icloud keychain local items more mess and confusion

again apple change stuff, that may well cause more problems, certainly from a UI point of view, keychain access is now worse, as i have to make an extra click to switch between login or local for a keychain item, im hunting for, dependant on where mavericks decided to place it in either local or login?

more mess and confusion well done apple ! and the fact local gets renamed icloud when that is setup, I have not dared turn icloud keychain on, just incase makes things a great deal worse, especially as you now need another password/pin to secure the darn thing.

All additional features should be by default off and when OS upgrading, and only turned on by the user I don’t want this local keychain particularly, and would certainly like a technical explanation as to when mavericks decides to create a keychain item within login or local ? and whether there is any control over this, presumably this mess means that only new keychain items are put in “local items” post mavericks upgrade, when syncing with icloud will actually be synced, like the abortion of “icloud notes” “icloud calendars” and “icloud contacts” where sometimes form a sync perspective post upgrade it will ignore older notes/calendars/contacts it deems not to be in the icloud syncing group – messy messy messy.

and as per usual apple will give little obvious explanation or user controls as to how to resolve such complex issues, because they magically promote “it will just work” when in fact it very often doesn’t and resolving such scenarios is made by obfuscation and a lack of visual user control.

I also doubt that apple will provide an app to view keychains cleanly on ios, SO i will stick with keychain2go as a solution to my problem, which enables me to view and edit around 10,000 various passwords in 500 notes all secure in iOS, i very much doubt iCloud syncing can handle that and give the user access, its all no doubt hidden and in the background.

Also note apple I have alway despised your disappearing outbox on all your platforms, it has caused me no end of grief, make it permanently appear and remain or give me a user setting to be able to decide for myself whether it is visible or not, turning of internet access to make it appear is an awful kludge.

Keychain2Go – The best keychain syncing software – bar none

Ok after having purchased and tested this app for some time, I feel if safe to now say If you want to synchronise a keychain between your computers and iOS devices, then keychain2Go is really the best program I’ve found to do the job. I am now able to successfully add to my private keychain on os x and it is synced successfully to iOS when you have the iOS app open on the iPhone and it syncs in the reverse meaning any edit or additional items I make on the iOS keychain2go app then get synced back to my iMac via the background OS x keychain2go os x app which is purchasable direct from the jinx.de website or the os x app store.

I’ll be honest I initially had a few issues in setting this up, but some of that might have been down to a dodgy router that didn’t handle bonjour very well, My best advice is to read the FAQ in detail and remember that any personal and private keychain i.e. not login etc you want synced must be placed in the ~library/keychains folder and follow the advice under help>faq>misc section for a terminal command that will make it recognise other keychains placed there. and if it first you don’t succeed try a clear out of the program bits and reinstall and try again, because when you’ve got it working this is just dynamite and saves me so much time plugging and unplugging usb sticks where I kept my private keychain until Keychain2go but now its all editable available and synced on my iPhone – absolutely marvellous! Ive bought other password management apps 1password for instance but that could not work with my pre-existing existing keychain notes and I wasn’t going to re-enter over 500 keychain notes each crammed with information, 1password also worked out more trouble than it was worth, when it came to its auto entry feature and required way to many clicks to work, and it only does half what Keychain2go manages to and that seamlessly and cleanly, i much prefer keychain2go’s feature set, the syncing is awesome especially to an iOS app that works well.

don’t mind the few reviews here, the app has recently been so healthily updated, that each new version requires new rating and reviews every time, this a good app, and when you have it working, if you need keychain syncing, this will rock your world ;)

macos x keychain access self blanking secure notes

I use keychain secure notes to store large numbers of passwords and info securely , and also now and again suffer from keychain access blanking secure notes so that all information they contained is lost, this is a big problem with keychains, and also reduces my faith in keychains completely. My conclusion is that this is occuring when a keychain is left open in the background and times out and the keychain locks itself and then goes into some form of deep sleep, and when awoken the secure not appears to be blank or somehow is then blank.

To minimalise the chance of this occurring my theory of using keychains involves saving and closing them and not leaving them open unsaved or open or timing out and locking with unsaved edits in them, whilst the machine goes to sleep as im convinced it is in that situation the blanking is somehow occurring. this flaw is at least 5 years old in my experience and it surprises me no-one at apple has recognised or fixed this problem, I guess the real issue is to identify in what exact circumstances it is occuring.

I was personally going to switch to one password, but since that has no import ability, Im stuck in a tough place as 400 secure notes each containing many logins and information is not really feasable to translate into one password without huge time and energy and expenditure, so I also struggle along with keychain and its frailty