PC vs MAC

Jan:

Mac is a good choice for a new computer. You won't be disappointed. As for converting files, the 2-3 year old information I've seen said that it does convert, but the process is somewhat tedious, and some people have not had good results. Perhaps someone here will have better and more up to date news.

There is no good way to convert. Quicken 2007 Mac lags far behind Windows, and there's no direct conversion - you have to export to QIF in 2009, then import that into Q2007Mac.

The replacement for Q2007Mac, "Quicken Financial Life for Mac" is far behind schedule (Intuit has recently removed the product info page from their site & replaced it w/ a redirect to Q2007Mac) and it has not received good feedback from beta testers. I haven't heard of any clean import process there either - even from Q2007Mac to QFLM. Intuit has really botched this product line.

If you're going to go to those lengths to, make a clean break and switch to iBank, MoneyDance, etc.

I've resigned myself to running Quicken Windows 2009 in a virtual machine on my Mac.

That being the case, what's the big deal? You have to accept the FACT that for as long as you use a Mac you will have to use the virtual machine to have an acceptable range of software.

The big deal is that at present there is only one application I use which has no analogue in MacOS - thus requiring me to keep a virtualization environment and a copy of Windows around if I want to keep track of my money without having to re-enter years of data, deal with an improper conversion process, and reconfigure dozens of accounts.

It's not an "acceptable range of software" - it's a SINGLE PROGRAM. A program which, if Intuit did it right, would be head and shoulders above any competitors on the platform. Instead, they have left their Mac customers in a terrible place (and given potential PC to Mac converts the finger) and can't even make their own products read each others' data.

Well let's see. Intuit made, what seems to me, to be a perfectly rational, perfectly defensible business decision to focus on 90+% of the home computer market rather than waste significant time and resources re-writing their products for a meaningless minority with ego problems.

db

p.s. You're outraged defense/objection only confirms and reinforces my point.

Yes, but writing cross platform applications is just not that difficult.

I suspect that they have a bunch of ugly legacy Windows code that passes down from one version to another. That seems pretty apparent in the problems with screen updates, flickering, video driver conflicts, mouse driver conflicts, etc.

At the same time, If someone chooses the alternative platform with the smaller installed base, they have to take the bad with the good. I ran OS/2 for a few years, so I know how it feels.

-- Jim

Then eliminating that ugly legacy Windows code in the process of making more portable to other OSes would ultimately make it a *better* product, would it not? Sounds like a winning proposition to me.

It's 2009. A piece of software like Quicken should *not* have "mouse driver conflicts". Why should it even be aware of mouse drivers in the first place? I guess that just further demonstrates the ugly legacy junk underneath.

While I do not disagree that there is legacy code that creates difficulties for current maintenance and improvements, I do disagree that it should not be so. The marketplace wants costs kept low ... replacing code that basically works is too expensive. The fact that writing "cross platform applications is just not that difficult" may or may not be true ... but it is way too subjective. And it suggests what is nearly ridiculous: that since writing cross platform code is so trivial, that there is no good reason for Intuit not to do so. I anxiously await anyone to make the case that Intuit is incapable of understanding what it takes to write code for multiple platforms, or that Intuit has lost their corporate minds and are simply refusing to make a profit when one is staring them right in the face.

And as to the mouse driver conflicts: I'm not sure how you propose that they could possibly be avoided solely by Intuit. At least one mouse problem in Quicken was caused by Microsoft creating a new mouse driver for an old mouse in a new operating system ... and changing what the mouse driver transmitted to the application (without any notification to application developers). New drivers shouldn't break existing code ... especially code written in accord with examples provided by the mouse driver developer.

I doubt that there is a big enough market at $30-$50 a copy to make it worthwhile. That is why there are so few viruses for OS-X and Linux. There just aren't enough users of those operating systems to make it worth the effort.

"Better" in the corporate world means it makes more money. While the programmers may get a lot of satisfaction by cleaning it up, the management has to make a profit. That is their job. It currently (usually) works well enough for a cheap piece of software. Would you be willing to pay $75.00-$100.00 for the next version if they cleaned up the old code? I wouldn't, and I doubt many others would either.

-- Jim