#QUICKEN ESSENTIALS FOR MAC BETA UPGRADE#
#QUICKEN ESSENTIALS FOR MAC BETA SOFTWARE#
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#QUICKEN ESSENTIALS FOR MAC BETA WINDOWS#

I got my first inkling of this via a conversation with Aaron Patzer, VP and general manager for IntuitвЂ™s Personal Finance Group. Quicken Essentials: A New Hope? Despite this gloom and doom, there is reason for hope that Quicken Essentials may yet herald a successful new direction for Intuit. Given this history, I had virtually no hope for Quicken Essentials. On first hearing this, my reaction was: вЂњWhat? After all the years of having to put up with the hassles of Quicken, and after the failure of Financial Life to ever appear, the best Intuit can do is release a product that isnвЂ™t even as capable as the program itвЂ™s replacing?вЂќ By this point, I was ready to storm AppleвЂ™s annual stockholders meeting and demand that IntuitвЂ™s Bill Campbell be removed from AppleвЂ™s Board of Directors. If you want these features, Intuit recommends that you stay with Quicken Mac 2007. Quicken Essentials:В (1) вЂњwill not track investment buys and sells, nor will it provide some advanced investment performance reportsвЂќ (2) will not export data to TurboTax and (3) will not allow you to pay bills online. Intuit noted three such features in the вЂњUsing a prior version of Quicken Mac?вЂќ section of the Quicken Essentials Web page. So why the rename? Because Quicken Essentials would not include certain вЂњnon-essentialвЂќ features offered in Quicken 2007 and Financial Life. Essentials appeared to be based on the Financial Life code.

#QUICKEN ESSENTIALS FOR MAC BETA UPGRADE#

At the very end of 2009, Intuit announced the forthcoming release of a new and different upgrade to Quicken for the Mac: Quicken Essentials. Strike 3: Quicken EssentialsвЂ™ missing features. The program would never see the light of day. Still, after over two years of development and considerable hype, Financial Life died.

#QUICKEN ESSENTIALS FOR MAC BETA FREE#

Intuit offered a free beta version of Financial Life at one point. New release dates were announced, followed by announcements of further delays.

It would be a Cocoa-based Intel-native application with an entirely new iTunes-inspired Mac-specific user interface.ДЄs I wrote previously, Intuit initially promised a September 2008 release date for Financial Life. As suggested by the new name, Financial Life would be a completely new program, rewritten from the ground up. To remedy this situation, they planned to replace Quicken with Financial Life.

In January of 2008, Intuit admitted that Quicken for the Mac was not up to the standards that Mac users expected. Given this history, I was not about to get my hopes up for Quicken Essentials. The only reasons I continue to use Quicken 2006 are because I have never found a better alternative (mainly due to a lack of competition) and at some point inertia took over.

#QUICKEN ESSENTIALS FOR MAC BETA WINDOWS#

The program was never updated to run natively on Intel Macs and has always lagged behind its Windows sibling in terms of features. Generating reports is clumsy, as I often have to redo the settings for a report several times before it finally displays what I want. Connecting online to my bank has never worked as promised. Auto-fill too often persists in filling in out-of-date or unwanted data. The Search function is annoying, showing only one match at a time, forcing you to jump from one unwanted item to the next until you hopefully stumble over the one you want. Basic Mac conventions, such as Command-A for Select All, do not work. It has a clunky interface (a remnant of the fact that it is a port of the Windows version of Quicken). To the contrary, I grumble and complain about some aspect of the program almost every time I launch it. While Quicken 2006 has worked fairly reliably at carrying out its essential tasks of tracking transactions and printing checks, I would never describe it as a joy to use. For the record, I am still using Quicken Mac 2006 (as the 2007 version did not add any new features that mattered). Prior to the release of Quicken Essentials, Quicken for the Mac had not seen a major upgrade since Quicken Mac 2007, released well over three years ago. I figured I could allow the program at least one more strike before sending it back to the dugout.

#QUICKEN ESSENTIALS FOR MAC BETA SOFTWARE#

Fortunately for Intuit, the rules of the software game are more forgiving.

In baseball, three strikes and youвЂ™re out. Why? Because, given the programвЂ™s dismal history, Quicken Essentials already had three strikes against it before I even installed the software. My initial approach to IntuitвЂ™s newly released Quicken Essentials was similar to how the bomb squad in The Hurt Locker approaches an improvised explosive device: with extreme caution.

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