Password Field

[Brian Maher]

Hi Rob,

This is part of a normal application login (i.e. enter user name & password) rather than asking for a password to open a stack or something.  It seemed very unintuitive to the users to have to bring up two separate dialog boxes (one for user name and another for password).
 
>1.  Is it necessary that the password be entered in a field instead 
>of via the ask password dialog?

Yes (see above).

>2.  Is there a reason why you need to know what keys the user pressed 
>(eg: the user is entering "secure" data instead of a predefined 
>password)?

I don't need to know what keys the user pressed.  I need to keep someone from swiping the password when the user is not looking (i.e. copy and paste).  My initial thought was to do a password by internally tracking what they typed (i.e. the plain text) and putting some character (dots, asterisk, etc) on the screen so that if the user typed in the password and had to leave their desk for some emergency no one could come up, do a select all, copy, paste scenario and walk off with the password.  The initial responses that helped with that work ok but don't really handle all of the things a user could possibly do within the field (backspace, select all & delete, select some & delete, select some & change, etc).

The best solution was to simply make the contents of what the user is typing into the field invisible and disable the ability to copy the data out of the field.

Thanks, Brian