Bad GUI!

So I started to switch from free open source GnuCash, which sorta worked but didn’t have any of the budgeting features I wanted to Quicken 2006, which was included with my new iMac.

It has come to my attention that Quicken uses completely custom GUI widgets, although they are designed to mimic the Aqua look-and-feel. The scroll wheel doesn’t work the way it should in list views, things are drawn in weird places, double-clicking .qfx or .qif files doesn’t call the importer (Quicken tries to open them as Quicken data files), there’s this wacky custom tree view for managing categories that lets you drag categories under subcategories but doesn’t let you drag a subcategory out into a category… I could go on.

It’s almost as if someone took a Windows application and rewrote the GUI code… oh wait, that’s probably exactly what Intuit did! Ugh.

EDIT: I can’t believe I never noticed that the CDDB import of Thornhill spelled “Independence” wrong. Fixed now.


Comments

7 responses to “Bad GUI!”

  1. that is what they did. at the expense of including features from the windows version.

  2. Yeah, it’s always painfully obvious when they do stuff like that. Or take NeoOffice/J, which runs in Aqua, but hasn’t even bothered to rewrite any of the X-Windows interface.

    Didn’t you get Quickbooks NUE? That’s what came with my PowerBook. But it might be a difference in the software set between the pro and consumer model lines, like with the word processors.

  3. This almost certainly doesn’t have the features you want/need, but it is an open source Mac-native application that can import Quicken files:

    http://wbyoung.ambitiouslemon.com/cashbox/

  4. Hey, I just now noticed that my iMac has a bundled copy of Quicken 2005. Despite this not being exactly a glowing endorsement, it seems sure to be an upgrade from my current financial system, which is a giant Excel spreadsheet.

  5. The main reason Quicken is king, and why it costs money, is that they negotiate direct connection agreements with financial institutions so that they can make an SSL connection directly to their database and be an aggregator of account information. It’s a great feature, when it works.

    I switched my credit card so that I would have one that could be used through the same web interface as my checking and savings accounts. That has much more value to me as a customer than any stupid rewards program.

  6. Excel is still an improvement over, say, a scrap of paper in your wallet.

  7. Yeah–you can put a copy of Excel through the wash and it will still work!

    (But not the dryer… then it gets all warped…)

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