1Password 8 - Non-native feel

@mia - if it wasn't clear, I'm an employee here as well. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't accidentally confusing or appearing to deceive anyone. The orange post header banners are the main "tell" for who is staff and who is community, and you can also click our profiles to verify the 1Password logo on it if you like.

I've heard the negative comments about Electron and the arguments against it just doesn't seem that compelling to me. The app runs fast.... Very fast.

Yep, and it's only going to get faster, and smoother, over time. Most people have their "bright lines" of what something they're willing to spend money on must have or can't have, and those will vary with individuals' tastes. We're aware we won't please everyone; that's why there are other offerings. What I will confess to not understanding is a perspective that places the requirement of specific local app UI toolkit seemingly above all other considerations, but that's the great thing: everyone gets to choose.

Glad you like Psst! sharing. It's a long-awaited feature that took a significant amount of care to make sure it was being done correctly and securely. Regarding other "3rd party-dependent" features, your point is well-taken, and we do develop features that are within our core wheelhouse when we can. Unfortunately, while we've grown substantially in the last couple of years, we're still nowhere near the size of Apple, meaning we don't already run our own email servers and infrastructure -- nor could we spin such a thing up quickly or easily. It would be great if we could, and who knows, someday we might have the kind of capacity to take on a large project like that quickly!

But even if we did, one of the things that's kept us at the forefront of the password management space over the years is a continual re-dedication to remembering to focus on the things that best suit our core offering (usable privacy and security), as well as our current resources. As I'm sure you can imagine, we've gotten tons of requests for all sorts of things over the years, and I place a lot of our success on us knowing how to choose the right ones for the right moment. Some suggestions are simply too big and not attainable at the moment they're offered. Some don't fit well with what we're trying to offer overall. Others are great and get adopted. And there are a myriad of other variations and reasons. We had our masked email feature well under development when Apple debuted their own offering, which maybe wasn't the ideal timing for us, but Apple don't share their roadmaps with us and there wasn't much we could (or can) do about the timing of Apple's feature releases. We love Apple's implementation, and for those who want to stick solely within the Apple ecosystem, it can be a great addition. But, in much the same way that 1Password itself works across browsers and platforms in a way that iCloud keychain does not, partnering with a great email provider like Fastmail means users can now enjoy the masked email feature wherever their digital life takes them.

Either way, both your passion and your comments are always appreciated, and I hope you'll stick around and continue to tell us what you think. :) :+1:

Agree 100% rctneil - the Home app is an outlier and quite poor overall and I would never consider that to be a reference design. If anything, it's a good indication of what NOT to do in a Mac app.

but my way to deal with that is to find alternatives by developers who care about the Mac experience enough to use the native UI options available.

I know of no password managers that offer anything like 1Password does that still use native UI frameworks. Nobody that does is cross platform. Companies have the choice of developing only for a small niche segment of the market (Mac fanatics) or leaving native UIs behind and developing for everyone. If you find someone who has managed to do both, let me know.

@Lars Ya I knew you were with AG. I know your staff fairly well at this point, lol. :-)
I figured the AB's integration w/ FastMail was well under way before Apple's implementation. One of the problems with FastMail (and other providers!) is that forums, banks, big stores, etc tend to block due to spam abuse :(

@mia - you've seen that with Fastmail specifically? I have seen it with some of the larger free providers that allow quick and easy account creation and hence the possibility of abuse, but I haven't heard of it with regard to Fastmail -- and (full confession) I've had a Fastmail account that dates back to even before my first purchase of 1Password in 2007! One of the differences with Fastmail (at least for the last several years) is that there is no "free" option -- if you're using a @fastmail.com (or the older-school @fastmail.fm) address, you are paying at least something for it, and that eliminates nearly all spam: if spammers have to pay, they don't bother. So I've not experienced those issues with my own Fastmail account. You have?

@Lars full disclosure, no. I haven't used fastmail, but I've used at least 7 others and even ones that aren't abused for spam (e.g. Spamgourmet) get blacklisted because they adopt lists compiled by companies who look for these kinds of services. I would be shocked if they didn't include Fastmail simply because it is disposable email whether it's paid for or not. The companies who compile these lists don't seem to segregate between the two.

Then again, I have over 500 logins (yes ~590+) so I've signed up on a LOT of places and have been a good litmus test for many sites.

I haven't used fastmail

We're pretty far off topic here. Let's reel this thread back to the topic at hand. If there is a problem with the Masked Email feature, please feel free to start a separate thread on that. Thanks!

Ben

@soshiito - have a look at enpass

What I will confess to not understanding is a perspective that places the requirement of specific local app UI toolkit seemingly above all other considerations, but that's the great thing: everyone gets to choose.

The reasoning for this is pretty simple - it's a quick and simple litmus test for how the app will feel when you use it. If it uses native UI (even with custom widgets), it's going to feel like an app that belongs on the platform. If it uses Electron, it's going to feel 'wrong'.

The worst Electron apps feel like a web page pretending to be an app - because that's what they are. Generally using Electron usually means that the app is largely the same on every platform - so it tends to feel 'wrong' everywhere, or development tends to favour a platform for feel. Additionally, by having to implement their own widget set, each app that does it has unique quirks - and the widgets that normally get wide reuse like text boxes, checkboxes or on/off switch components never match the platform's expectations.

For 1Password 8 it's not as bad as the web page in a window feel, but it's not a Mac or Windows app. It has some Mac and Windows specific features, but it is a cross-platform app with a UI design that does not match any of the platforms it lives on - even simple text boxes feel 'wrong' - and they feel wrong on every platform.

Sadly, 1Password was pretty much the last password manager vendor actually doing native apps for desktop/laptop platforms, and that's definitely over - as staff posting on these forums don't even seem to see the issues as issues.

@tomjepp - thanks. I did not say I didn't understand the reasoning behind a personal preference for apps designed with native UI, only the preference that prioritizes it seemingly above all other considerations. ;)