Those that do business on the Internet or have credit or ATM cards soon finds their brains swimming in passwords. Now, maybe you have a really good memory, and keeping 20 or 30 passwords straight is a non-issue. But if you’re like me, you handle this situation by either covering your monitor with layers of sticky notes, or you get yourself a password management program.

As I found out, this particular wheel has been reinvented many times, and there are quite a few to choose from. Had I the horse sense of a … horse … I would have plunked down my $30.00 for a readymade solution and been done with it. Unfortunately, I had the horse sense of a donkey and straightaway started writing my own.

Generally, when I start a project like this, I have some idea of trying to sell it in the end. Programming is a lot of work, and I’m not usually so altruistic as to not want to make a few bucks in the process. With that in mind, I downloaded trial versions of several different password managers to see what features the “competition” was offering.

I didn’t spend terribly long writing the application, but at some point, it finally dawned on me that I was trying to occupy a fairly crowded niché. If my program was to distinguish itself, it would need some unique and nifty features. What finally sealed it for me was seeing DataViz Passwords Plus advertised for $10.00. Was there anything my program did that Passwords Plus did not? No. Was there anything that Passwords Plus did that my program did not? Unfortunately, yes. (Not that Passbook was that lame, but still!)

So that was that. I bought a copy of Passwords Plus, and sent Passbook on its merry way to the archive.