iPod Touch Productivity: Passwords

Posted on December 7, 2009 by LJ

Mondays are productivity days at SimpleProductivity blog.

Photo by Mirko Macari

One of my biggest needs of on-the-go information is passwords. When I stopped carrying my PDA, pretty much the only thing I used on it was the password safe. I used YAPS on my PDA for years, and had a desktop viewer that I could use to view (but not edit) my information.

When I left the PDA behind, I started noticing all the times I used my passwords…and didn’t have them with me. Like when I was in the library, trying to reserve a book. Or when I was at work and needed to login to the coder site. Or when I was on the road and needed to access my employee information.

So the first order of business was to find something that would run off of a USB drive. I chose Keepass, mainly because I could use it from USB, and it had come highly recommended. And it was free. So I set up a process (and it is A BIG process) to transfer YAPS to Keepass, involving text files, an two sets of Excel macros. PITA.

When I got the iPod Touch, I wanted to do a password safe on there. But the big component was that it had to be accessible from the desktop. Or a desktop app that could be accessible from the Touch. Obviously, being compatible with Keepass or YAPS would be good, since everything was in there already.

I looked at various solutions before I ran into iKeepass. It’s a for-pay iPod Touch/iPhone application that is compatible with Keepass.

Pros. The big pro is that it is compatible with what I am using on the desktop. All my passwords go over, and I can access them quickly, using the same password as on the desktop.

Cons. iKeepass is difficult to import passwords to, and it has no search capability. But since my passwords are arranged in a way that I use search only out of pure laziness, this is not too big of an issue. Luckily, I had the xAmpp application installed on my PC already.

iKeepass could be so much more. With other applications turning themselves into web servers for information import, I hope that the programmers of iKeepass do the same. And the search would be great.

In the meantime, I will continue to use iKeepass. But I’m still looking. Any suggestions?

Photo by Mirko Macari

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