BRIAN'S APP OF THE WEEK: LASTPASS

Having used LastPass Free for a little while now, I finally caved, upgraded to premium and installed the app to see how well it translates to the iPhone. Basically, LastPass is a simple program that vaults all of your passwords and, once saved to your vault, will auto-fill and remember passwords for you. Simple enough, yes, but it also has some great features that make it unique in the "password-remembering industry," as well as just being incredibly easy to use.

Just like LastPass for your PC/Mac, you are prompted to log in to your LastPass Master Account.

You'll need a LastPass account for this--premium ($1/month) for the iPhone app--which will grant you full access to all features available.

As you can see, LastPast imports all of my favorited and saved LastPass'd logins and organizes them. You can also quickly navigate through each section by using the floating groups on the side.

Navigating to "More" will allow you to access some of the more unique features of LastPass. Safari Bookmarklet is your way to use LastPass within Safari--by default, LastPass uses an in-app browser to navigate your added sites--by using some clever Javascript.

Though it's simple enough to find a password generator, LastPass's built-in one is easily one of my favorite features. As someone who has a hard time generating creative, unique passwords and remembering them, I usually just let LastPass do it for me. Enabling all of the features and picking the site you wish to be protected--this works best for financial-based ones--you just choose a length and let it generate. Just for fun, I generated a 64-character code that uses a mix of everything. The code is the following:

!zYWl3Ef#:Yk7QrZfQ&FbGc&Udc#FSEn~ccq:lAXS5?~*!RVPM4oxYEq&d4=nXKw

Which is 14 symbols, 24 upper-case characters, 20 lower-case characters and 6 numbers. Using a brute force calculator, I figured out that, using one computer, this would take around 4.4E78 hours, or 4.4 with 78 zeros after it. That's 5.02E74 years, or, well, a number that most scientific communities wouldn't even bother trying to name.

Anyway, you get the idea. Overall, LastPass is one of the first apps I've actually paid for and really felt like I got my money's worth--I mean, $12 for an entire year of generating 64-bit codes and memorizing my passwords for me? Pretty sweet deal.

Look out for a How-To of mine on How-To "integrate" LastPass with Safari to remember your passwords.