But two things still bothered me:

1. I could not figure out how to move an application window from one space to another, no obvious way to “send to another space.” I thought I’d done it once accidentally, but couldn’t reproduce it so must have been wrong. I knew I could pin an app to a space — I do this for Twitter and NewNewsWire — but once a window was open I couldn’t move it elsewhere.
2. I can’t set a different desktop background in each space. I would love this, because then I could immediately identify which space I’m in without having to think about it. Having to take a split-second to review the app windows or check the menu bar isn’t unbearable, but the small things add up.

Granted, I have not bothered to investigate whether these things were possible, but they weren’t obvious. I’m lazy.

I was delighted to find, then, that there are several ways to move a window to another space, including the now-obvious technique of clicking a window’s title bar while switching spaces. Excellent.

Still flummoxed by the different desktop backgrounds, but neither have I started digging. :)

I really should read Mac Tips more often.

Owen and I played with an iPhone in the AT&T store today. He thought it was pretty cool; he figured out how to scroll through pictures of Antarctica.

A four-year old can figure out how to look at pictures of Antarctica on the iPhone. I can’t figure out how to get to Minneapolis on my mom’s car’s navigation system.

We live a five minute drive from Minneapolis.

I can cope without all of that. What I really, truly miss is a good password manager. Namely Password Safe. With Password Safe, I never need to know any of my passwords. And I don’t. Password Safe can generate and store strong passwords and never display them to me. (Under the same principle, for some web sites I use a modded version of a password generator bookmarklet that you might find useful. It’s not perfect but for many things it’s good enough.) Passwords are stored in a believably cryptographically strong manner. After I copy a password to the clipboard to paste elsewhere, the password can be cleared from the clipboard by minimizing or closing Password Safe. Yes, keeping sensitive data in a shared clipboard makes me nervous. It minimizes and locks itself after a configurable period of time.

It works well and I trust it.

OS X has Keychain, a password store with strong crypto. It’s nicely integrated into the OS and made available to applications. Subversion finally uses Keychain to store passwords on OS X (instead of leaving them in cleartext, which you’ll find on Unix systems. Grrrr…). I can use Keychain to manage my passwords, but it badly needs some user interface work. Yes, it can generate passwords using several different algorithms, but I rarely succeed in creating a new password. There’s no clean way to copy the password to the clipboard, and when I do it visibly exposes the password in cleartext. Then I can’t clear it from the clipboard.

Keychain just needs a little UI love.

Last night on Twitter I was bemoaning the situation. Stephen Collins immediate responded, pointing out that there’s a Java version.

What? I didn’t see that in the list of related projects! Oh, that’s because it’s not there. It’s down under news from 16 January 2007. Of course.

But it’s there, and it works. Not surprisingly for something that’s at version 0.6, it’s not as polished as the native Win32 version. And maybe it needs a little Filthy Rich Clients love. But so far it’s a far sight better for what I want than Keychain is.

I should probably try Password Gorilla, too, which I’d conveniently overlooked. It reads and writes Password Safe 3 databases.

Thanks, @trib.