Keychain is a fabulous application which comes as standard on every Mac. It is the program which stores all your passwords for you.
For me, it has proven to be a lifesaver time and time again. I have more passwords for more sites than I have hairs on my head (not that that’d be very difficult!). I have systems in place to try to help me remember passwords but I frequently find myself staring at the login screen of a website with no idea what password (or username) I chose for the site.
This is where Keychain comes into its own. Launch it from Applications -> Utilities, search for the website, click the Show Password tick box. You are prompted to enter your login ID for your Mac, on doing so successfully, your password appears – brilliant!
Yes, I love Keychain, it is a life saver for passwords!
Its funny when im in a net cafe without my mac, I can never remember the passwords, LOL!
Yep!
Its easier to have a single password, and use a greasemonkey script based on Nic Wolff’s I hate passwords mechanism.
The greasemonkey script modifies each password input on the webpage, that once clicked provides a dialog. You enter your master password and its hashed using the websites domain name.
Simple, easy and highly recommended.
I hope you don’t mind Tom but I couldn’t resist plugging an open source application called Universal Password Manager (http://www.17od.com/upm) that I wrote to help me manage my passwords. While I too use (used) the keychain on OS X it was no use to me when I moved to a Windows machine, either my home or work PC. UPM is a password manager that runs on both OS X and Windows (it’s written in Java) so it can be used everywhere. One of it’s main features (and the main reason I wrote it) is the ability to have your password database stored at a HTTP location that can be accessed from home and work.
Just came across your site and I’m a windows user. Sure wish it came with its own password manager. Do you know of any reliable ones for us non-mac people?