November 2, 2005
A tiny bit more on the Mac switch
One of the things I've been looking for since the switch to the Mac was a personal finance program so that I could keep our records up-to-date. Looking around there really didn't seem to be anything that was that good and I kept having to go back to the PC to keep our finances up-to-date. I've been searching (and from Googling round I can see financial packages are a black-hole for Mac users) for a while.
I finally found a fantastic replacement for MS Money on the PC.
It does pretty much everything that Money (and Quicken) do and IMHO, does it quicker, easier, and better. OK, it doesn't look like a pure OS X app and there's a good reason for that - it's not! It is a cross-platform app that runs on Windows and Linux as well. It imported all my financial info (going back over 10 years) and did it flawlessly.
I exported all my accounts from MS Money in "Loose QIF" and this appeared to be the key to a successful transition. It took me less than an hour from exporting the data to be up and running with Moneydance and ready to pay for it ($29.95 + 17.5% VAT in the UK).
So, if you're looking for a GOOD personal finance package for the Mac (or windows for that matter) and don't want to give cash to Intuit for another bloated ad-ridden version of Quicken then give Moneydance a go.
The only thing I'm now looking for is a GOOD replacement for Agent - and before any old-time Mac people say it, MacSOUP is not an option. I'm looking for a proper offline (and by offline I mean it only downloads headers until you tell it that you want to read the body on an article) reader that can handle multipart binaries when required (not often, but sometimes). It would also preferably use the three-pane window design that Agent uses.
Any suggestions?
We use Budget rather than Moneydance, which uses a somewhat different model - take a look at http://www.snowmintcs.com/products/budgetmac/
With regards to Agent, I took a look at most of the newsreaders listed on VersionTracker. Since I don't go onto Usenet all that much I opted for the free MT Newswatcher, which can be found at http://www.smfr.org/mtnw
Posted by: Richard at November 2, 2005 8:11 PMI bought hogwasher which is OK but still insists on having old-mac-like multiple little windows (give it UP already!)
I tend to use unison more than anything else these days but there is no agent on the mac yet :( nothing really comes close
Annoyingly it's not that agent is in any way special! It's just that simple is exactly right for reading news
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