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RoboForm

RoboForms Identity Window I'm in a reviewing/evangelism mood, so I thought I'd mention another program which is so much a part of my daily life I could barely get by without it.  I finally got tired of having to enter my Web passwords into both IE and Firefox, and decided to try out some password management software.

While there are a couple of different open source (free) tools out there, none have been as easy to use or have as many options as Siber's RoboForm.  It's been so good we've gotten licenses for my wife and mother-in-law.  Neither of them think they can ever go back to entering passwords, and Erin's mom felt almost helpless when she got a new computer and didn't have her passwords remembered.

Essentially RoboForm sits in your Web browser and in your task tray, near the clock.  It remembers all of your passwords, letting you pick one secure password to encrypt all of your information.  It even remembers your windows passwords in most cases.  Whenever you sign-up for a new account somewhere it will ask if you want to save the information.  Once you do it'll automatically populate the form next time, and let you have multiple usernames and passwords for the same site (so you pick the one you want to fill and click "Fill and Submit").

While all that password stuff is cool, I'm finding almost as useful is the personal information piece.  It will store your credit cards (remember, all encrypted), addresses or whatever.  When you go to check out at some shopping site you can pick the credit card from the drop-down list and it will populate every field in the form for you, name, address, credit-card type, credit-card, CCD, everything.  It is literally one two clicks to fill a form and check out (as dangerous as that could be for my bank account).

I also tend to use the search function a lot.  I have my own searches set-up, so if I want to find a photo on Flickr or a book on Amazon or a topic on Wikipedia I just type in the search box in the toolbar and select the search engine.  It's incredible easy, and I prefer it to the quick searches in IE and Firefox because it's easy to add my own searches for any site.

Anyway, it is easily the best $30 I spent on a software product.

Peace,
+Tom

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Comments

Anonymous said…
I use a piece of paper with cryptic notes on what my passwords are. It works, but this is cool software.

With all the online shopping I've done this season, it would have been nice to have the address feature.

When I got my laptop, I had to go back and enter in all my passwords. It sucked! I let Firefox remember the passwords for stupid sites that don't have any personal info like credit card numbers.
December 4, 2007 at 8:49:00 AM EST
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