MacOS X a dog or just in need of a good bitch slap?

I make a point to vote nay on Campbell on every Apple shareholder's ballot.

JW, what did you hate about Moneydance? I'd love to see a "best practices"/"pro tips" guide for that app (and I don't bank online, or have investments, so my needs are more UI/UX, ease of data entry, making reports more easily and more readable).

ddt

Quickbooks for Mac is now feature-parity with the Windows version, I believe. At the least, they are now supporting the online stuff where they weren't up until 2008.

It's not that I hated Moneydance, it's just the conversion from Quicken wasn't smooth. Moneydance DOES do the online banking the way that I want it, but the institutions supported are different and the whole process of transfering my PIN's and passwords (long forgotten but saved in Quicken... inaccessibly) ended up keeping my process broken for six weeks or more. Converting back to Quicken was similarly painful.

I'm thinking that, if I have to go through this again, I will get one of the dumb (no online component) money tracking programs and pay all of my bills through my bank's online check payment system. I'll have to go to different sites to access different accounts, but I honestly hate jumping through all of these hoops every five years or so.

Moneydance is cool, for a Java app. The interface is competent, if not snazzy, and the only time I ever caught a math error was in one particular kind of transaction right after the switch to Intel (little-endian bytes) from PowerPC (big-endian bytes). It was fixed quickly. The developer, in general, was responsive when I used the app. The bank integration was odd, because he reverse-engineered how Quicken did it and the banks, when they noticed, made him stop. He was going through on a case by case basis with the banks re-negotiating connection rights but, while I was a user, he couldn't advertise the capability. You had to send him an e-mail with the bank you needed, and he'd send you the appropriate settings back. I'm sure that's fixed now. The coolest thing: licenses are lifetime. (Yours or the app's whichever ends first.) No further charges after initial purchase EVER.

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tomierna
Quickbooks for Mac is now feature-parity with the Windows version, I believe. At the least, they are now supporting the online stuff where they weren't up until 2008.

But is it PPC code running in Rosetta or Intel code that will run on Lion?

Hm, my version of MoneyDance tells me it's a double-digit payment if I want to upgrade to the new x.0 version -- but my purchase was a few years ago.

ddt

Damn. He may have changed the rules. Or have to pay banks. Or I'm insane. Or more insane than I had thought. Sorry to mislead you.

Are these not available in the US?

http://www.cognito.co.nz/

http://myob.com.au/

I thought MYOB was a worldwide standard - accountants here use nothing else...

Most of that is far more than I need, and doesn't have the bank integration that I am used to. Moneydance is probably my best bet but, as I mentioned, I will probably give up on apps entirely and do my banking on the web. Bastiges.

Here's an interesting Quicken alternative that I hadn't heard of before.

you first

I think that I'm just going to migrate to the web; I don't want to spend $30 to evaluate another app. But the functionality looks good; it will be my fallback position if dealing with the web becomes too annoying.

If I find $30 lying around (that I'm not forced to eat on the spot) I might throw it their way. Why? They still support PPC.

Didn't quite know where to put this - but I've been looking at the credits for a few programs and I was wondering thus: is it a good rule of thumb that the number of people on the QA team should be double (or more) the number of original programmers?

(This may start a bunfight but...) Discuss!

Ha! The answers to that one should be classic.

No. of devs in a project is directly related to no. of bugs and resulting slippage.

Of course, senior management will always add resources to speed things up.

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porruka
Ha! The answers to that one should be classic.

I know what you're thinking. Where is Clay, these days?

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tliet
Of course, senior management will always add resources to speed things up.

Or get a bigger whip.

Our tester pool is about equivalent to our developer pool. Granted, given the cycles, the testers can work/test many systems.
And you of course need to delineate between functional/regression testing and load/stress/capacity testing testers.

We have few dedicated load testers. Attributable to the fact that they 'string together' many programs to effective do overall system tests; even if they stub/synthesize parts of the system to do this.
On the other hand, we had upwards of 30% of our testing area let go last week. But that includes non-testing management types as well. So, the 'need' can be debated when push comes to shove.

So... uh... Happy 10th Birthday, Mac OS X!