Feature Request: automatically categorise entries with OTP entries

Jeff Laing
Jeff Laing
Community Member

Every time I use it, 1Password just makes me smile at how simple it all is.

I'm now up to 9 distinct password entries that have an OTP entry, but typically, I am logging in on a different device to where 1Password is running and thus the auto-copy to the clipboard doesn't help. Instead, I get out the iPhone and search by Tag. Sadly the tag namespace is getting full as well these days.

It would be really cool if there was a "smart category" that filtered for entries with an OTP.

Obviously user-definable "smart categories" are what programmers would like to build, but for me, this one special case seems to tie into 1Password's raison d'être.


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Comments

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @Jeff Laing: It's definitely an interesting idea. I'm not sure it would be a good idea to create another tag-like thing that doesn't work the same way tags do, but it's something we can consider. Thanks for the suggestion! :)

  • Jeff Laing
    Jeff Laing
    Community Member
    edited September 2017

    Another reason that I'd like it to be automatic is that 1Password does such a bad job at being consistent across the platforms, when editing tags. I have a tag called "Two Factor" which is attached to all of them already, and the mac client was great, but the UI on the iPhone and the iPad and Windows have all, at one point or another, refused to understand that it is a "two word tag". Quotes around tags don't get the point across, commas didn't seem to help, etc. Drag/Drop in the Mac client makes it trivial, but of course that doesn't work in any of the others. The root cause of the issue is, of course, poor UI design. Why don't the non-keyboard-centric clients offer dropdowns of your existing tags? Tags are, in your own UIs words, for organising. Organisation is by definition not ad-hoc - making people create their tags in advance in a separate UI list would immediately fix this. Currently, I can't see how I rename a tag on iPad/iPhone/Windows whereas it is exactly where I expect in the Mac app (right-click the tag name).

    So, I agree, doing another tag-like thing is not what I want. I want 1Password to organise it for me without me being involved.

    The OTP entries are the only ones that I need on a regular basis, given that auto-login works so well for most other websites. And, as I say, I don't think it is unreasonable for 1Password to treat those particular passwords as being special - I'm not looking for a "tag-like" thing. I'm looking for "Smart Categories". You already have "All". I'm looking for "All the special ones" where the criteria "special" is something that 1Password already highlights as a feature (OTP).

    You could also consider "Old Passwords" as another smart category - let people see quickly all the passwords they not changed recently. Personally I would ignore it, but I would understand why it was there and could definitely understand why other people wanted it.

    Passwords are your domain - your product should demonstrate that it has a wealth of domain-specific knowledge, not leave it to power-users to create their own fixes to problems. Being able to find a certain subset of passwords, a subset which you strongly support, is a differentiating feature. And it's a lot easier if you build the sub-categories yourself, than have to build the "Smart List Editor" support that a full implementation of user-defined-smart-categories would entail, on all platforms.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    Another reason that I'd like it to be automatic is that 1Password does such a bad job at being consistent across the platforms, when editing tags.

    @Jeff Laing: I agree completely. And that's why I don't think it's helpful to introduce yet another thing here, while there's still work to be done to make the experience more consistent across platforms.

    I have a tag called "Two Factor" which is attached to all of them already, and the mac client was great, but the UI on the iPhone and the iPad and Windows have all, at one point or another, refused to understand that it is a "two word tag". Quotes around tags don't get the point across, commas didn't seem to help, etc. Drag/Drop in the Mac client makes it trivial, but of course that doesn't work in any of the others. The root cause of the issue is, of course, poor UI design.

    There's definitely room for improvement. But as far as I can tell commas work as tag delimiters. Can you be more specific about where you're having trouble?

    Why don't the non-keyboard-centric clients offer dropdowns of your existing tags?

    You mean when editing? Well, there are only so many hours in a day, so we can't do everything that we want to. I had gotten the impression that you have more than I do, but even I'd find that unwieldy in a dropdown. I'd rather have autocomplete. But regardless you're right that we should do better here.

    Tags are, in your own UIs words, for organising. Organisation is by definition not ad-hoc - making people create their tags in advance in a separate UI list would immediately fix this.

    I couldn't disagree more. This just isn't how most people operate, even if you and I are a bit persnickety about stuff like this. That seems way too proscriptive.

    Currently, I can't see how I rename a tag on iPad/iPhone/Windows whereas it is exactly where I expect in the Mac app (right-click the tag name).

    Agreed. The experience is much better on the Mac. We're working to bring the other platforms to that same level, and then we can move forward making improvements to all of them more consistently in the future.

    So, I agree, doing another tag-like thing is not what I want. I want 1Password to organise it for me without me being involved.

    That's a really sweet idea. I'm not sure what form that might take, and I think that search can take us a long way, but the smarter we make 1Password the easier it will be for users!

    The OTP entries are the only ones that I need on a regular basis, given that auto-login works so well for most other websites. And, as I say, I don't think it is unreasonable for 1Password to treat those particular passwords as being special - I'm not looking for a "tag-like" thing. I'm looking for "Smart Categories". You already have "All". I'm looking for "All the special ones" where the criteria "special" is something that 1Password already highlights as a feature (OTP).

    That's a good point. If we can come up with a way to present this in a clear fashion, something like that might work.

    You could also consider "Old Passwords" as another smart category - let people see quickly all the passwords they not changed recently. Personally I would ignore it, but I would understand why it was there and could definitely understand why other people wanted it.

    Security Audit does this, but I get what you're saying.

    Passwords are your domain - your product should demonstrate that it has a wealth of domain-specific knowledge, not leave it to power-users to create their own fixes to problems. Being able to find a certain subset of passwords, a subset which you strongly support, is a differentiating feature. And it's a lot easier if you build the sub-categories yourself, than have to build the "Smart List Editor" support that a full implementation of user-defined-smart-categories would entail, on all platforms.

    The tough thing is that 1Password isn't used by only power users, or a majority of them. So we have to consider others as well. I think you're on to something, but it's going to depend heavy on UI design. Based on your previous comments, that probably scares you, but I know our team is up to the task. :tongue:

  • Jeff Laing
    Jeff Laing
    Community Member

    I do have a stupidly large set of tags - most of which were used to segregate software licenses that were bought as part of a bundle (2016 Award Winning Mac Bundle, Bundlefox Feb 2017, etc) - definitely candidate for shoving into a different field in the serial number entry, but they actually came pre-tagged in the bundles pif (?) file. Normally, all my serial numbers are in a seperate vault so they don't interfere with passwords, but the Windows Client doesn't do "some vaults" terribly well, it's one or all and I need "several" since some passwords during the day are work related and some are personal.

    I know I've seen the Security Audit somewhere, but can't for the life of me find it in the iPhone client. Or the iPad. Or Windows. (I'm not at home, so I'll assume it must be there in my Mac). This is the problem of someone who does not treat any one of the platforms as "the master" - I edit with whatever device I have to hand at the time, so my memory is of the lowest-common-subset of features - it doesn't matter if you do it well in one place, all I remember are the places you don't do it well (if at all).

    I've just gone and tried editing tags (on Windows) and I can see that there are some mixed signals being sent. Perhaps it's not as bad as I suggested, but still ... the behaviour of the system is different depending on whether there is an existing tag, or you are creating a new one, and because tags are case sensitive, you may not realise you are creating a new one. While I was experimenting on the iPhone, I noticed that auto-complete in the keyboard was also interfering, changing the case of some of the words I was entering, which made them not match the case of the tags I was attempting to type. Perhaps this is also part of the problem I was experiencing. Enter a multi word tag once, have it broken into separate single-word tags because the case didn't match, and from then on, the extra single-word tags interfere with subsequent tag entry.

    Explicit commas DO appear to separate tag values more reliably than I remember. If you enter a new multi word tag and suffix it with a comma, you get a multi-word tag, whereas if you don't suffix it, you get single-word tags which then start contributing to the auto-correct dictionaries in the keyboard. Any field where the app is going to be doing auto-completion really needs to disable the keyboard from doing the same.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @Jeff Laing: I don't recall for certain, but it may be that we had a bug in the past regarding comma delimiters for tags. Sorry if something like that threw you off!

    At this point I think we're getting way off topic in a few different directions. You make some good criticisms about the new Windows app which we'll be continuing to address as we build it. If you have others I'd encourage you to post in the Windows category so all the right people see your feedback — including other Windows users who probably won't be looking here in the Mac category.

    That's also a great observation about autocomplete on iOS. I can definitely see a case to be made in both directions, but unless I'm mistaken the only way to avoid autocomplete in the app itself is using password (Secure Input) fields, and that isn't a great solution in many cases.

    Ultimately I think we're on the same page here, since we can al agree that we need more consistency between platforms. We've made a lot of progress on this already, but we do still have quite a ways to go before we're to the point where you don't have to think about any of this. In the mean time, I apologize for the added cognitive burden that places on you and other users who don't want to (and shouldn't have to) think about this stuff. And I appreciate not only your patience but constructive criticism in this area, pushing us to do better. We'll get there. :blush:

  • Jeff Laing
    Jeff Laing
    Community Member

    Just checked the Mac Client and yes the Security Audit does look like exactly what I was thinking of - I didn't notice it because of that foolish "don't display the show/hide control till you hover over it" that Jonathan Ive should be ashamed of.

    Do you expect to include it into the iDevices?

  • unless I'm mistaken the only way to avoid autocomplete in the app itself is using password (Secure Input) fields, and that isn't a great solution in many cases

    Autocomplete can be turned off without enabling secure input. Text fields can have the autocorrection type set to no.

    Regarding Security Audit, @Jeff Laing, we'd eventually like all clients to have it. It's relatively expensive computationally as it requires decrypting pretty much every bit of information and sorting through it, and this is why it's been limited to the desktop apps so far. We're slowly trying to find ways of bringing that power down to the mobile apps in a way that works well for them given their constraints.

    Rick

  • Jeff Laing
    Jeff Laing
    Community Member

    See, this is why I suggested a built-in smart category for "Old Passwords" as opposed to a full "I'll check that your passwords are weak or strong" feature.

    You manage to dynamically filter by tag and search filters by name in real time, how on earth can sort by date be any harder? Building the UI to allow the main list to sort-by-arbitrary field is absolutely going to be hard to do, but 'date modified' is something that the user has no input on whatsoever, it's a built in field that you already display in all of the clients. (I'd be mildly surprised if the security zealots even cared if that (date modified) field was not encrypted - "oooh look, this app leaked the fact that something changed. no idea what, but I know when - and I'd gladly trade my what and when for a who and how...")

    I completely understand that feature parity across all the platforms is hard given the differences in the underlying UI toolkits. But you can jump ahead of specific failings by providing the high-value feature as opposed to a high-complexity capability. You don't need to provide people with a full-featured-encrypted-free-form-relational-database - you just need to provide people with a useful-encrypted-information-repository that can answer the domain-specific (ie, password related) questions they want answered as quickly and efficiently as possible.

    Making the result column sort by <name/moddate> would address my need. Making a smart category would make 1Password appear to know what features are important when managing this information.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    Definitely some things to consider. Thanks for the feedback! :) :+1:

This discussion has been closed.