Quick Reads is the future that passkey enthusiasts dream of

I neglected to mention it in the announcement post, but another thing I'm really excited about with Quick Reads is that it's the first app I've made so far that requires users to sign in. I decided if I was going to do it, I was going to do it the right way, so I've implemented what I think is a pretty good system.

The headline here is that Quick Reads is 100% password-free. This is convenient for users because there's nothing to forget, and it's even more convenient for me as I have no password data to secure. When you sign up for Quick Reads, you simply need to provide your email address. Assuming you pass the CAPTCHA, I'll send an email to that address with a magic link for you to sign in for the first time. From there, you'll just stay logged in effectively forever, but if you ever want to log into a different device or another browser, you just key in your same email address, and I'll send you another magic link.

However, sometimes magic links are annoying, so I bucked up and I figured out how to do passkeys, and it turns out it's really not that hard. So after you get signed into your account and sign up for a free trial, you can go into settings and create a passkey. You can create multiple passkeys, and you can name them, and from then on you can just use your passkey to sign in to the web interface.

What I personally find exciting about this is that one of my frustrations with passkeys in general is that they are a technology that was pitched as an alternative to passwords, and a lot of their benefits only apply if the password is taken out of the equation. However, I'm yet to find a single service that lets me rely entirely on a passkey. There's always a password in the mix. I guess one of the benefits of having a purely greenfield solution is that I was able to omit passwords from day one and create the passkey future many people dream of.