If you already use Intuit’s other budgeting tool Mint (see review later), you’ll really like Personal Capital because it’s got the same feel but with far more powerful investment tracking.Quicken for Mac 2005 customers: Choose Quicken 2005 menu Check for Updates. Personal Capital (Free) Personal Capital is the best personal finance software for Mac and best of all, unlike Quicken it’s actually free to use. Windows xp sp1 download Adobe After Effects 6.5 for Mac windows xp product.1. In fact, one of my most popular blog posts is about how to hack in and fix a rather arcane (but common) issue with Quicken 2007.automatic document filing windows Intuit Quicken Deluxe 2009 adobe add ons.You can switch to Quicken Essentials for Mac. The options are not pretty: However, since I love the Mac, and I love Quicken, I’m desperately looking for a way out of this problem.Problem: Mac OS X Lion (10.7) is imminentIt links to this blog post on the Intuit site. Intuit has really backed themselves into a corner, and not surprisingly, Apple has no interest in bailing them out.
Quicken 2004 How To Hack InI love Mint, and I’ve been using it for years. So I’m going with them on this one. And they can put you in jail and take everything you own. At least, the IRS thinks so. In their words, “this option is ideal if you do not track investment transactions and history, use online bill pay or rely on specific reports that might not be present in Quicken Essentials for Mac.” Um, sorry, who in their right mind doesn’t want to track “investment transactions”? Turns out, at tax time, knowing the details of what you bought, at what price, and when are kind of important. Which includes my 401k, for example. Unfortunately, Mint is basically blind to anything it can’t integrate with online. For me, Mint is something I use in addition to Quicken. By the way, to add insult to injury: “You can easily convert your Quicken Mac data with the exception of Investment transaction history. Switch to Windows? Intuit would get a better response here if they just sent Mac users a picture of a huge middle finger. Seriously? 1999 called and they want their advice back. (The bar talk between Adobe & Intuit on this mistake must be really fun a few drinks into the evening.) Whoops. After all, Apple was dying. Hey, they thought it was the prudent thing to do then. Around 2000, Intuit made the mistake of abandoning the Mac. But the Trojan War involved tens of thousands of troops, so I’m going with Homer’s definition of “Epic”.There are really three issues at play here: I’m not sure how many people are actually affected. But in the end, it was a very expensive decision, and even if it was necessary, it should have mandated a fast follow with that capability. I’ve spent more than a decade in software product management, so I have compassion for how hard that decision must have been. Sometime in the past few years, someone decided that Quicken Essentials for the Mac didn’t need to track investment transactions properly. Untouchable, unfortunately, means unfixable. From everything I hear, Quicken 2007 for the Mac might as well be written in Fortran and require punch cards to compile. You are talking about the company that killed floppy drives almost immediately in favor of USB in 2000, with no warning. Intuit had six years to make this migration, and to be honest, Apple is rarely the type of company to support long transitions like this. Fast forward to June 2011, and Apple announces that their latest operating system, Mac OS X Lion, will not support the backwards compatibility software to allow PowerPC applications to run on Intel Macs.With all due respect to my good friends at Intuit, this problem is really Intuit’s fault. Yes, that’s *six* years ago. Apple announces the move from PowerPC chips to Intel chips in June 2005. (See note on the IRS above) They want to push software developers to new code, new user experience, and best-in-class applications. They want to simplify the operating system (brutally). Or maybe they could license Rosetta to Intuit to bundle with Quicken 2007.Apple’s not going to do it. But in the end, they called several plays wrong, and now they are vulnerable.Intuit would argue that Apple could still ship Rosetta on Mac OS X Lion. It’s not like Apple was going back to PowerPC.If you examine the three strikes, you see that Intuit made a couple of tactical & strategic mistakes here. Quicken 2007 R4 installed / configured to run at launchOK, this solution isn’t perfect, but it is plausible. Custom “headless” install of Mac OS X 10.6.8, stripped to just support the launch of Quicken 2007. If this is true, this reflects a fundamental shift in Apple’s attitude toward this technology. Apple has announced that Mac OS X Lion will include a change to the terms of service to allow for virtualization. Microsoft did too much of this with Windows over the past two decades, and it definitely held them back at an operating system level.A Proposed Solution: VMware to the rescueI believe there is a possible solution. They are changing the virtualization terms for Mac OS X Lion, so why not change them for Snow Leopard to0.I’m a daily VMware Fusion user, which is how I use both Windows & Mac operating systems on my MacBook Pro. I’m guessing that Intuit & VMware might be able to work out a deal here, especially since Intuit would be promoting VMware to a large number of Mac users, and even subsidizing it’s adoption.This is always the $64,000 question, but theoretically, this feels like really not much of a give on Apple’s part. They can distribute new images as necessary.The cost of VMware Fusion for the Mac is non trivial, but actually roughly the same price as a new version of Quicken. A VMware image allows Intuit to configure & test a standard release package, and ensure it works. In fact, Apple’s install disks for Mac OS X have been built this way. But my larger point is: there are several worthwhile alternatives to Intuit’s products, many of them developed exclusively for the Mac. My sales spiel ends there. I’m the marketing whiz at IGG Software, so that’s where I’m coming from.IGG makes iBank, an excellent, Lion-ready alternative to Quicken or Mac. So I’m hoping we can all find a path here.I think this all very interesting, but the post seems to dodge the most obvious solution.First: full disclosure. I buy TurboTax every year, and I use Quicken every week. And that means finding Mac personal finance software that works. But most users just want a simple solution that meets their needs. Or create a Windows partition, or a Snow Leopard partition, to run a different Quicken version. Yes, each has its limitations or characteristics that make them fundamentally different from Quicken, or from one another.If you’re committed to both Lion and Intuit, fine – run Essentials. Hidetoolz 22 3This is easy to do in Quicken, but not so with iBank.Another type of report I use frequently with Quicken is “Print Register” (e.g., my checking account) for a particular time period – again, very easy to do in Quicken. With Quicken I frequently use the “QuickReport” feature to either display or print a list of, e.g., payments to a particular payee or payments to a category, for a specific time range, from a particular account or from all accounts. I downloaded a 30-day free, full-feature version and was encouraged when I was able to export my Quicken data file and then import into iBank without a hitch.I obviously have very little experience with iBank, so take what I say below with a grain of salt.The main problem I’ve found so far is with iBank’s reporting capabilities. You can select landscape mode and type in a % scale, but it has you effect, you always get a fixed (and quite large size) font in portrait mode.These are “features” that should be relatively easy to fix, but at the moment (version 4.2.4) they’re a real nuisance.I have not upgraded to Lion yet, but plan to in the near term. Even though there’s the usual File>Page Setup… menu item, it doesn’t seem to work. So, if you’re like me and have a checking account register that goes back many years, you may get an 80-page printout! Not good if all you’re looking for is the last month or so.I’ve found a kludgy way around some of this by using a feature called “Smart Account”, which works sort of OK however you can’t format the printout into landscape mode or even scale it to make it fit on one page.
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