Lookin’ for the Next Quicken

Quicken for MacintoshFor more than a decade, I’ve been using Intuit’s Quicken for Macintosh to manage my personal finances. Once upon a time, it was an elegant piece of software engineering — for anyone who’d ever balanced a checkbook, Quicken’s user interface, at least in the early days, was eminently intuitive. It worked exactly the way you’d expect it to.

Nowadays, it’s arguable whether the application has successfully retained that ease of use, or whether it’s driven off the cliff of bloat and accretion. But I know a few things for sure: for me, the Quicken franchise feels neglected, even while, as a user, I feel continually taken advantage of.

To begin with, I don’t think anyone would argue the fact that the Macintosh version consistently lags behind the Windows version in development and sophistication, and it only barely feels like a truly well-behaved software citizen on my Mac. In spite of this poor state of affairs, I feel regularly bamboozled by what I call ‘the Quicken tax,’ a combination of additional online fees that my bank charges me for accessing my account via Quicken, and the regular, forced software upgrades that Intuit demands I purchase from them every few years when they cut off support for older versions.

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Lookin’ for the Next Quicken

Quicken for MacintoshFor more than a decade, I’ve been using Intuit’s Quicken for Macintosh to manage my personal finances. Once upon a time, it was an elegant piece of software engineering — for anyone who’d ever balanced a checkbook, Quicken’s user interface, at least in the early days, was eminently intuitive. It worked exactly the way you’d expect it to.

Nowadays, it’s arguable whether the application has successfully retained that ease of use, or whether it’s driven off the cliff of bloat and accretion. But I know a few things for sure: for me, the Quicken franchise feels neglected, even while, as a user, I feel continually taken advantage of.

To begin with, I don’t think anyone would argue the fact that the Macintosh version consistently lags behind the Windows version in development and sophistication, and it only barely feels like a truly well-behaved software citizen on my Mac. In spite of this poor state of affairs, I feel regularly bamboozled by what I call ‘the Quicken tax,’ a combination of additional online fees that my bank charges me for accessing my account via Quicken, and the regular, forced software upgrades that Intuit demands I purchase from them every few years when they cut off support for older versions.

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Illustrate Me for November

Illustrate Me for NovemberWell, I guess the Cold-Eeze I mentioned last week didn’t really do the trick after all. That “twenty-four hour bug” has turned out to be a week-long cold, and even pretending I wasn’t sick for four or five days didn’t do much good; it finally caught up to me, and I’m sitting in bed today, just trying to give my body a day to recuperate.

That’s not going to stop me, though, from posting a brand new Illustrate Me for November’s archives. This month’s illustration is the handiwork of the extremely talented Rob Giampietro, one-half of the design studio Giampietro + Smith, located in downtown New York City.

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