Monday, April 9, 2007

Do the Moneydance In the entry for March 27, I made a passing mention of Moneydance, the personal finance software package which I currently use. So now I'll say a little more about it. Moneydance may be considered a competitor to Quicken and Microsoft Money, though it comes from a much smaller company. Moneydance costs about $30, or about the same as the "basic" version of Quicken. (You can try Moneydance out for free, though; it's available for download at http://www.moneydance.com.) Unlike Quicken and Microsoft Money, Moneydance is written in Java. One implication of this is that it has the same functionality on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Quicken, by contrast, is a much less capable package on a Mac than it is on Windows, and isn't available at all on Linux. Moneydance isn't "open source", but it does have an open API (Application Program Interface), which allows any Java programmer to write extensions to Moneydance. It may seem as if this is not important to you if you are not a programmer, but I think it is important to anyone, as an indication that the makers of Moneydance have a much more open attitude than do Intuit, the makers of Quicken. Besides, there are already some extensions available: ten of them, as of today, and they're free. (The online list of available extensions lists only three of them; the only way I know of to get a complete list is from within Moneydance itself. One negative note: when you do that, you get only the names, no descriptions, which makes it hard to tell which one, if any, has the functionality you are looking for.) This extensibility is one of many reasons why I greatly prefer Moneydance to Quicken. Caveat: this is not a formal review, because I've never done a head-to-head comparison of the same version of the two packages -- that is, of versions released at about the same time -- but I would be very suprised if doing such a head-to-head comparison were to change my preference. As for Microsoft Money, it's not available on any platform except Windows. Other than that, I know little about it: I've never used it. Disclosure: a project I have done some work on, and hope to get back to, is to create another Moneydance extension. I don't expect to make any money from doing this (at least, not directly ... ); you decide whether this involvement with the product nevertheless makes me "biased" in evaluating the merits of Moneydance versus its competitors. I don't speak Marketing: it's not my style to drown you in superlatives. In my judgment, though, Moneydance is the best personal finance program now available. I'd say that's true for most users, and most especially for Macintosh users. Categorie(s) for this post: Personal Finance Software. 10:58:25 AM    comment []

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Using TaxACT Online -- one gotcha Let me tell you about the biggest annoyance I found while using the Web-based service, "TaxACT Online", to prepare my 2006 income tax returns. There are two reasons for telling you this: Since I consider this the worst problem I encountered, my recounting it will allow you to judge for yourself what my calling their service "relatively painless" really means. If you choose to use them, and you run across the same problem yourself, knowing about it in advance will help you to work around it. The problem was that it was harder than it should have been to paste information into their software from other applications; for example, from Moneydance, the personal finance package that I use. I do almost all my computing on a Macintosh these days, and that includes preparing my taxes. I regret that I don't know whether Windows users would have the same problem or not. Also, I use Firefox (currently, version 1.5.0.11). TaxACT does list "Firefox 1.0 and higher" among the browsers they support on the Mac -- you can find the full list on their "system requirements" page, [currently] at https://www.taxactonline.com/s_online_tax2006/introduction/requirements.asp -- but still, I can't say for sure whether you're likely to have the problem, unless you're using the same browser. At any rate: on other sites, I can paste into a text entry field, in Firefox, the same way I would in most other Mac applications: by pressing Command-V. That even works in other parts of TaxACT Online's site. It just doesn't work during what they call the "Q & A": the part of the site where you're actually entering information that will go into your tax return. After a while, it occurred to me to try another way of pasting information into TaxACT's "Q & A". Namely, I right-clicked within the text field where I wanted to paste the information. (If I'd been using a traditional, one-button Macintosh mouse, I'd have needed to Control-click, instead.) And what do you know, that worked: it gave me a pop-up menu that included "Paste", and selecting that menu item gave me what I wanted: it pasted whatever was in my Mac's Clipboard into the data entry field. I only wish I'd thought of trying that sooner. I wasted a good chunk of time: both in actually retyping information, and in double- and triple-checking to make sure I'd done so correctly. (I trust the accuracy of Paste a good deal more than I trust my own typing.) So now, if you decide to use TaxACT Online (I do recommend them), and you encounter this particular data entry problem, you'll know how to work around it, and you won't waste as much time as I did. Categorie(s) for this post: Personal Finance Software. 2:20:18 PM    comment []

Saturday, September 2, 2006

I'm a Mac person My last post cited Scheme, Perl, and Java as my "favorite" programming languages.  I anticipate that I may, in time, add Objective-C to that list.  Some readers will know that such an expectation suggests a Macintosh connection.  (And/or GnuStep.) It's true.  I'm a Mac user (almost exclusively, lately), and a moderate enthusiast, though I'm not in love with Apple as a company.  I'm primarily interested in software to be used by individuals, or very small organizations, and the Mac seems to me to be the platform of choice for that sort of application. Your mileage may vary, but that's how I see it. Categorie(s) for this post include: Macintosh. 4:30:33 PM    comment []

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