Hands on: 1Password 7.3 for Mac recognizes apps and introduces drag and drop login

Password manager 1Password is a service and a series of apps for Mac, iOS, Windows and Android, which remembers your login details and also creates new, strong passwords as you need them. The newly updated 1Password 7.3 for Mac concentrates chiefly on its menubar companion app, 1Password Mini, which has been revamped for quicker access.

Previously, 1Password Mini was for use in websites and was only made a system-wide menubar app so that you could use it as easily with Safari, Chrome, Firefox or any other browser. Recently, though, the 1Password Mini app has been made useful within other apps.

In the previous version to this, 1Password Mini gained the ability to fill in your login details for apps such as ones in the Adobe Creative Cloud range. Now it's added others including those from the Omni Group. If you are in an app such as the OmniFocus To Do one, and you press the keystroke to launch 1Password Mini, it recognizes where you are and offers you relevant details.

Whereas with Apple's Keychain, you might have the login details for the app from when you signed up on its website, but getting those out into the app itself is a chore. Now 1Password 7.3 offers you the right login details for an app automatically.

Logging into an app or website will always be fastest using 1Password Mini and keystrokes because it automatically fills in the details. However, not all websites play nice with password managers and both to deal with them and just to give you another way of doing it, you can now drag login details from 1Password Mini and drop them onto the site or app.

It would be good if you could drag both username and password at the same time, but this feature is especially useful when you have multiple accounts on the same service and 1Password can't know which one you need now.

This intelligent selection of what you're most likely to want appears to be done every time you open 1Password Mini, however. In the majority of cases that's going to be right, but previously if you went right back into 1Password Mini, it would open to the list of logins you last saw. That is sometimes more convenient if you're working through a series of logins.

To mitigate that, the new 1Password Mini app adds the ability to search tags. The main 1Password 7.3 app lists tags in a similar way to macOS Mojave's Finder windows, a sometimes endless column of them. So the fact that a regular search in the Mini app will now also find tags is useful.

The company now sells 1Password as a subscription service with different tiers and combinations. For an individual, you can have 1Password for Mac, iOS, Android and PC for $2.99 per month. Or you can use various family and teams tiers which let you share passwords in a group.