Why would anyone in their right mind want their company accounting records in the cloud, where they can't do local back ups, can't migrate somewhere else if their needs change, and are hostage to whatever future subscription rate is charged? Nice set of books you got there. Shame if something should happen to them.
Accountedge has been an excellent program. They have been saying for months they would make it compatible. What dicks.
Not that it should make any difference but Priority Software is headquartered in Israel. It appears all of its management team (see website) is Israeli. I have to wonder if their refusal to upgrade the Mac version has anything to do with possible security issues implemented in Catalina. When I was working for a US government contractor, we had to get special permission to buy anything manufactured in Israel, mainly because of security issues.
Based on the Twitter threads, AccountEdge reps were saying that they made the effort to migrate the code, but ultimately gave up.
There are no excuses that AccountEdge can hide behind to essentially abandon their customers like that. AccountEdge had literally years of warnings to convert their apps to 64-bit, something that is easy to do, and they failed miserably. It's laziness at the least, incompetence at the most.
It just shows where their priorities are, and running on MacOS is not one of them. Shame on them.
I find it interesting that AccountEdge's Catalina support page blames the excuse on their "30-year-old code base", yet the next paragraph for non-Catalina users proudly proclaims "AccountEdge 2020 is now available"! IT'S 30-YEAR-OLD-CODE!!! What's "2020" about it?!
Lazy company.
If these developers (a very generous term considering their ineptitude) cannot handle a port to 64-bits imagine how quickly they would respond to a security breach in their software, you know, software that is managing real people's real money.
We really do need to put this in perspective. If the code is truly 30 years old, circa 1990, it was not even written for 32-bits. At that point in time nobody other than military/DOD/SEI was really too concerned about the security threat as we now know it to be. The moves from 16-bits to 32-bits to 64-bits were not done in a vacuum where the only motivation was to increase addressable memory. The quality, security, and robustness of compilers, libraries, algorithms, debuggers, exception detection and handling, and design-for-security responses to emerging threats grew substantially all along the way. Code that was considered to be "good enough" to meet functional requirements of commercial software in 1990 would probably be declared as a steaming pile of shit by today's standards.
So I'd ask the customers of this company, who entrust their financial formulations and liabilities to this 30 year old beater of an app that cannot be brought up to snuff against a very reasonable quality bar that was put in place years ago, do you feel lucky? Hey, it's only your money. You can always make more and you really didn't want to retire anyway.
In other news, Intuit has had many years to make its QuickBooks software feature-compatible with the Windows version. This too did not happen. Users can't migrate from Windows to the MacOS version.
This is one (of two) reasons why I still run Windows on my Mac. I've been a QB user for almost 30 years and almost made the switch to QB for Mac, but halted when I read about the incompatibility between the two.
Honestly, I don't know why companies pull stunts like this. To develop QB for Mac & Windows, and not make the data compatible with each other is inexcusable. I should be able to go back/forth between platforms if I wanted to and just pop in my QB data and run the software. It's lazy methods these companies employ.
There are no excuses that AccountEdge can hide behind to essentially abandon their customers like that. AccountEdge had literally years of warnings to convert their apps to 64-bit, something that is easy to do, and they failed miserably. It's laziness at the least, incompetence at the most.
It just shows where their priorities are, and running on MacOS is not one of them. Shame on them.
I find it interesting that AccountEdge's Catalina support page blames the excuse on their "30-year-old code base", yet the next paragraph for non-Catalina users proudly proclaims "AccountEdge 2020 is now available"! IT'S 30-YEAR-OLD-CODE!!! What's "2020" about it?!
Lazy company.
Why are you so upset with them? They have determined that it isn’t worth the investment to support Catalina. It’s their money.
What's with the codebase that cannot be re-used to run on Catalina? I wonder if they were using a third party compiled code which they were reliant for the app to run.
I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad.
Some trolls are smart and can be difficult to spot or weed out, but you are so inept and ridiculous in your assertions that it doesn't even tax a few of my brain cells to see what you are.
I hate trolls, f'ing idiots.
The thing about trolls like this one is they never respond. They drop their turd on the floor, then stand back and watch people walk up and smell it. And we fall for it. This idiot will never come back and defend his/her turd as it has served its purpose.
While Priority Software had initially hoped they would be able to make AccountEdge compatible with Catalina, they learned along the way that it was beyond their abilities. Instead, the company offers a list of solutions for customers.
What the fuck does this even mean? Even low-life Windows ports like Hallmark Card Studio now support Catalina.
I have been using MYOB, the predecessor to AccountEdge, in a Mac OS 10.6 VM for nearly a decade. It has worked perfectly for me, and I can update the tax tables by hand, which is why I never upgraded to AccountEdge. It is almost certainly possible and quite easy to run AccountEdge out of a VM, but the problem will be the inability to update the tax tables.
LOL. Me too! Using a version from 2000 running in a snow leopard VM in parallels. Works beautifully!
I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad.
I get slammed for being anti-Apple around here... and I think your comment above is pretty ridiculous. Any company that cannot update their own code to be 64-bit... while suggesting users SUBSCRIBE to a different product of theirs... is being disingenuous. What did they do, lose some of the source code??
I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad.
Some trolls are smart and can be difficult to spot or weed out, but you are so inept and ridiculous in your assertions that it doesn't even tax a few of my brain cells to see what you are.
I hate trolls, f'ing idiots.
I did like the "Sad." part at the end. Should have been in all-caps or followed by an exclamation points however. Style points lost for that oversight.
I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad.
Yes, god forbid Apple wants to have a modern platform without bloat from 15+ years ago...
In other news, Intuit has had many years to make its QuickBooks software feature-compatible with the Windows version. This too did not happen. Users can't migrate from Windows to the MacOS version.
This is one (of two) reasons why I still run Windows on my Mac. I've been a QB user for almost 30 years and almost made the switch to QB for Mac, but halted when I read about the incompatibility between the two.
Honestly, I don't know why companies pull stunts like this. To develop QB for Mac & Windows, and not make the data compatible with each other is inexcusable. I should be able to go back/forth between platforms if I wanted to and just pop in my QB data and run the software. It's lazy methods these companies employ.
I use a PPC version of AccountEdge in a VM. I moved most of my businesses to something else ages ago but a side business I have is not worth the cost or time so I just run it in the old AccountEdge as long as I can. (I don't need tax tables or anything for what I am doing -- have no employees and can track sales tax manually).
Priority Software is not the original developer. I don't know when they took it over but it has had at least one if not multiple former owners.
I suspect that this is a Carbon app and the final vestiges of Carbon went away in Catalina:
Truly sad a company cannot update there software to current technology. Education is having the same problem as users of Easy Grade Pro have found out.
For a second there I thought you were talking about Aperture.
The way to convert to 64 bit if you use objective c, swift, and even some other modern frameworks not created by Apple is to flick a switch in xCode.
This indicates to be they are running code written for pre OS X systems, rather than Apple abandoning their developers these guys were two lazy to write for a new OS for two decades. I doubt they have a much better codebase on windows either.
I remember when MYOB first came out for the Mac in the early 1990s, in Australia. My father had convinced me to do an Accounting major as part of my CS degree and he thought I should have created a competing product when I graduated. I wasn't keen on the idea and instead worked in the health and education industries after my dad sold his Apple dealership. Ironically, I ended up marrying a girl whose family had been involved in developing an accounting product that MYOB easily out-competed.
The path MYOB followed, as best I can tell, was to build something that did the basics well and covered the majority of the potential user base, i.e. a DOS/Windows product. I'd say that in the late 1990s when the Australian distributor bought the product from the original developers the management were still keen on keeping Mac customers but would have been wary about the "impending death" of Apple (in the immortal words of Jack Miller, "Who's beleaguered now, punk?"). I do know that in the lead up to the introduction of the GST in Australia in 2000 I sold a lot of MYOB AccountEdge with new iMacs, so they were reasonably committed to the product at that time, but for Windows you could get a large variety of MYOB products while for the Mac there were only two.
A few years later, though, it felt like the Mac version got released 6+ months after the Windows version. From the wikipedia article, it probably jives with the timing of the co-founder leaving and a corporate merger. So, usual story - new management thinks Windows is all they need to support, yada yada yada, if the cost of contracting out the Mac development is sufficiently less than the incoming revenue then sure, we'll keep a Mac version. After a few more years, management realise that the product has probably peaked in the market, so they sell out to private capital which, predictably, has no idea how to develop and manage products and now appears to be selling off the few remaining profitable parts of the company.
I find the claim of a 30-year-old code base perfectly plausible, even reasonable - it's not like accounting changes much. But clearly, there have been additions to the software that justify claims of new versions, so while I appreciate the cynicism it's not justified to the extent it initially appears. The company have extended the product with business management features to complement the bookkeeping functionality, so I'm not going to be too harsh with my judgement.
BUT.
The move to cloud-based services is clearly the sign of a company that doesn't want to deal with multi-platform development any more. They have known for several years that they were living on borrowed time with the Mac but didn't analyse the extent of their technical debt. When the time came to pay the piper they tried to do it on the cheap, failed, and now appear to be willing to walk away from loyal customers who they strung along with promises they couldn't deliver on.
Comments
We really do need to put this in perspective. If the code is truly 30 years old, circa 1990, it was not even written for 32-bits. At that point in time nobody other than military/DOD/SEI was really too concerned about the security threat as we now know it to be. The moves from 16-bits to 32-bits to 64-bits were not done in a vacuum where the only motivation was to increase addressable memory. The quality, security, and robustness of compilers, libraries, algorithms, debuggers, exception detection and handling, and design-for-security responses to emerging threats grew substantially all along the way. Code that was considered to be "good enough" to meet functional requirements of commercial software in 1990 would probably be declared as a steaming pile of shit by today's standards.
So I'd ask the customers of this company, who entrust their financial formulations and liabilities to this 30 year old beater of an app that cannot be brought up to snuff against a very reasonable quality bar that was put in place years ago, do you feel lucky? Hey, it's only your money. You can always make more and you really didn't want to retire anyway.
The Mac market is not “dying”.
Priority Software is not the original developer. I don't know when they took it over but it has had at least one if not multiple former owners.
I suspect that this is a Carbon app and the final vestiges of Carbon went away in Catalina:
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Carbon_(API)Carbon (API) - Wikipedia
This indicates to be they are running code written for pre OS X systems, rather than Apple abandoning their developers these guys were two lazy to write for a new OS for two decades. I doubt they have a much better codebase on windows either.
Wikipedia has a good article outlining the history of the company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MYOB_(company)
The path MYOB followed, as best I can tell, was to build something that did the basics well and covered the majority of the potential user base, i.e. a DOS/Windows product. I'd say that in the late 1990s when the Australian distributor bought the product from the original developers the management were still keen on keeping Mac customers but would have been wary about the "impending death" of Apple (in the immortal words of Jack Miller, "Who's beleaguered now, punk?"). I do know that in the lead up to the introduction of the GST in Australia in 2000 I sold a lot of MYOB AccountEdge with new iMacs, so they were reasonably committed to the product at that time, but for Windows you could get a large variety of MYOB products while for the Mac there were only two.
A few years later, though, it felt like the Mac version got released 6+ months after the Windows version. From the wikipedia article, it probably jives with the timing of the co-founder leaving and a corporate merger. So, usual story - new management thinks Windows is all they need to support, yada yada yada, if the cost of contracting out the Mac development is sufficiently less than the incoming revenue then sure, we'll keep a Mac version. After a few more years, management realise that the product has probably peaked in the market, so they sell out to private capital which, predictably, has no idea how to develop and manage products and now appears to be selling off the few remaining profitable parts of the company.
I find the claim of a 30-year-old code base perfectly plausible, even reasonable - it's not like accounting changes much. But clearly, there have been additions to the software that justify claims of new versions, so while I appreciate the cynicism it's not justified to the extent it initially appears. The company have extended the product with business management features to complement the bookkeeping functionality, so I'm not going to be too harsh with my judgement.
BUT.
The move to cloud-based services is clearly the sign of a company that doesn't want to deal with multi-platform development any more. They have known for several years that they were living on borrowed time with the Mac but didn't analyse the extent of their technical debt. When the time came to pay the piper they tried to do it on the cheap, failed, and now appear to be willing to walk away from loyal customers who they strung along with promises they couldn't deliver on.
There are better ways to handle the situation.