1Password 7 to 8, my experience ... the same for others?

xco
xco
Community Member
edited December 2022 in Mac

To start, I used to love 1Password and recommended it to friend, families and colleagues. In fact, I have been using the app since 2007 on Mac and iOS devices. It was a great, reliable app. I have been using Macs since 1984. Yep, a long time.

To finish, I really "hate" 1Password v8 after upgrading this week from v7. It is incredibly flaky and ill conceived. The interface design for a variety of reasons, including the use of color is a step backwards. I will now start searching for alternatives.

I spent several hours transferring data and files from iCloud to 1Password cloud. Getting the browser app to work properly on Chrome tonight took two hours. I still cannot say exactly how I did it. Never a problem with 1Password v7. I also use 1Password in Safari, on multiple Macs.

Someone needs to go back to the drawing board, and keep the marketing department away. The app requires some good human interface design thinking, to consider more than what sells, but rather what is practically useable day in and day out. The detail is important, very important. After all, 1Password's goal should be to recruit and keep subscription paying customers over the long term.

It should not take a longtime computer professional, who has also run software startups, so much time and effort just to get the darn software upgrade running properly. At the same, it has my life's passwords and documents. If the software seems flaky, what about my records?

I realize one problem. Someone, perhaps more clever than I, decided not to write native software for the Mac in v8.

The problem is, 1Password is limited by the very capabilities of that tool set. "Penny wise, pound foolish," is a classic English phrase. I do wonder whether the marketing folks and company leadership would have been better served by not short changing the Mac community.

I recall when AgileBits was a fun company, with smart people who really cared about being the best.

Is AgileBits, Inc. the same company as back then? I wonder ...

1Password Version: 8.9.8
Extension Version: 2.6.0
OS Version: macOS 13.0.1
Browser:_ Chrome / Safari
Referrer: forum-search:1Password 7 to 8

Comments

  • xco
    xco
    Community Member
    edited December 2022

    Some say 1Password is only a faithful if not improved version of v7. It's not really. I never, ever had problems with Password 7 and before. These were always rock sold, intuitive apps. No longer, I am sad to say.

  • danco
    danco
    Volunteer Moderator

    I realize one problem. Someone, perhaps more clever than I, decided not to write native software for the Mac in v8

    The backend is not native (it uses Rust, which is cross-platform) but apparently does not have significant problems. The user interface is written in the cross-platform Electron.

    As I understand it, originally there were two teams working on the UI, one using Electron, the other using the native SwiftUI, and the native version was later dropped. I have seen many comments not relating to 1PW that suggest SwiftUI is not yet ready for full use. That may be the reason AgileBits dropped that development. I don't think we were ever told

  • viswiz
    viswiz
    Community Member
    edited December 2022

    Since the early access versions of 1PW8 I'v tried to adapt to all the changes. Luckily I've installed it only on my macOS Beta test installation.
    For my search based workflow 1PW8 is barely usable. The completely obsolete dropdown window with its insane relevance filtering and an extra shortcut just to get the actual results make me think that 1PW8's UI designer has never ever used any of the previous versions. On top of that many buttons and functions that were easily available before are now hidden behind dropdowns or menus. Even basic functionality like drag and drop support is now extremely limited.
    The technology behind might be great but the whole UI still feels out of place on macOS. One of the problems seems to be related to the idea that AgileBits would like to have a pixel perfect copy of the same UI on all platforms. The first 1PW8 versions didn't even respect basic UI principles like window stop lights on macOS windows have to be top left instead they used a windows like X top right. It was finally corrected but in contrast to a native UI those fixes are much more difficult to implement in a cross platform toolkit like Electron as you have to reimplement things that native UI toolkits have readily available.
    It is completely incomprehensible that even after one year of development hardly anything has changed. Even rather simple things like setting a default vault, enable/disable auto submit or wrong locales in dates took more than a year to fix.

  • ossiejhmoore
    ossiejhmoore
    Community Member

    I actually had no technical issues with the move from 7 to 8. However, I do agree that the UI, while "prettier" is a bit clunky, click happy, somewhat unintuitive, and a regression. Examples for me on macOS:

  • pixelmachine
    pixelmachine
    Community Member
    edited December 2022

    Yeah I don't find it unusable but there's just so much more friction than before, it been really disappointing, I wish I'd stayed with 7. As mentioned the amount of time it's taken just to fix basic things like the date locales is actually quite shocking.

    But don't worry they'll "add your vote to the feature request" and give you a patronizing 😊 for your troubles!

    Seems like the classic situation where the team gets bigger, VC money arrives and the product just gets worse and moves slower. Every company seems to think they can avoid it and yet it happens over and over again.

    Edit: 1Password crashed when the forum asked me to make a new password, lost the password causing me to have to reset it twice!

  • Dave_1P
    Dave_1P

    Thank you everyone for your feedback! I'll respond directly to a few points below:

    @ossiejhmoore

    I've replied to your comments in the other threads and added your feedback to our internal tracker for the other issues. Thank you for your great suggestions!

    @xco

    I spent several hours transferring data and files from iCloud to 1Password cloud. Getting the browser app to work properly on Chrome tonight took two hours.

    That certainly doesn't sound right. Can you tell me a little more about where things got stuck? I would love to dig deeper on how we can avoid having other users run into the same situation in the future.

    The interface design for a variety of reasons, including the use of color is a step backwards.

    Our design team would be interested in hearing more about this. Is there any specific parts of the interface that you're not a fan of? Which colours in particular do you consider to be a "step backwards"?

    @viswiz

    For my search based workflow 1PW8 is barely usable. The completely obsolete dropdown window with its insane relevance filtering and an extra shortcut just to get the actual results make me think that 1PW8's UI designer has never ever used any of the previous versions.

    Thank you for your feedback. I've passed along your comments to the product team so that they're aware that the current search feature is falling short for you.

    On top of that many buttons and functions that were easily available before are now hidden behind dropdowns or menus. Even basic functionality like drag and drop support is now extremely limited.

    Which buttons and functions would you like to have more exposed in the user interface? And can you tell me how you were using drag and drop before?

    The technology behind might be great but the whole UI still feels out of place on macOS.

    What specifically feels out of place with 1Password 8 on macOS to you? I use it daily, all day at work and in my personal life, and 1Password 8 is more heavily integrated (and works better) with macOS than previous versions. But that's my personal subjective opinion and I'm interested in hearing how your experience of the app may differ. 🙂

    -Dave

    ref: IDEA-I-372
    ref: IDEA-I-289

  • pixelmachine
    pixelmachine
    Community Member

    Yeah same, it's especially unintuitive as so many little things are just gone! It's hard to know if they've moved to some hidden place or were just abandoned in the move to Electron to save time.

    Also not keen on the huge UI change from 1Password Mini to the Quick Access thing. I use Alfred and Spotlight but with 1Password I tend to need to interact far more and the minimal Quick Actions popup is just more clunky for me for that purpose. It's a good idea but I would have preferred it to be optional.

This discussion has been closed.