Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

As promised, my pick for "turkey of the year" of Mac OS X software. No, I'm not going to pick on a little application that somebody wrote one evening in Basic that PerversionTracker might lampoon. And going after a Microsoft product, well, that's just too easy.

Quicken 2004

No, this year's Turkey award goes to Quicken, the 2004 edition of the program that never seems to get any better with each new version they issue. Every year they come up with some useless new bells and whistles that you will never use, while never actually making the program more robust and fixing the bugs. (The one positive: At least the UI is pretty and aqua-like. But that's useless if it's impossible to use!)

Here's our story: My wife has been trying to retire her ancient PC for years, and I finally convinced her to transition to the new Quicken now that it's firmly established on OS X. She spent hours and hours trying to get the data exported from an older PC Quicken to the Mac. I think she would have preferred a root canal or two. It required tons of manual data clean-up (e.g. making account names shorter) on the PC end before it could be exported. And then — get this — when we finally got it imported to the Mac, The numbers didn't add up the same! After much investigation with both of us pouring over the numbers, it turns out that certain transactions just didn't copy over. Other features, we discovered after talking on the phone with support people who insisted that we shouldn't be getting the error message we were getting, are PC-only, even though the first-level tech support people didn't realize it, and actually didn't even have a Mac around to verify. (Apologies to all my past English teachers for that last sentence.) And then there's the overall user experience, where you can't select multiple transactions and process them, or where certain columns show up or don't show up almost haphazardly.

If this were a stamp-collecting database, no big deal about the bugs. But this is people's money it's keeping track of, and we as customers deserve a lot more than this.

This program is getting 2.3 stars on its page at VersionTracker -- and I think that's generous.

And to think that I was actually offered a job to work at Intuit on the Quicken team, many years ago....

This is part three of a series... probably the last part unless I can think of some other favorite applications from small, perhaps under-publicized developers. (There are lots of other great programs out there, but these are ones that I personally tend to use fairly frequently

VueScan

I have a Canon scanner, which is great except for the fact that the drivers don't work on Panther. Canon's tech support is MIA. But VueScan is an application that does that job. The user interface is a little bit clunky, but is actually works! $60/$80

OmniOutliner

I used to use ACTA back in the early days of the Mac, and I used to yearn for a Mac OS X program that was as useful. Finally, after several revisions, OmniOutliner is now my outline processor of choice. A great way to organize tasks. $30

UnicodeChecker

A great utility to browse and search the thousands of Unicode characters installed on your Mac. I find the search capability extremely useful. Even if you aren't a polyglot, it's still handy for finding all sorts of symbols. Want card symbols? It will find you ♠ ♤ ♣ ♧, etc. Musical symbols? How about ♩ ♯ ♬. Currency? How about ₪ ₭ ₰ ₱. free

Peripheral Vision

A very useful utility to indicate visually when you have added or removed hardware to your system, mounted or unmounted volumes, gained or lost network connections, and so on. A subtle transparent display (not unlike when you adjust your brightness or volume from the keyboard) appears for a moment on your screen. Very handy. $7

Coming next: Turkey of the Year Award!