Dave Kochbeck

I love Zipcar, because I spend about as much on it a year as I used to spend on parking tickets alone in SF. The app can be a handy extension to the Zipcar service, but it has some definite quirks too.

First of all the magical-car-management-satellite-in-the-sky is slow. Very slow. Without a good shot at the sky, punishingly slow. If you're counting on using the app to get into the car, you'd better bust out your card instead. It's a neat idea, but it just doesn't work that well in practice.

The second thing is more of an iPhone in San Francisco problem - the app's error handing on network hiccups is pretty iffy. And AT&T in SF is nothing but network hiccups occasionally punctuated by service. A few days ago, I was needing a car real fast. I was, quite literally, standing there looking at the car. I saw there was not a reservation on the car in the app. I tried to begin booking. AT&T went south. I fought. I wailed. I gnashed my teeth. And then the person who succeeded in reserving the car from home walked up a minute later and drove away. And I got to take cabs the rest of the day.

Was that the app's fault? Not really, but at some point it wouldn't hurt to add error checking that says, "Hey, it looks like you're trying to spend money with us, but you're having a problem. Touch here and we'll connect you with an operator to complete your order."

The same is true of the find-a-car map. It would be great if it would take the times you want a car for and zoom out till it found the closest available car. I don't really care that every car in this lot is booked in the next hour. Maps that mock me and put little grey pushpins in that tell me, "You're in a wasteland of no mobility. Throw yourself onto Muni tracks and hope one of those shows up," aren't as helpful as getting the info I do need.

Would I recommend the app? Sure. It's your only choice. It's better than trying to use the Zipcar site on the iPhone browser. But it could be better. It's not in a state where you can count on it in a pinch.

I had really lousy passwords for a bunch of web services some of which dated back as far as my BBS days. Not surprisingly, eventually a couple accounts got accessed. It wasn't anything serious, but it was annoying, and it ate up a bunch of time. I went and bought 1Password for my Mac and for iOS that day.

I won't say I love it - password managers are a hassle for sure. And it's not directly integrated into Safari on iOS. That's really annoying on an iPad where you'll be browsing along and suddenly have to hop out to a different app. And typing a long, complex master password on an iPhone keyboard is very difficult.

Having said that, everything else about it is pretty great. It's a clean interface. It syncs multiple devices. It's stable on the iPhone. I have my passwords and security codes for everything wherever I go, and that really wasn't true at all before. So things are better since I bought it.

I've gotten 4 or 5 other friends to buy it. The only complaint I've gotten so far is that Android support is sort of lacking. Other than that, they all like it too. If you have a Mac and an iOS device, this is probably your best choice for a password manager.

I've been trying this app since it was still a jailbreak app, and I've never been able to consistently take a UPC image that it likes. It's very finicky and slow. A couple weeks ago I finally gave in and deleted it off my phone. Maybe I'll try it again one day when someone says, "Hooray, it's great on the 3G now!"