Quicken Financial Life for Mac due this summer

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 43
    john.bjohn.b Posts: 2,742member
    I got the beta invite email and downloaded/installed the dmg. I won't get a chance to put it through its paces until tomorrow.



    I'll say in advance that I have high expectations, though I don't need "feature parity" to the Windows version. There are a lot of things in Quicken/Windows that I'd never use.



    Some of the other apps recommended here are interesting, but I don't like Java ports on my Mac and I definitely don't trust someone to store my financial data in "the cloud".



    iBank looks promising, but I could live without the "Quicken Killer" sales pitch; if you have to tell people yours is a killer app, then it isn't.



    BTW if there are things in QFL you don't like, I think you can still sign up for the beta and submit bug reports and UI suggestions.
  • Reply 22 of 43
    dr_lhadr_lha Posts: 236member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by hmurchison View Post


    http://www.thequickenkiller.com/



    iBank is fine for what it is, and I'll admit that I use version 2 for my finances, but it lacks some major features that would be very easy to implement. For example, I think people have just about given up asking for a feature that allows you to track your net worth over time. Maybe they added the feature, I should check, but last time I tried iBank 3 couldn't import me iBank 2 file, and nobody could help me at IGG.
  • Reply 23 of 43
    In January 2008, Intuit announced the Mac version of Quicken would be available about January 2009. Now they are saying summer of 2009. Giving Intuit the benefit of the doubt, this might mean that minimum system requirements for the Mac version of Quicken include Snow Leopard.



    Or in other words, yes, they re-wrote it from the ground up for Mac OS X, but as a carbon app, and now they have to backtrack and make it a Cocoa app because of Snow Leopard.
  • Reply 24 of 43
    tbelltbell Posts: 3,146member
    I do not understand people's problem with Quicken's support of Cover flow. Based on the preview, it appears to be an option. So if you don't like Cover Flow switch it off. There is nothing wrong with giving people options. Moreover, since Cover Flow support is built into OSX it essentially takes no effort to add the capabilities. I think modeling Quicken after iTunes is also smart because the overall layout is a good way to organize information.



    Nonetheless, I think Quicken for the most part has been a poor example of Mac Software especially with other cross-platform options like Monkey Dance available. I, however, respect Quicken for making the decision to rewrite the application from the ground up. That takes time and it will likely end up in a better application. I'll reserve judgement until the application ships.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by initiator View Post


    First off, let me say that I have been a Quicken for Mac user since 1995. My life is in Quicken.



    Having said that, Quicken for Mac has always been the red-headed stepchild of Intuit's product line. Opening it in Mac OS X is almost embarrassing. Each year, they would make only cursory changes and band-aid it just enough so that it "worked" in Mac OS X. It was embarrassing. It's still very much a System 7 app.



    Quicken Financial Life for Mac? WTF. Why on earth would I need coverflow for my checkbook? Or tags or a tag cloud for my finances? Give me a break. If you are going to re-write a program from scratch, how about write a program that is functional. I'm all for using Mac technology, but how about using it appropriately. Give me a functional, modern Quicken for Mac minus the clouds.



    Where does Intuit get their product direction from? Who do they listen to? Did some focus group tell them to write this program that looks good but isn't very functional. Intuit has NEVER listened to it's customers. I guess they figured, why start now?



    Repeat after me: "Every Mac program does NOT have to look like iTunes". Say this 5 times until it sinks in.



  • Reply 25 of 43
    tbelltbell Posts: 3,146member
    You'd have to agree that you are in the minority there. People are lazy and want the ease of use of automatically downloading transactions. You can still review the transactions after they are downloaded.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by webraider View Post


    Therefore, Downloading transactions is of no use for me.



  • Reply 26 of 43
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dr_lha View Post


    Yippee, another program than inappropriately uses CoverFlow!



    Ugly? Yes. Innapropriate? No.



    They seem to be using it as a file browsing interface which is pretty much what it was designed for.
  • Reply 27 of 43
    akacakac Posts: 512member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by SMacSteve View Post


    I hear a lot of complaints about this new "Financial Life" but none of you have used the download link and tried it out. I did and it's pretty nice. Even the cover flow view is used pretty well! I had no problem getting it to work with my B of A account and it downloaded all the data and set up spending categories too. I don't mind that it is using it's own look as it's not meant to be a Mac version of the Windows Quicken. Check it out before you start slamming it.



    What do you mean none of us? Sure some of us have. And I'm not impressed.
  • Reply 28 of 43
    I used mint.com for several months but found it wasn't right for me.



    The solution I found that worked for me was switching to Bank of America and Apple's Numbers.app



    The bill payment features are excellent.

    With Bank of America almost all of my bills are delivered directly to my online bill pay account.

    I love not having to check 10 different sites to do my bills.



    Bank of America also has a portfolio feature that also tracks investments, loans and other accounts all in one location.



    Bank of America also has a very good iPhone app that you can make bill payments from and transfer funds.



    I also use Apple's Numbers.app to track various aspects of my finances.

    The thing I like about using Numbers is that it produces beautiful charts that help me see how I'm doing as well as project where I'll be in the coming year.

    The charts give me a clear mental picture of my finances that keeps me motivated to not spend unnecessarily, pay down my credit card debt and invest wisely.
  • Reply 29 of 43
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AppleInsider View Post




    "Due to overwhelming interest in the beta, at this time we cannot accommodate your request to participate," Intuit said in an email to one AppleInsider reader whose application was rejected from the beta program. "We expect to release Quicken Financial Life for Mac in summer 2009."*







    I also was able to download yesterday with no problem. I may be the only neutral party on Cover Flow use! I don't hate it, don't love it, it just is there to use.



    As my first-ever participation in beta trial of a paid app, I have a seriously neophyte question: If you are a beta user do you have to pay for the real version when it comes out? Or are you grandfathered in as some sort of "payment" for participating before they sell it to the masses?

    My guess is you keep the beta version, but pay for finished product if you want it. Sorry to sound dumb, just have never been exposed to this process before.



    BTW, Intuit is used as great example of a company that listens to its customers in book The Ultimate Question, which is about measuring a company's customer experience. Sounds like many, many people would view their inclusion as an afront to common sense
  • Reply 30 of 43
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TBell View Post


    You'd have to agree that you are in the minority there. People are lazy and want the ease of use of automatically downloading transactions. You can still review the transactions after they are downloaded.



    Downloading transactions saves hours of time for me, it's not about being lazy, it's about letting the computer do the import, which it's good at. Downloading transactions actually usually works in the current version of Quicken, but the file format is slightly different than windows and so the banks have to specifically support the Mac version, which delays their support. So Intuit sucks, but it's the best out there for people who want to avoid having to enter all their transactions manually. Or please correct me, I'd love to see an alternative that can read Quicken .qif files from all my banks, especially that handled all the Windows .qif files.
  • Reply 31 of 43
    I've run through the beta, which doesn't take long. Only the basic check register functions are working. There are asset and loan categories, but they are just simple ledgers with no 'loan' or asset tracking features. The investment portion is completely non-functional... you can't add anything (yet). At least it looks like there will be a portfolio manager... as the original QFL specs made it sound like there would be no security-level (stock) tracking - only total account values.



    If you can get it to download your statements, you'll have something to play with, otherwise it has the basic functionality of a Numbers spreadsheet right now... and not much more. This might of better been labelled an 'alpha' release, as perhaps only 25% of the actual functions are workable. I'd expect a beta to be feature complete, but buggy.



    So, don't cry too much if you didn't get in on the beta - it is in absolutely no way ready to do anything more than track a checking or credit card account. If your 'Financial Life' is that simple, you can probably get away with Quicken Online.



    I'm looking forward to the next release, and seeing if it is something that can finally replace the 10+ versions of MS Money I've been through in the last 15 years. Like MS or not, it still is the most feature complete and handles the complexities of multi-currency, stocks, mutual funds, etc...
  • Reply 32 of 43
    https://quicken.custhelp.com/cgi-bin...er/sign_up.php



    Just fill in the fields and download.



    What's the big deal about sharing the link? Found it via Google.



    MoneyDance, Mint, & iBank are all worthy of consideration (Mint being the more limited).



    Looks to me like Macs will remain low on the Intuit priority list, especially given the Mac only rewrite/version and the major delay.
  • Reply 33 of 43
    docno42docno42 Posts: 3,755member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by webraider View Post


    I must say that I have always despised downloading transactions from ANY financial institutions. If you download transactions, you may as well just get your statement, and forget balancing your check book.. just take the banks word for All your transactions. The entire point of Quicken or any checkbook register is the reverse.. Keep the bank accountable for what they say is in your account.



    Yup. I never understood this mentality. If you are going to blindly take your financial institutions word for things, why bother using financial software like Quicken at all?
  • Reply 34 of 43
    I used iBank as a Quicken replacement for just over a week before I switched back. Mostly minor quibbles with its usability; e.g. couldn't summate multiple items within a transaction or use a category as both income and expense. I also found the whole Cover Flow and look-how-attractive-we-are points more annoying than useful.



    Quicken for Windows is far superior to the Quicken 2005 for Mac that I use. Feature I miss the most is the Savings Goal feature. You'd think it'd be a fairly straightforward add.



    My biggest concern about the forthcoming update is backwards compatibility. It took several days of crosschecking multiple accounts before my Quicken for Mac was even usable, immediately following the transfer from the XP version. It basically double counted the majority of my transactions.
  • Reply 35 of 43
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by DocNo42 View Post


    Yup. I never understood this mentality. If you are going to blindly take your financial institutions word for things, why bother using financial software like Quicken at all?



    I enter in all my transactions myself but I also use the download feature as well. You can use the downloaded transactions to reconcile on demand. Instead of waiting up to a month for your statement to arrive and doing the reconciliation then, I can reconcile within days of the transaction. If I find something off, I can deal with it immediately.



    I discovered fraud on my credit card within a day of it occurring thanks to the download feature. If it wasn't possible to download transactions, I might have not noticed a problem for a long time and much more theft could have occurred on my credit card.



    So, moral of the story here is don't knock a feature that you don't fully understand and don't wrongly put down people who use it.
  • Reply 36 of 43
    I my humble opinion, I have been very disappointed with Quicken for the Mac. We have used it since Quicken Deluxe (copyright 1995). From our perspective, there has been little real progress. And it definitely feels like it gets worse over time. As I remember we found Quicken 2005 frustrating from 01 or 03. 07 is even worse. So my expectations for Quicken Financial Life are pretty low. ( Turbo Tax on the other hand is great. Must be two different companies under one roof out there. )



    My main beefs with existing Quicken 2007 are:



    * Reporting is remains limited. The main report formats are canned. We can't really configure the reporting to be very useful. After all of these years, we still can't do even a simple selection based on more than one factor, such as content = "Larry's Gas" and not "Larry's Tires". That means if tracking something with this small of a difference is important (for whatever reason), then you have to create two different categories.



    * It appears to me that Intuit forces you to upgrade by ending support for Online Security price updates for each trailing version. Yep, without any good reason, they just stop allowing you to update stock and fund prices after 2.5 years. Therefore you must update to the next version. I believe this happened from Quicken 03 to 05 and then 05 to 07 for us.



    * User interface changes are arbitrary. For example, prior to Quicken 07, when you double clicked on a transaction in the Upcoming list, it would open and you could edit it. This worked well for us for Utility bills which have standard split items but monthly values vary. We can't download from the Utility either. With Quicken 07, double clicking the upcoming transaction causes it to be entered in the target register. In order to edit one now, you have to go find it in the Scheduled Transaction list and update it there.



    Quicken Financial Life

    I downloaded the file and read the small user guide. I don't think that I will even try it. Coverflow in a financial app seems really weird. What use are all of the fancy reflections at the bottom of the pane? Duh? I thought the comment in the In Flight Entertainment section "We support 160 currencies" must have come from some junior marketing employee. How many of the Quicken users have been swooning for logging expenses or assets in different currencies? Just amazingly off-target both in mindset and delivery.
  • Reply 37 of 43
    jwsteelejwsteele Posts: 12member
    Not sure if anyone else has noticed but Quicken has closed furhter comments/discussion in the Quicken Financial Life for Mac Beat forums.



    This isn't saying much since the forums were a bit of a sham anyway, with Quicken only posting the same "thanks we sent that to the dev team" comments over and over.



    Given that there was no real progress during the time I played with the beta I see no way that they will release a product this summer.



    The funniest part was reading person after person asking why they can't just make a Quicken version for mac that has the same features as the Windows version.



    There must have been 50 people who demanded that QFLFM import their Windows data. This isn't surprising but it sure seems like Quicken is not going to provide the option.



    Many people also wondered why the Mac version was losing features from Quicken 2007 for Mac, a program written in 2006.



    I haven't seen a lot of betas but I can't imagine there are many that were as poorly run.
  • Reply 38 of 43
    kim kap solkim kap sol Posts: 2,987member
    Intuit is a piece of shit company. I hope it goes bankrupt soon.
  • Reply 39 of 43
    frank777frank777 Posts: 5,839member
    The new version of Quicken is now officially missing - from the Intuit website.
  • Reply 40 of 43
    webraiderwebraider Posts: 163member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Frank777 View Post


    The new version of Quicken is now officially missing - from the Intuit website.



    This doesn't necessarily mean they've ditched it. This may mean they are revamping their website. this sometimes happens when a new product is begin released. The did say they were going to release it in the Fall so who knows.
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