Improvements and changes to password managers as well as a new way to keep up to date with Docker news.
Password manager changes
There was news concerning two password manager applications this week.
The first one is straightforward: 1Password has stepped up the subscription types it offers so that you can now have a personal subscription plan as well. Before this they only offered team and family plans and you had to buy the pro features as a single purchase.
Interestingly, possibly having learned from TextExpander’s disastrous rollout, they offer this as completely optional while still allowing you to purchase your licenses the old way. In fact, it seems like it’s mostly aimed at being a hosted service that takes away the need to manage any and all application licenses. Additionally the subscription fee seems reasonable in price ($2.99 US), and most importantly it doesn’t lock you in. Even if your subscription expires you will still be able to get access to your data. I assume it just won’t let you add anything new to the subscription service.
As far as changing to (or rather also offering) a hosted service goes, this is well done. I believe I’ve rehashed the pros and cons for developers and consumers enough in the past, so I’ll skip that this time. Between needing licenses for all your different devices this seems like a good option. Additionally it wouldn’t surprise me if within the next 3-4 months they’ll come out with a new version that requires a new license for your Pro features. Looking through my invoices it seems they haven’t charged me anything for the last 2 major updates1, so it seems to be about time anyway. Of course, when they do I’ll probably go the cheaper route and take a family subscription.
The second news I want to mention is the team-up of Google and Dashlane to create the unfortunately named “Open YOLO”. Where YOLO stands for “You Only Login Once”2. Despite the horrendous name, the project seems like a good one. From what I understand it’s similar to what 1Password made for iOS applications which allows you to build this into your app to then choose your password manager through an extension. Obviously, this solution is initially aimed at Android but comes with plans to extend to other platforms (which I read as iOS) and even other password managers.
I don’t have a way to compare this to the 1Password solution, but the most interesting part is obviously how it might eventually support other password managers. I don’t know if this is the case for the 1Password extension, but as a user I hope that they’ll join in on this project. Of course, as of right now there is neither any code nor documentation available for the project3 so there is no way to know what it will be like or even when it will be available.
Docker podcast
In the wake of Dockercon, Docker released all of the videos not only on YouTube, but now also as a podcast. I still haven’t had time to listen to these, but from what I’ve heard the sessions were interesting. The plan with the podcast going forward is also to keep releasing new episodes that aren’t tied to events like Dockercon, so it’s certainly something to look at if you like podcasts. And who doesn’t?