Quicken and iBank
For the past year I’ve been trying to manage my finances with iBank. After hearing nightmares about Quicken for the Mac, it seemed like the only other option. While the software itself is stable and, in true Mac fashion, full of lovely eye-candy, it completely lacks support for online banking via both my credit union and primary credit card. Judging from their user forums, this problem is pretty widespread–it seems their database of supported online banking sites is tragically tiny. Importing data manually got old quickly, so I find myself only using iBank once every few months or so, importing everything at once and looking at the generated graphs to get a general sense of my spending. I’d prefer to be able to do this much more frequently.
Today Intuit sent me an email notifying me of the beta release of Quicken Financial Life for Mac. It’s supposedly a complete rewrite of Quicken based on Mac OS X 10.5, and thus may solve the problems of the previous version, which I guess were from porting the software from OS 9 to OS X. I’m downloading as I type–hopefully it will be functional, stable, and support the banks I actually use.
Update: Nevermind, the Quicken beta can’t use direct connect to interface with any of banks. Le sigh.
