Quicken for Mac 2007 being rebuilt to work with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion - Page 2

Too little, Too late, i've got ibank now with no intention of going back to a company that has treated us so badly for so long.

Who cares about endian-ness? What they should do (actually, what they should have done a decade ago) is port the WINDOWS version to the Mac rather than porting the old Mac version to Lion.

If they had done this properly a decade ago, they would probably have SAVED money over the years. The computation part of the app should have been separated from the UI and platform specific part. Then they could use the same computation part on both platforms which would ensure compatibility and feature equality.

Come on people Intuit has shown no love of the Mac platform for a very long time!! They only give it enough attention so no other company can get a foothold. They have got to be laughing at everyone for sticking it out this long...

No kidding! It's not as if financial formulas are different on a Mac than on Windows. And why would they want to maintain two file formats, two sets of design requirements, etc. The only thing I can think of is that the Windows code is so poorly documented that they couldn't reference any of it for a Mac version and they needed to "reinvent the wheel", so-to-speak, for every new release.

That's when you should've asked "... and how's that been working out for you?"

Intuit is the worst. I switched from the Quicken PC version to the Mac in 2003, which was painful because the file formats were not compatible. Despite being more expensive than the PC version it had fewer features and a much poorer user interface. Each year they would come out with a new release with no upgrade pricing for previous users. It didn't really matter since these never had any major changes - I think one year the highlighted feature was integration with iPhoto. Then they forced everyone who was using online banking to buy the 2007 release because they sunset that feature in all prior versions (i.e. it would stop working without the latest release). The 2007 release was pretty much the same software as from four years earlier, so basically they forced everyone to pay up again just to keep a feature they had previously purchased. Despite the new software they somehow managed to let the Quicken SSL Certificate expire in Sept 2009 - then nobody could use online banking for more than a month until Intuit got around to releasing an update.

I had planned to use my move to Lion as the push needed to get my data away from this horrible piece of software, but had to do it sooner because Quicken began locking up and crashing on startup. After looking at the alternatives I settled on SEE Finance, a very good program that ported more than 20 years of data seamlessly for me. It is still in beta but is far better than Quicken already, and I have seen more changes to it in 9 months than I did in eight years with Intuit. I'm actually not sure why they don't consider it a production release yet - they are letting people try it for free, but it is certainly worth paying for in it's current form.

Lion didn't spring out of nowhere and Intuit had plenty of time to port Quicken if they had wanted to. I think their interest now is that they realize they won't be able to milk it much longer if they don't. Given their abominable track record on the Mac I would advise using this opportunity to get away from them.

Yep. It definitely smacks of short term thinking. If they had put the core of their app in a portable C library they could even have used it as the basis for an iPad version.

I still don't understand why Quicken for Mac can't be written to use the same file format as Quicken for Windows. Every other frickin' app from Photoshop to MS Word can.

It's not just Apple users that Intuit has treated so badly. I'm in the UK using Quicken 2002 on my MacBook through Crossover. Quicker 2002 used to automatically update stock prices, and Intuit just ended that support and abandoned UK users. The only reason I'm still using Quicken is because I keep putting off the trauma of looking at the Mac alternatives and migrating my data, which goes back years. Choosing financial software is a big decision that's hard to change down the line, and anyone would have to be crazy to tie themselves to a company that has shown itself to be so capricious and opportunistic, with no loyalty to its user base.

I don't see many people commenting about online banking with Quicken, other than the lack of it in Essentials. Personally, one of the MAJOR assets of the traditional quicken, to me, is their Quicken Bill Pay. I have used it for years, and frankly, rely on it these days. I rarely pickup a checkbook any more, unless its for an in person transaction, like a contractor. I can pay from quicken itself, almost all my bills. No need to go to my bank site, or to the payee site, I just do it from the program itself.

I didn't see that ability, in any other financial program. What I did see, was downloads of info, but not paying the bills themselves, from the finance application.

I welcome the update, cause now I can switch to Lion on my desktop. I'm sure its not gonna be perfect, and Intuit is far from a responsive company, but its something. (I sure won't update till the reviews are in, thats for sure)

Oh thank GOD, the newest MS word for Mac is somewhat familiar to us long time users. In the new MS word for windows, at work, I spend a LOT of wasted time looking for simple things. They have changed the desktop so much, you can't find anything!

Me too. Somehow ribbons are harder to learn/memorise than traditional menus.

Intuit: That will be $49.95 please.

Apple holding back Rosetta on Lion is forcing us to run our two Intel Minis on Snow Leopard.
Looks like staying with Lion is going to restrict us from using some recent Apple web facilities.
It will be some more years before we can do without Rosetta, so we'll have to "save money and stay as we are".

Me too. Converting to iBank took a couple weeks, and it took a couple months to get used to a new workflow. But everything is converted, going back to 1991, and I only did it because Intuit was so abusive of the relationship that went back a little more than 20 years. They can ship whatever the hell they want, I'm out.

I switched to iBank too. After some getting used to it, I like it better as well. They have great customer support and are actively developing and enhancing their app.

But Rosetta is a userland process (unlike the 68K emulator they used in the original PPC transition era). Although Lion does give all Lion-capable Macs a complete 64-bit userland, it also still contains a complete 32-bit userland (including a complete 32-bit Carbon API for x86-compiled code) and the two can coexist simultaneously on the same Mac, allowing an arbitrary mix of 32-bit and 64-bit processes running at once. So the signle most significant impediment to maintaining Rosetta shouldn't have been the simple fact that the default Lion userland is 64 bits.

The fact of the matter is, Rosetta only ever existed to support legacy software during the transition period while software publishers were still adjusting to the new CPU.

It is in Apple's best interests to quicken (no pun intended) the death of all such legacy software so that their customers can be assured a consistent user experience with all their software taking advantage of all the latest features that have been made available in post-x86 versions of OS X.

I used Quicken's Bill Pay for about 10 years - and while Quicken Essentials plus my bank's website for bill pay is not quite as feature rich or convenient as Quicken Bill Pay was - it is about $120 less per year - although, Intuit did send me a "free" upgrade to Quicken every couple years while I was subscribed to Bill Pay.

It is somewhat annoying that Intuit has behind on this for some time - and although I did check out alternatives I ended up with QE since it meets nearly all of my requirements - and in the brief testing I did with other packages I did not see a significant difference.

The biggest issue I had in transitioning was that the import messed up transfer transactions where one of the two accounts involved had been deleted since it was closed - so I spent about a day cleaning up my registers - have been using it for something like 6 months now and the initial transition pain is long over.

Bingo, me too. Moved to iBank last year.

Moneydance has online bill pay. And it runs on Lion.

As far as Quicken goes, I've already made the switch and cleaned Quicken out of my system. It would take a herculean effort on Intuit's part to get me back.

Intuit - if you're trolling for feedback here it is. As a longtime Quicken user too long neglected, I've switched to iBank. If you really want to be competitive in this segment your product will need feature parity, mobile syncing with iPhone/iPad apps, online bill pay and file conversion with all the alternatives that have sprung up in your absence. Really... REALLY??? You've got a serious uphill battle ahead of you which you can thank yourself for... As for Intuit's presence on Apple's board, I can't imagine the contribution there...

I hope this doesn't mean they are abandoning Essentials. I really like it and it does everything I need it to do

Xero Personal is now $34. a year. And it works on an iPad.

Why is anyone still concerned with what Intuit does?

Looks interesting, but how is it better/different from the free Mint.com?

It's not owned by Intuit.