Fear of export
In the new issue of my newsletter, I have a small review of RoboForm, a password manager for Windows that I’ve gotten quite attached to. It’s full featured and works without getting in the way. I like it a lot. But…
Among its features, it will generate obscure passwords for you, useful for the lazy ones among us (i.e., all but the 1% of us who are Data Saints) who use the same passwords everywhere. (Software like RoboForm thus brings us the “single sign-on” benefit that is one of the selling points of identity management platforms, but that’s a different hobby horse.) I haven’t been using the auto-password-generator, however, because RoboForm has no export capability. If I use it for a few years, I could have hundreds of finger-twistin’ passwords. If I want to switch to a different password manager, I’d have to type them in manually, an annoying, error-prone process.
(Mea Culpa: In my newsletter, I take RoboForm to task for not even having a way of printing out the passwords. I was wrong. David Teare, the creator of 1Password, a Mac password manager that imports from RoboForm, wrote to let me know that there is a way to print out RoboForm passwords. Then 1Password scrapes the html print file. David says 1Password is adding an export capability. PS: I’d sent the RoboForm PR person a message asking about this, but I only gave them two days to get back to me.)
I don’t mean to pick on RoboForm, for it is exceptionally friendly in its day-to-day use. Microsoft Word, which says it will support the Open Document Format but still doesn’t, is a more important target. Every app should make it easy — not just possible, but easy — for a user to break up with it. It’s our time and information. If there isn’t a standard format for the interchange of information for that particular application area, then a documented, comma-delimited file would be a big step forward. There’s also this new standard called “XML” I believe that seems to be catching on with the youngsters. But for Lord’s sake, let us have our data.
We should not have been allowed to advance to Web 2.0 until every app gave us that basic Web 0.0 way of moving data around.
We won’t love you unless you let us leave you. [Tags: roboform 1password odf]
