Exploring Sidebar Categories ✨

dteare

It's been a while since we've talked about Categories and their new design in 1Password 8. There's no time like the present so let's jump in and revisit this! 🤿

TLDR: We are experimenting with customization features to enable you to add Categories to the sidebar. 🤘

It's great to see those newly designed category icons shine on the sidebar. 😍 And from the many threads in this forum, I think this will make a lot of you quite happy. 🤗

@Mitch has been playing with this idea for a while and created a branch to test with. I've been playing with it for an hour now and it's a good experience.

The way it works is the item list continues to sport the categories filter alongside the sort options so you can continue to quickly narrow your list of items by item type when viewing a specific vault, account, or tag. Keeping a consistent experience with the current design was important to me as I really loved the new approach. When a category is selected from the sidebar, the Categories filter is replaced with a simple title to keep things neat and tidy. It's feels really natural.

This is still an experiment so I'm not sure where things will land or when/if this will ship, but If all goes well with this experiment you will be able to try this yourself in an upcoming beta.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Please make some noise if this feature sings to your heart and you want it in the next beta. 🙂

Thank you! 🤗

++dave;
1Password Founder

mikebore

That looks great! Thanks

DenalB

Please make some noise if this feature sings to your heart

It looks great! :+1:

and you want it in the next beta. 🙂

I'm looking forward to it. ;)

OAW

I'd need to see it in action to give a final verdict but this looks really good based upon the screenshot!

rctneil

Love it! But do need to test it in beta form.

Tertius3

I don't care for the categories, but I want the ssh key support that is visible on your screenshot.

AdieB

If I could I'd be leading a marching band round your office until it makes it into the beta 🤣
I'd love to see it in a nightly soon!

viswiz

Looks promising! I would really like to test it😉

dteare

Thanks everybody! 🤗

@Tertius3: I was hoping someone would notice that special new category. 🙌 It's something @roustem and I have wanted for a very long time and what the team came up with is better than we ever imagined. I can't wait to share more details with you soon.

@AdieB: Looking forward to hearing your marching band! I love love love marching bands. How did you know? 🙂

++dave;

roustem

@Tertius3 You might like it even more than you think. I know I did 😀

Tertius3

@roustem This looks very good and it's a quite unexpected feature preview. It seems it's exactly what I asked for implementation some time ago. What ssh clients will be supported on Windows with the agent? OpenSSH, perhaps putty?

AdieB

Updated to the latest nightly and love having the categories back in the left hand nav.
I know I have been pretty vocal on threads about it, but it has already made such a difference to me.

@dteare - I think it was maybe on an episode of MPU???

mikebore

Yes, latest nightly is great! Thank you!

DenalB

Yesterday it wasn't in the Nightly build. But today it is there. :)

OAW

@dteare Thank you for restoring Categories to the side bar! Now if we can just get Item Counts by category in the sidebar (at least as an option) as well 1PW8 will be perfect!! :)

rctneil

All looks great and the SSH key support looks brilliant! Can't wait to try that out.

How do I switch to the Nightly channel?

telephoneman2

+1 and a big LIKE from my side - I opened the thread and herewith I approve the design lol - serious - hope you can implement this, looks good

andmade

Switched to Nightly just to test...it looks so GOOD! I love the new icons. Totally thought this would never happen. Now, with the Zoom level lowered and the app's window size modified appropriately, it's not quite like having the old macOS mini, but it's similar! Makes the program feel more agile and I can finally see the appeal of having a keyboard shortcut to open the full app.

dteare

Glad to hear all your excitement! Happy we were able to strike a chord with y’all. 🤗

Be careful with those nightlies though. They’re built automatically with zero manual testing. I recommend hanging back on the beta channel unless you really love being on the bleeding edge. For example all your categories are about to disappear tonight as we added a preference and defaulted it to off.

++dave;

MrC

You've made terrific progress on this app. Nice work.

Tertius3

Never had a single bigger issue with one of the nightlies. They are stable as releases. I'm running these since months, and the biggest issue I have with these is having to enter the master password after each daily update+restart.

DenalB

we added a preference and defaulted it to off

Good choice! Enabled categories in the sidebar again. The only thing that is missing now is the item count behind every category. ;)

mikebore

Post deleted user error.

EDIT
The user error was:
After updating to latest nightly build (# 80500126), only "Logins" showed in the Sidebar under Categories.
I poked around a bit, and then Cargories disappeared completely from Sidebar.
Then I found in Prefs > Appearance that the Categories in Sidebar option was unchecked.....checked it and all was well again.
Don't know if anything changed in the latest nightly to cause this hiccup?

dteare

Thank you, @MrC! 🤗

@Tertius3: It's great to hear the nightlies have been so stable for you. Hopefully we can keep it that way but no guarantees. 🙂 The trickiest situation is when there are database migrations and we need to change it. It's rather rare and can be fixed by simply deleting the database and setting things up anew, so we felt comfortable enough leaving Nightlies as an option. Still, you can see how you'd have to really enjoy this kind of stuff to have a smile on your face while doing that. 😃

@DenalB: Glad you're happy! 🙌 Regarding item counts, we have a plan there. We also have a lot of plates in the air so I'm not sure when this will bubble to the top of the priority list. Soon hopefully as this is a popular request.

@mikebore: I think what tripped you up is the nightlies change super quick and features aren't always fully polished before they land there. We (purposely) merged part of the code to get the sidebar categories rolling before the settings were available (it was on a separate branch to make things easier). Anywho, it meant we needed to default this option to ON even though that wasn't our long term plan. Once we merged in the settings code we were able to change the default to what we wanted it to be.

Glad to hear y'all are enjoying the new sidebar customization. Carry on and enjoy the rest of your week. 🤗

++dave;

rctneil

Hi,

Just tried a nightly version. Really liking the categories in the sidebar, but have two points to mention. (Come on, you didn't expect anything less from me right @dteare ? :-) )

1. Can the sidebar sections be re-orderable? Then I can drag my two accounts above categories or move tags to the top. Just allow for flexibility.

2. Can you add an "All Categories" option to the top of the categories list? Currently if you click multiple categories, you ahve to keep clicking back at the top left to get back to all. All should be the default i'd expect.

Thanks,
Neil

Chris Messina

@dteare it's nice to see this kind of access to categories and would love to see you go deeper in two ways:

1. Allow for custom views based on the selected category that's more appropriate to the content types. You shouldn't go completely skeuomorphic, but it would be nice to be able to view Documents, Identities, Memberships and other card-like types in grids, rather than just lists, for example, like Apple Books.¹

2. It'd also be useful to access these categories as filters via shortcut keys or as autosuggested filters in the ⌘-f searchbox. I see that you can filter results using special queries like =category:Documents, but starting a query with =category: doesn't autopopulate the list of possible categories.

rctneil

I take back my second point above. I guess just using the "All items" at the top of the sidebar suffices here!

dteare

Hello @rctneil. 👋 In my head I was writing up an answer that All Items should fit the bill for what you were looking for. I'm glad I read the whole thread before writing a big essay there and taking screenshots. 🙂 As for your first point, extended sidebar customization is something we've talked about internally and I could see it being a cool addition to 1Password.

Thanks for stopping by @Chris Messina and for the screenshots as they're super helpful. I remember learning from you to take a screenshot of everything. 🤗

We've had quite a few discussions about embracing custom layouts for different item types and you can see a glimpse of how they may look on future.1password.com. Here's a screenshot from there of an artists conception on how a House category could look.

We're still at the concept stage and there's a lot of possibilities here. I'm looking forward to being able to share more with you soon.

As for filters and auto-populating search filters, absolutely yes. Our advanced search filters work but they'd be so much more useful and enjoyable with a nice pill design with suggestions and the like. Definitely something we want to add.

++dave;

Chris Messina

@dteare++

PeterG_1P

An update for folks who are interested: this ability to add Categories to the sidebar has made it into our latest Betas. If you haven't tried it yet, we'll be happy to hear what you think!