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After missing numerous deadlines, Intuit has finally shipped a new, modern version of Quicken for Mac OS X, dubbed Quicken Essentials for Mac. Long-time Quicken users may be disappointed that many features, in particular stock tracking and online bill pay, are missing after waiting four years for a new version. However, the company says this release is just a first step in a major overhaul of its personal finance software.

Quicken Essentials for Mac tosses aside the user interface from older versions of Quicken, opting for a cleaner, Cocoa-based, more “Mac-like” interface designed to be more intuitive and easy to use. It simplifies the process of connecting to your bank and credit card companies for automatic importing of transaction data from over 12,000 institutions, with another 6,000 expected to add compatibility in the coming months. The new version will also import data from Quicken for Mac 2005, 2006, and 2007; Quicken for Windows 2007, 2008, and 2009; and Microsoft Money. The latter is especially handy for switchers.

Despite the much nicer looking graphs and tag clouds showing you where your money is going, though, there isn’t much here for users with needs beyond the basics of tracking bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and spending habits. Quicken Essentials for Mac doesn’t include integrated online bill paying, nor does it allowing detailed tracking of stocks and other investments. The latter is probably not a need of a majority of users, but the former has certainly become commonplace. Quicken Essentials for Mac also lacks the ability to export data to Intuit’s own TurboTax software.

Aaron Patzer, who became the new VP and general manager of Intuit’s personal finance group after the acquisition of his online financial site Mint.com, agrees that Quicken Essentials for Mac isn’t going to appeal to all users. “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,” he told Macworld. “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?”

A new version of Quicken for Mac was first demoed at Macworld Expo 2008, but it suffered a number of delays over the last two years. The long absence of an update of Quicken for Mac opened up an opportunity for a number of shareware tools to gain in popularity, including iBank, Cha-ching, and Money, to name a few. Quicken has an advantage with having support for the de facto standard format for financial data, but Intuit may have its work cut out for it to keep Mac users interested in its products.

Patzer told Macworld that next year we can expect an updated version of Essentials as well as Quicken Deluxe for Mac, which is expected to include the missing functionality from the Essentials. Users that need those features now can either stick with Quicken for Mac 2007, or run a newer Windows version in Boot Camp or a virtual machine.

Quicken Essentials for Mac is $70, and can be downloaded directly from Intuit’s website. You’ll need an Intel-based Mac and either Leopard or Snow Leopard to run it. Quicken for Mac 2007 is still available (also $70) for those running Tiger and/or PowerPC-based Macs. We’ll be posting a more in-depth look at the new software as soon as we have a chance to spend some quality time with it.

When you think personal finance software, the first thing that comes to mind is probably Quicken. While Quicken has been a mainstay on Windows desktops for years, its Mac presence has been less than stellar. That changes today, with the release of Quicken Essentials for Mac. Re-built from the ground-up and integrating lots of features from Mint.com, Quicken Essentials is a great addition to the Mac software space.

Quicken has always treated the Mac platform as kind of an also-ran. Although new versions of the tool appeared yearly (at least until 2006) alongside the Windows variants, the Mac editions always lagged behind in features, stability and even pricing options. Quicken Essentials for Mac, previously known as Quicken Financial Life for Mac, has been promised since Macworld 2008. After two years, it’s finally here.

Rebuilding Quicken for the Mac

Quicken Essentials for Mac is a native Cocoa app. This in itself wouldn’t be that noteworthy, except that previous versions of Quicken for Mac have not been built on Cocoa (or even optimized for Intel Macs), which has meant that there were user interface quirks and behavioral differences that made Quicken feel like less of a real Mac app.

With Quicken Essentials for Mac, the interface and program have been designed to use Mac OS X’s core features and strengths. This is a really good thing, and it shows a commitment to the Mac platform. This is important because it has been nearly four years since a Quicken app was released for the Mac. QuickBooks has had more frequent updates, but for home users who want to manage their finances, this is a long time coming.

A Dose of Mint (.com)

In September, Intuit, the makers of Quicken, acquired the money management web app, Mint.com. The acquisition was controversial amongst some Mint users, out of fear that Intuit would end up changing Mint into something different.

It’s still too early to assess how the acquisition has affected both product groups (Mint.com continues as a separate product), but consumers did get something out of the deal: Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint.com, is now Intuit’s vice president and general manager of the company’s Personal Finance Group. That means that Aaron and the Mint team are now working on both Quicken and Mint.com.

I spoke with Aaron at the Future of Web Apps in Miami on Monday night, and he offered me some insight into his new role and the changes on the new Mac product.

Aaron described Quicken Essentials for Mac as “the closest thing to Mint on the desktop as you are going to get.” From a personal money management perspective, that’s really great, because it means that not only is it easier to visualize where money is going, but you can connect to more financial institutions through the program than ever before. More than 12,000 institutions are supported now and a total of more than 18,000 is expected by the end of the year.

Categorization is also much easier in Quicken Essentials for Mac, which is again, a hat-tip to Mint.com

A Few Notes For Users

Quicken Essentials for Mac is designed for home users and while it supports basic investment tracking, it isn’t as robust as the Quicken for Windows offerings or the old Quicken Mac 2007. Better support for investments is planned for future versions of Quicken Essentials for Mac, but for right now, this isn’t really designed for users with heavy portfolios.

Because only 6% of Quicken users used the built-in Bill Pay option in Quicken, this was removed from Quicken Essentials for Mac. You can still track your bills and make sure you have the money to pay them, but you can’t pay directly from the app unless you sign-up for Intuit’s Bill Pay service.

If you’re a TurboTax user, Quicken Essentials for Mac doesn’t integrate or export to TurboTax, although again, that type of support might be added to the future. If you rely on getting your Quicken info into TurboTax, you’ll need to use Quicken Mac 2007.

A Nice Start

This is a great rebirth of sorts for Quicken for Mac. After being virtually abandoned for such a long time, it’s nice that the most popular money management tool is finally back on the Mac and in style. Quicken Essentials for Mac is $69.99 and requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Mac users — what do you think about Intuit’s new commitment to Mac? What are your favorite Mac-based financial management apps? Let us know!

Tags: Financial, mac, mac apps, mint, mint.com, Quicken, quicken essentials for mac, software

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Bugs/Recalls, Snow Leopard

Ahhh, Labor Day – the weird U.S. holiday that celebrates work by encouraging people to take the day off. Since it also coincides with the beginning of September, many Americans associate Labor Day with the end of summer, which isn’t until 3:18 PM on September 22nd. Since the colder temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere will soon mean no more picnics, it’s a great day to get out and have one more al fresco meal.

Like a picnic, where a good time can be spoiled by a group of aggressive little ants, my first ten days of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard have been a lot of fun, interspersed with some tiny, nagging annoyances:

• Preview, an app I use constantly to resize screenshots for TUAW, crashes way too frequently
• Without having changed any preferences, the OWC Mercury Elite Pro 1 TB drive I have attached to my iMac now spins down between Time Machine backups (this actually saves power, so I’m not complaining — I just find it strange that it didn’t happen before!)
• An unexplained kernel panic the other morning when I woke up my MacBook Air by opening the “lid”
• Having to reset the synchronization between my two Macs, MobileMe, and my iPhone after duplicate calendar entries began to multiply
• Occasionally having to physically remove and plug back in the USB receiver for the Logitech wireless mouse on my iMac when the mouse refuses to work upon waking up from sleep
• Exports from iMovie ‘09 to YouTube aren’t working properly for me

There are no real show-stoppers here, just those little oddities that have kept life with Snow Leopard from being pure bliss. What are the ants that are showing up at your Snow Leopard picnic? Leave a comment below.

TUAWThe few ants at my Snow Leopard picnic originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted 2009-09-07 18:25:16. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Filed under: Switchers, Tips and tricks

Every now and then I’ll have an “I never knew about that” moment as I come across a setting or nuance in Mac OS X that I never realized existed. Take, for instance, character viewer, which allows you to display a variety of characters in your document. Whether you’re a switcher or seasoned Mac veteran, here are five tips that could help improve your Mac experience.

“I hate that noise my Mac makes when changing the volume”

By default, changing the volume on a Mac will result an audible chirp. If birds could burp, this is the sound they would make. While tolerable with your Mac’s built-in speakers as well as external speakers, the noise can be a bit startling when you have your headphones on. To disable, navigate to the “Sound” portion in System Preferences and uncheck “Play feedback when volume is changed.” Now that’s a sound decision.

“Why are the scroll arrows next to each other?”

Whether it’s a Finder or Safari window, Mac OS X places scroll arrows next to each other by default — in contrast to their top and bottom placement in Windows. If you find that your scroll arrows need some space from each other, head on over to System Preferences and click on “Appearance.” Within the “Place scroll arrows” section, select “At top and bottom.”

“Give me my translucent menu bar!”

When Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard first shipped, many cried foul at its menu bar: it was translucent. And whether you liked it or not, you couldn’t do anything about it. It wasn’t until the 10.5.2 update, a full three months after Leopard was released, that users could disable it. To toggle translucency in the menu bar, head on over to System Preferences and select “Desktop & Screen Saver,” where you’ll find the “Translucent menu bar” option at the bottom.

“I wish I could rearrange items in the menu bar”

After making your menu translucent (or not), you may want to tinker with the menu bar some more. Much like how you can rearrange icons in your dock, you can also arrange the icons in your menu bar. To do this, hold down the command key and then click on an icon to move it around. Similar to moving an icon out of your dock, moving an item out of your menu bar results in a cloud poof.

“I prefer right-clicking with two fingers”
The coming of the unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro brought a more conventional way of right-clicking: the bottom right corner (or left, if you’re left-handed) serves as a right-click. However, my fingers have grown accustomed to right-clicking using two fingers; I find myself constantly doing this on PC-based notebooks, obviously with no luck.

The only way to right-click on non-unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros (and on late model PowerBook G4’s) was to use two fingers. To enable two finger right-clicking on the unibody MacBook Pro, select Secondary Click under the Two Fingers option in Trackpad preferences. On non-unibody models, select “For secondary clicks, place two fingers on the trackpad then click the button.” And if you have an older model PowerBook or an iBook, some have found success with iScroll2.

TUAW5 tips for switchers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Tips and tricks

I have to admit that I don’t always use them, but I do always enjoy reading the hints over at Mac OS X Hints — there probably isn’t a more eclectic or helpful mix of random hints about how to use your Mac or iPhone available on the Internet. So I was saddened to read today that editor Rob Griffiths (who always adds in his confirmations and other testing on the various hints posted) is leaving the editor’s position. He’s moving on to join Peter Maurer at Many Tricks, where he’ll handle the business aspects of the company. He mentions that they’re working on “some good stuff in the pipeline, especially for the upcoming iPad.”

As for Mac OS X Hints, the site is owned by Macworld, so it will continue to run under the oversight of a new editor, who will have the benefit of Griffiths around for training as long as necessary. But it will be a little bit of a disappointment to not see the little “robg” notes on the hints in the future. Good luck to Rob on his next venture, and here’s hoping his successor keeps the site up as an endless fount of interesting tips and tidbits about all of these Apple products we use.

TUAWRob Griffiths leaves Mac OS X Hints originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back in December, we discussed Google’s decision to shift focus away from Gears, its platform that allows web apps to work offline — instead the company would utilize HTML5.

In the Gears API Blog this week, Google has reinforced that decision, making it clear that the company “will not be investing resources in active development of new features.” Instead, the focus will continue to be on bringing all of the Gears capabilities into HTML5 and other web standards.

Gears Was the Past, HTML5 is the Future

When the Gears project launched in 2007, one of its big features was the ability to allow users to use certain web applications (like Gmail) offline. As time has progressed, however, implementing those features of Gears into a standard like HTML5 makes more sense, as it will ultimately work on more platforms and not require the operating system or browser specific workarounds that Gears currently employs.

Until it is feasible for developers to convert their Gears-enabled apps to something standards-based, Google will continue to support Gears, but that support will be constrained in scope.

Likewise, while Gears support will be added for Firefox 3.6 and will continue to work with Internet Explorer, Gears for Mac OS X Snow Leopard in Safari 4.0 is not going to happen. The necessary architectural changes that would be involved in supporting Gears in Safari would take too many resources which could better work with adding to the HTML5 spec.

Good Sign for the Future

Gears was a good first step in lots and lots of ways, but building those features into something standards-based has a lot more potential for Google. By and large, mobile browsers are adapting to support HTML5 and other web-standards faster than their desktop counterparts (in large part because the majority of the next-generation mobile web browsers use WebKit — including Google Chrome, Mobile Safari and the next version of BlackBerry web browser). Because mobile is an area that can benefit from some of Gears’ functionality like local storage and offline capabilities even more than traditional computers, there is great potential in having some of those features available on platforms for the future.

If you are a developer of an application that uses Gears, now would be a good time to start exploring options for migrating or rewriting in HTML5.

Tags: gears api, google gears, HTML5, webkit

Our top Apple news this week was dominated by news out of the 2010 Macworld Expo. It turns out that Apple’s absence didn’t really hold back a great conference and, in fact, might have helped it. In addition to the Expo, Steve Jobs kept railing on Flash, the App Store got a little cleaner, and we polled users on their 3G data usage. Read on for the roundup:

USB power outlet, iPhone Universal Remote impress at Macworld: Fastmac isn’t just a third-party battery company anymore. The accessory maker is about to come out with a USB wall outlet solution that we want to put all over our own houses, plus an improvement on its old iPhone battery extender that lets you control anything via a built-in infrared blaster. We checked out both during this year’s Macworld Expo.

Upcoming Outlook for Mac remains shrouded in mystery: Office 2011 will mark the first appearance of Outlook on Mac OS X. Ars spent some time with Microsoft’s Mac BU in an attempt to learn more about Mac Outlook’s feature parity with the Windows version.

Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we deal with some technical issues on our production Mac before turning to questions about Windows key remapping in Boot Camp, sharing files with a LaCie media extender, downloading images in Safari, recovering from a hard drive failure, and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you’re using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we’ll assume you’re running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don’t specify), or if it’s an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.

As you may have noticed, Ask TUAW is running a bit late this week. Perhaps somewhat ironically in a troubleshooting column, the reason is that my 24″ iMac decided to go wonky right as I was preparing this week’s column. I’ve decided to make a little lemonade, however, and describe a bit of my troubleshooting strategy. For no apparent reason the spinning pinwheel of death began appearing randomly, which would eventually result in the computer freezing completely and requiring a hard restart (holding the power button). After experiencing this a couple of times (and losing an earlier version of this column) I decided to reboot with my Snow Leopard install DVD to run Disk Utility. I repaired the disk and permissions but it didn’t report any problems and the pinwheel continued to appear after a few minutes. At this point I figured the problem was not with the boot drive, but just to make sure I booted into single-user mode and ran the standard script with the AppleJack troubleshooting utility. Again, no problems were reported, but I continued to experience the freezing. At this point my suspicions turned to my third-party RAM. Of course, I had been running it for the last couple of years without problem, but I shut down the computer and removed one of my two 2GB SODIMMs. That appears to have done the trick and my iMac hasn’t frozen in the last few hours. This is the second Mac I’ve had problems develop with third-party RAM after running for more than a year. So now with half as much RAM we can get on with this week’s questions.

Feeney 22 asks

How would I reassign my control/command key in bootcamp, it’s increasingly hard to switch back and forth.

To do this you’ll need to remap your keys in Windows, using a Windows key remapping utility. There are a variety of Windows key remappers available, and this being a Mac site I don’t really have any concrete recommendations. However, I can point you in the direction of KeyTweak a donations-requested utility that should do what you need.

tyronescott55 asks

Will Apple allow iPhone tethering to the iPad?

Predicting what Apple (and, perhaps more to the point, AT&T) will do is a fool’s game. While a feature like this would be great, I’m not even sure if it makes financial sense. Of course we’re still waiting on AT&T to give us iPhone tethering, and once they do the pricing is likely to be in the range of $60/month. With the iPad’s unlimited service at $30/month it would only take about 4 months to make up the 3G radio surcharge versus the Wi-Fi only version.

Just for information sake, I’d note that it’s already possible to set up Wi-Fi tethering on a jailbroken iPhone with a utility like MyWi or PdaNet. These apps basically turns your jailbroken iPhone into the equivalent of a MiFi portable Wi-Fi hotspot. Presumably your iPad could connect to it like any other Wi-Fi source. Needless to say, this is all unauthorized and probably violates the AT&T contract.

pathumx asks

I’m running SL on a Unibody MacBook and am backing it up to a 1 tb FireWire drive that is partitioned for a time machine back up and a carbon copy clone backup. In the event my MacBook harddrive were to fail, what would be the best way to restore from backup?

The quickest thing you could do to get back running is to boot the MacBook from the FireWire drive (reboot and hold the option key to select the drive). You could then replace the internal drive on the MacBook and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone back to the internal drive. You could also use Time Machine to recover any changes made since the last time you cloned. While it is possible to recover directly from a Time Machine backup while booted from a Snow Leopard install DVD, the clone restore should be quicker.

Shears asks

Hi. I’d like to create an Automator service that would save me some clicking. Basically I’d like to have an extra option in the Safari Context menu that would save the selected image directly to the My Pictures folder.

It turns out that Safari will automatically change the contextual menu to save images to your defined download folder. So if you changed your default downloads folder in the Safari preferences to the Pictures folder, you wouldn’t have to add anything else.

Melissa asks

I bought a LaCie LaCinema PLAY drive to use as a sort of media server. It has wireless N connectivity and outputs HDMI to my TV. I have an Airport Extreme which is on the other side of the room. I’d like to be able to drag files from my computer (a MacBook 2.2Ghz, using 10.6.2) to the drive, but I can’t see it in the Finder. I have another LaCie drive connected via USB to the Airport Extreme which I can see since I guess it can use AirDisk. The PLAY drive can connect to the network via WiFi. I’m confused because if someone brings another laptop into my house, I can see it in the Finder under ’shared’. How come I can’t see the PLAY drive? Does it need to be formatted? I don’t think I can since it has software for the remote and wifi on it.

I had a look at the manual PDF for the LaCie LaCinema PLAY and it indicates that the only sharing option for Mac is via the TwonkyMedia Server (p. 38). In order for the drive to appear in your Finder sidebar it would have to support the AFP or SAMBA file sharing protocols, but as far as I can tell the LaCinema does not. So, unfortunately, you won’t be able to just copy to it from the Finder, but if you install TwonkyMedia Server, you will be able to copy files from the Mac to the LaCinema through its interface.

TUAWAsk TUAW: Key remapping in Boot Camp, iPad tethering, file-sharing with a media extender, and more originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mac OS X: If you want to be able to select your “default” browser on a link-by-link basis, directing some links to Firefox, others to Chrome, and so on, Choose Wisely allows you to do so.

After installing Choose Wisely you set the Choose Wisely application as your default web browser in your system preferences, instead of one of your already installed browsers. In Choose Wisely you can specify up to five browsers—here we’ve specified Safari, Chromium, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera—and you’ll be presented with that menu each time you open a link that would normally launch a new instance of your default browser. You won’t be presented with the menu while browsing from within a browser however, the selection process occurs only for the initial link.

Choose Wisely is freeware and requires Mac OS X 10.6. Have a handy OS X application to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Filed under: Software, Video, Internet Tools

Skype 2.8, with hot fixes for Mac OS X 10.6, is available for your downloading pleasure. It’s a micro update of the summertime release of Skype 2.8; the version number is now up to 2.8.0.722. The release date is listed as September 17.

Version 2.8, originally released in July, included features like screen sharing & improved audio codecs that had been around in the Mac beta and the PC version of Skype for awhile. Version 2.8 also included Skype Access, which is a pay as you go public Wi-Fi service based on the Boingo network.

This latest update adds a bunch of fixes for Snow Leopard. Skype has very detailed release notes if you are so inclined.

Skype is a very popular solution for free audio and video chatting and instant messaging. The app also provides many paid services to allow you to call cellular and wired phones anywhere in the world at low rates, and to forward calls to your chosen phone when you are offline.

Skype [iTunes link] also runs on the iPhone, but only works on Wi-Fi. (Thanks AT&T and Apple.)

You can download the update to Skype by using the ‘check for updates’ feature built into Skype, or go to the Skype Mac web page and grab it there. It’s a 44 MB download.

Thanks to Ben for the tip and additional information from Skype Journal

TUAWSkype 2.8 for Mac gets update for Snow Leopard originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted 2009-10-01 18:25:37. Republished by Old Post Promoter