has a ways to go. Regressions and making things more complicated is not a good approach. I actually hate it when I have to unlock 1PW now, since it rarely defaults to TouchID on my Mac, and I also hate having to invoke Quick Access for all the reasons I mentioned above. It’s all fixable, but it would be nice to fix it already.

And as mentioned in another thread, I still don’t have my set category sticking after reopening 1PW…

DitchComfort id check out either Enpass or Minimalist Password Manager, both are good (but not quite great alternatives). That, or you could go all in with iCloud Keychain, especially now that it supports TOTP codes.

+1 on viswiz's points.

I agree with all of them, but also:

• the UI elements all look enough like native elements (but never quite right) that I expect them to act like them, but they all have different behaviours that are jarring every time I use them. Even text boxes are close-but-not-quite, dropdowns are particularly guilty of this. If you'd gone for a very visually different design it would actually bug me less, but the uncanny valley you've hit is the worst place to be. It's an indecisive middle-of-the-road approach. I assume that it stems from 'how can we make this inoffensive on all platforms', but it just feels off everywhere.
• there's an obsession with keyboard shortcuts in 1P8 - every new feature feels like it needs you to memorise some new keyboard shortcut. Search no longer filters a live view, it shows a few suggestions and needs a keyboard shortcut to actually show me results. Quick Access is nothing but this. It's a horrible UI change for me and makes 1P8 massively harder to use.
• old flows are nearly all made longer or replaced with flows that are designed for users with lots of vaults or lots of accounts. The aforementioned search changes, the category changes, the constant pushing of vault collections which makes low numbers of vaults more awkward and annoying to use
• Quick Access requires you to memorise keyboard shortcuts or search syntax to be able to do things that 1Password Mini had actual UI for. It's a horrible approach that is so opaque to use and an absolute usability disaster. Paired with the fact that search doesn't work as well as it used to makes it considerably more awful to use.

DitchComfort if you have an iPhone the inbuilt password manager is actually pretty darn good. The only place where 1P is better than it for auto filling is for OTPs

I still have a 1Password account but I only use it on my phone. And I’m still looking for another app but have a hard time to go all-in. Every time I try the new 1P8 on my Mac, I just feel sad. Hard to explain but… But that’s where we are heading, and I keep looking for another solution 😜

Being a software developer for 25 years I'm interested in technology and everything you've used to create 1PW8. But as a user I care about usabality and platform integration. Sadly both of those points are substandard in version 8.
Almost every workflow I've regulary used in 7 was either removed or replaced by something else that typically requires much more user interaction than before.
Examples:
* I have only two vaults and the second one is rarely used. I never got into tags. My main feature to organize was switching categories in the sidebar. Now I have an obsolete sidebar and a category switcher that requires more clicks and even worse hides the information, i. e. I have to click to open up a list of categories, have to refocus on this list and click again.
* Search is a total mess. I've used search all the day before. In 7 I didn't had to care about how something in the vault was written. I could just type any part of a word and the result was immediatly shown. Now I get only a fraction of the results because someone at Agilebits thought it might be better to only search for full words and even than hide some results unless you hit CMD + Return. Definately a dealbreaker.
* The password generator is available in the main app and the browser plugin. But why did you remove the QR code scanner from the main app? I typically create accounts including passwords within the main application. Now I'm forced to use the browser plugin just to scan QR codes.

Regarding platform integration:
* I really don't care if you use Electron are something else as long as you stick with the most basic UI principles of the OS. Don't use a complete custom UI, i. e. on macOS windows have either 'traffic lights' in the top left corner in order to close/maximise/minimise a window or in case of modal dialogues cancel and ok buttons. They never ever have a X in the top right corner.
* macOS offers a systemwide accent color configurable by the user. Please use it.