Quicken Essentials for Mac

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Quicken has long been the standard of personal finance for the better part of the last 15 years. If you wanted to digitally keep track of your finances, Quicken was the first name you heard of. Quicken for Windows remains, from what I’ve heard, the gold standard. However, the Mac version had long been put out to pasture with the last version, Quicken 2007, having been released in the Summer of 2006.

 I’ve been using Quicken 2004 for Mac since, well, 2004, because the “upgrades” (read $70 bug fixes) just weren’t justifiable in the 2005, 2006, and 2007 versions. Then, in January 2008, there was the promise of Quicken Financial Life for Mac, with a ship date of Fall 2008. This was to be a rewrite of Quicken for Mac that sport a fresh user interface and finally bring Intel native code.

Sadly, that ship date kept being pushed back again and again. I even started to contemplate alternatives to Quicken, but ended up deciding to just stick with my decrepit 2004 version. Then in October 2009, Quicken bought Mint.com, and put Mint’s head honcho, Aaron Patzer, in charge of the Quicken team. He promptly ousted the much-delayed Quicken Financial Life and put his Mac-savvy Mint team on the job to compile the essentials of finance tracking in a built-from-the-ground up Cocoa version of Quicken for the Mac. And they did it in four months.

Today we realize the culmination of that fresh outlook on financing in Quicken Essentials for Mac. Now, it truly is just the essentials, but it’s the essentials done right. It lacks stock-lot accounting, bill pay, and TurboTax export, among a few other things, I’m sure. However, if all you need is to get a hold of your spending and create a budget then QEM should fit right in for you. 

I’ll admit, I was extremely skeptical about QEM for the past couple months when looking at the multitude of failures and delays of Quicken Financial Life. What really sold me was Aaron Patzer, formerly of Mint, now VP and general manager of Intuit’s personal finance group, getting out and talking to just about any major Mac site that would listen. Keep in mind that he came in to the fray in October 2009. Here’s an excerpt from Macworld:

“When I came in, I looked at the Mac product and said, ‘Holy crap, we haven’t put one of these out in three years,’” Patzer said. “It’s called ‘Mac Essentials’ because it’s got the essential features used by 80 percent of the users we’ve surveyed and talked to. So we had to decide, do we want to put a product out that serves 80 percent of the market and is a vast improvement in so many ways, or do we delay it again? And what I thought was, given the growing popularity of the Mac platform… it was better to get a product out that’s good for 80 percent of the market.”

 Also:

Patzer says that you’ll see more similarities to Mint.com in the desktop Quicken products. Patzer says he “personally specced out” Quicken for Windows 2011. “Over time, you’ll start to see features and functionality for all the platforms come together. It shouldn’t matter if you’re using Mac, PC, iPhone, Android, or online” when it comes to features and data availability. Apps should have a native appearance, he said, but the underlying data structures will be the same and it should be easy to go from using a desktop app to the online service and back again.

It’s obvious to me that Intuit, the maker of Quicken, saw that they were stagnant. When they bought Mint.com, I thought for sure they did so just to kill it off, as it competed with Quicken Online. Instead, the company tossed Quicken Online in the bin, and embraced Mint.com as its replacement. It sounds like they gave the Mint people carte blanche over all of Quicken. It also sounds like the fresh blood has a vision for the future, and it is that vision that persuaded me to embrace Quicken Essentials for Mac.

Whether or not you decide to adopt Quicken Essentials is primarily based on whether you are an 80 or a 20. Thankfully, I fall in the 80 percent of the user base. I leave my investments to my brokerage site, and I like the web interface that provides. So I didn’t feel the need to continue on with Quicken 2004 and wait for another year or two.

Thankfully, my grandpa has Quicken 2006 and I was able to use iChat’s Screen Sharing and my iDisk to convert my 2004 file. From there, QEM worked like a charm.

Happy Birthday, Steve Jobs!

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The fearless leader of our favorite fruit company turned 55 today. Jobs is one of the most influential people in the tech industry, and has revolutionized the way we live with the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and soon, the future of computing, the iPad.

Whether you love Apple or despise it, no one can argue the impact of Mr. Jobs’ achievements in our day to day lives.

Happy birthday, Steve. I wish you many happy returns.

Back the F:\ Up!

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In the past year, I’ve known a lot of people who have experienced hard drive failures. No rhyme or reason or pattern, hard drives just have a tendency to fail. But, here’s one common thing I have noticed with each and every person that has experienced one of these failures: No one had a backup.

The most recent experience I’ve dealt with was a situation where the user had moved their Documents folder and their iTunes library to an external drive (which was ironically, considering the title of this post, the F:\ drive in Windows XP). And that external drive failed. 

Folks, you need to back up your data. It will be easier for you, and for me, when your hard drive fails. Notice I said when, not if. Your hard drive will someday fail. Just like someday your car will need maintenance.

I have seen so many folks, including members of my own family, buy extra hard drives to expand their storage when they fill up their primary drive, but they never think of having drives to back up their data.

At bare minimum, have your data backed up on a drive at your desk. To be even better you should have that and an offsite backup.

My motto for backup is “unless a file exists in two or more places, it doesn’t really exist.”

If you are on Windows, get a backup solution in place. There’s a lot of software out there that will help you schedule regular backups of your entire drive.

If you use a Mac, you don’t have an excuse. Buy an external drive, plug it in, and at least let Time Machine make backups for you, which is built in to Leopard and Snow Leopard. If you need a bootable clone, I suggest SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.

Now, go make a backup. You’ll someday thank me.

Find My iPhone, from an iPhone

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iPhone and iPod touch users will notice a revamped landing page when directing Mobile Safari to MobileMe today. Instead of just informing users they can access MobileMe syncing functions from the Settings on their iPhone or iPod touch, a few more options are available. Now present are links for instructions on setting up MobileMe services on your device, links to download Apple’s iDisk or Gallery app on the App Store, and the ability to use Find My iPhone.

Find my iPhone should be handy if, say, your significant other or friend also has an iPhone or iPod touch, and you need to lock down your device right away, especially if you aren’t near a computer.

It’s a nice addition, and one that hopefully won’t be needed too often.

 

⌘ iMultitasking

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Most of the people I know now have smartphones, and one thing many say to lampoon my iPhone is, “Well, it can’t multitask.” I often try to explain that it does indeed multitask, just not with third-party apps. For example: You can listen to music via the iPod app whilst playing a game or reading tweets, or you can talk on the phone while browsing the web or reading tweets. Did I mention reading tweets?

But what if multitasking isn’t quite the correct idea to seek? You see, the standard computer we know and love can multitask, but we cannot. We are unable to focus on writing an email and a blog post at the same time. Just like we can’t watch a movie and read our RSS feeds at the same time. Sure, you can have the movie playing, but when you switch your eyes from it to your feedreader, your eyes are now reading instead of watching. And yes, you can keep part of your consciousness on the movie by listening, but that is utilizing a completely different sense. 

When people say multitasking they really mean context switching. Louie Mantia has an amazing write-up of this idea.

The premise of context switching is great on modern computers. We can do this quickly and efficiently via clicking on an icon in the Dock or command-tabbing or using Exposé. (Or using the taskbar or Windows-tab, or Aero Peek, if you use Windows).

Humans don’t multitask, they context switch. Really quickly. Computers multitask, but only in the sense of running multiple processes at the same time. This is all presented to the user through context switching, though. Multitasking is something the user doesn’t necessarily see.

Now, let’s boil this down to smartphones. The iPhone multitasks processes in certain apps, allowing the user to listen to music or talk on the phone while simultaneous using a different sense to do something else (audio and visual). 

Another smartphone, such as the Palm Pre, can run any variant of multiple apps at once. This degrades performance and battery life. It’s a tradeoff. So yes, the Pre itself, as a tiny computer, is multitasking. But how is that presented to the user? One app at a time. Just like the iPhone.

Here is the big difference between so-called “multitasking” phones and the iPhone: the “multitaskers” context-switch faster. The iPhone is hindered by a middleman: the Homescreen. The hindrance is not so much by the act of closing one app and launching another, but rather getting from one app to the other. If the app I had been using is on Page 1 of the homescreen and the app I want to switch to is on Page 8, that’s a lot of swiping. 

Palm simplified this by the concept of cards. I’ve observed one of my friends with his Pre, and he doesn’t usually have too many apps running at once. Tends to be his top three or four. And he is able to context-switch quickly between those three or four apps via the card interface. The massive list of apps in the homescreen is cut out entirely when switching between a couple apps. The only time he needs to visit the home screen is to launch a new app.

I think the perfect middle-ground for Apple, which doesn’t want to impact performance and battery life by allowing any and all background processes, is to allow a gesture-based switching between certain “open” apps. What I mean by “open” is that when you use a gesture to switch apps, the app you were using is put in a suspended state and the other app you had “open” is brought out of a suspended state. This would maintain the illusion of multitasking without sacrificing resources. I think. I’m not an engineer. 

This solution, of course, doesn’t help the folks who want Pandora to supply stimulation to their audio senses while they engage their visual senses in another app. But we all know Apple isn’t willing to allow third-party background processes. But this solution would allow for faster and easier context switching of the visual sense.

(It should be noted that the only apps allowed background processing on the iPhone are a few of the pre-installed apps. Even the apps that Apple publishes via the App Store follow App Store rules and are not allowed background processing).

I think the real issues some people are having with the iPhone isn’t multitasking, but rather background-processing and more efficient context-switching. One of those Apple is unlikely to enact. The other is one I’d like to see. And I’d like to see it soon.

Google Extends Chrome for Mac

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Google has had a rising star over the past year or so with its Chrome web browser. The browser was first available to Windows users, with Mac and Linux support promised. After what seemed like an eon, age, and an eternity, Google delivered those versions in Late 2009. However, they didn’t have feature parity with their older Windows brother.

Today Google closed that gap significantly with an update to Chrome for Mac (sorry, Linux) by adding support for extensions and bookmark syncing.

Extensions add extra functionality to the browser. I, for one, am anxious for 1Password to finish their Chrome extension, as I can’t truly give a browser a chance without 1Password being easily accessible. 

Bookmark syncing is a great feature for folks with multiple computers. I know my friend, Aaron, was excited to finally have his home and work versions of Chrome talking to each other.

You can get Chrome here or see what Google has to say about the enhancements to Chrome for Mac.

Safari will likely remain as my main browser, but I think Chrome has trumped Firefox as my secondary.

MWSF 2010: Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac Announced

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The big announcement at the kickoff of Macworld Conference & Expo today was Microsoft’s official announcement of Office 2011 for Mac. 

Office 2011 ousting Entourage and adopting Outlook for Mac, built from the ground up. It will also herald the return of Visual Basic, which didn’t make the cut in the 2008 version.

Also, the “ribbon” user interface that introduced in Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for Mac is getting a visual facelift and functionality overhaul. And a nice little touch will be smooth transitions in the ribbon interface via Core Animation.

Office 2011 for Mac should be available for Holiday 2010. The price has yet to announced.

Aperture 3 Released

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Early this morning our favorite fruit company released Aperture 3, the iPhoto-on-steroids performance enhancing code for prosumer and professional shutterbugs alike. Aperture 3 is 64-bit, includes Faces and Places from the previous iPhoto release, and includes a few new tools such as Brushes and Adjustment Presets (among many other minute tweaks and updates).

I, for one, have been salivating over Aperture for a while. Since I started shooting RAW images over JPGs, iPhoto has become a slow, uncooperative mutt. Yes, I could have bought Aperture 2, but I had been convinced for the past 6 months that Aperture 3 was right around the corner. I waited, and it has paid off. 

I’ve requested a trial copy from Apple’s site, and can’t wait to download it and give it a run. That will also give me 30-days to see if I can find a decent deal on it.

I’ll post more on my thoughts on Aperture 3, the ease (or difficulty) of transitioning from iPhoto, and other gems after I’ve had a while to play and tinker.

If you’ve been feeling a little cramped by iPhoto, go visit the Aperture page and request a trial to see if that fits better for your photo processing needs. And when you want to buy, remember to feed the techēse speaking guy by using the Amazon link in the sidebar.

Did Anyone Else Forget Macworld Expo is Next Week?

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For a Mac user, there is a special, magical time of year called Macworld Expo. It’s the Mac geek’s Christmas. It’s the event where, once a year, the fearless leader Steve Jobs (or in a medical absence, Phil Schiller) takes the stage and wows us with new shiny products with Apple logos on them.

Except…Macworld is in February this year? Apple isn’t attending this year? David Pogue, the journalist, is delivering the keynote address instead of Steve Jobs? Is this the Twilight Zone?

Look, last year, during Steve’s medical leave of absence, Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing, took stage, delivered a couple products, nothing earth-shattering. Then he dropped the bomb that Apple wouldn’t be attending in the future. Tony Bennett came out to patch things up by singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

In the fallout, the Expo organizers pushed everything back to February 2010 (probably to give a little bit more time to strategize and so they wouldn’t be buried in the press by CES).

The reality is, I was so focused on Apple’s own iPad event and its aftermath that I forgot all about Macworld Expo. Am I the only one? I doubt it. I honestly can’t think of a single reason the consumer side of me should be salivating over Macworld Expo. 

Every Mac Geek’s Christmas was postponed a month, then Apple came in and saved the day with the iPad. Apple is simply enough of a juggernaut now that they don’t need the expenditure of being at an Expo for a week to grab the attention of the world. They just need to send out vague invitations a week early.

I’ll keep an eye out for anything interesting coming out of expo, but I have a feeling it, too, will succumb to its sibling’s fate. You do remember Macworld Boston, right?