Intuit

Review: Quicken 2007 for Mac OS X Lion

/ Adam Nash / 6 Comments

This is going to be a short post, but given the attention and page views that my posts on Quicken 2007 received, I thought this update worthwhile.

Previous Posts

Quicken 2007 for Mac OS X Lion Arrives

Last week, Intuit announced the availability of an anachronism: Quicken 2007 for Mac OS X Lion.  It sounds odd at first, given that we should really be talking about Quicken 2013 right about now, but it’s not a misprint.  This is Quicken 2007, magically enabled to actually load and run on Mac OS X Lion.  It’s like Intuit cloned a Wooly Mammoth, and put it in the New York Zoo.

The good news is that the software works as advertised.  I have a huge file, with data going back to 1994.  However, not only did it operate on the file seamlessly, the speed improvement over running it on a Mac Mini running Mac OS X Snow Leopard is significant.  Granted, my 8-core iMac likely explains that difference (and more), but the end result is the same.  Quicken.  Fast.  Functional.  Finally.

There are small bugs.  For example, some dialogs seems to have lost the ability to resize, or columns cannot be modified.  But very small issues.

Where is it, anyway?

If you go to the Intuit website, you’ll have a very hard time finding this product:

  • It’s not listed on the homepage
  • It’s not listed on the products page
  • It’s not listed on the page for Quicken for Mac
  • It’s not listed in the customer support documents (to my knowledge)
  • It doesn’t come up in site search

However, if you want to pay $14.95 for this little piece of magic (and given the comments on my previous posts, quite a few people will), then you can find it here:

Goodbye, Mac Mini

I have it on good authority that Intuit is working on adding the relevant & required investment functionality to Quicken Essentials for Mac to make it a true personal finance solution.  There is a lot of energy on the Intuit consumer team these days thanks to the infusion of the Mint.com team, and I’m optimistic that we’ll see a true fully features personal finance client based on the Cocoa-native Quicken Essentials eventually.

Final Solution: Quicken 2007 & Mac OS X Lion

/ Adam Nash / 6 Comments

In July I wrote a blog post about a proposed solution for running Quicken 2007 with Mac OS X Lion (10.7).

Unfortunately, that solution didn’t actually work for me.  A few weeks ago, I made the leap to Lion, and experimented with a number of different solutions on how to successfully run Quicken 2007.  I finally come up with one that works incredibly well for me, so I thought I’d share it here for the small number of people out there who can’t imagine life without Quicken for Mac.  (BTW If you read the comments on that first blog post, you’ll see I’m not alone.)

Failure: Snow Leopard on VMware Fusion 4.0

There are quite a few blog posts and discussion boards on the web that explain how to hack VMware Fusion to run Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.  Unfortunately, I found that none of them were stable over time.

While you can hack some of the configuration files within the virtual image package to “trick” the machine into loading Mac OS X 10.6, it ends up resetting almost every time you quit the virtual machine.  I was hoping that VMware Fusion 4.0 would remove this limitation, since Apple now allows virtualization of Mac OS X 10.7, but apparently they are still enforcing the ban on virtualizing Snow Leopard.  (Personally, I believe VMware should have made this check easy to disable, so that expert users could “take the licensing risk” while not offending Apple.  But I digress.)

You can virtualize Snow Leopard Server, but if you try to buy a used copy on eBay, it’s still almost $200.00.  Added to the $75.00 for VMware Fusion, and all of a sudden you have a very expensive solution.  Worse, VM performance is surprisingly bad for a Mac running on top of a Mac.  In the end, I gave up on this path.

Enter the Headless Mac Mini

For the longest time, you couldn’t actually run a Mac as a headless server.  By headless, I mean without a display.  It used to be that if you tried to boot a Mac without a display plugged in, it would stop in the middle of the boot process.

I’m happy to report that you can, in fact, now run a Mac Mini headless.

Here is what I did:

  • I commandeered a 2007-era Mac Mini from my grandmother. (It’s not a bad as it sounds – I upgraded her to a new iMac in the process.)
  • I did a clean install of Mac OS Snow Leopard 10.6, and then applied all updates to get to a clean 10.6.8
  • I installed Quicken 2007, and applied the R2 & R3 updates
  • I configured the machine to support file sharing and screen sharing, turned off the 802.11 network, turned off bluetooth, and to wake from sleep from Ethernet.  I also configured it to auto-reboot if there is a power outage or crash.
  • I then plugged it in to just power & gigabit ethernet, hiding it cleverly under my Apple Airport Extreme Base Station.  It’s exactly the same size, so it now just looks like I have a fatter base station.

I call the machine “Quicken Mac”, and it lives on my network.  Anytime I want to run Quicken 2007, I just use screen sharing from Lion to connect to “Quicken-Mac.local”, and I’m up and running.   Once connected on screen sharing, I configured the display preferences of the mac to 1650×1080, giving me a large window to run Quicken.

I keep my actual Quicken file on my Mac OS X Lion machine, so it’s backed up with Time Machine, etc.  Quicken Mac just mounts my document folder directly so it can access the file.

Quicken: End Game

This solution may seem like quite a bit of effort, but the truth is after the initial setup, everything has worked without a hitch.  I’m hoping that once Intuit upgrades Quicken Essentials for the Mac to handle investments properly, I’ll be able to sell the Mac Mini on eBay, making it effectively a low cost solution.

For the time being, this solution works.  Mac OS X 10.7 Lion & Quicken 2007.  It can be done.

 

Proposed Solution: Quicken 2007 & Mac OS X Lion

/ Adam Nash / 53 Comments

Right away, you should know something about me.  I am a die-hard Quicken user.  I’ve been using Quicken on the Mac since 1994, which happens to be the point in time where I decided that controlling my personal finances was fundamentally important.  In fact, one of my most popular blog posts is about how to hack in and fix a rather arcane (but common) issue with Quicken 2007.

So it pains me to write this blog post, because the situation with Quicken for the Mac has become extremely dire.  Intuit has really backed themselves into a corner, and not surprisingly, Apple has no interest in bailing them out.  However, since I love the Mac, and I love Quicken, I’m desperately looking for a way out of this problem.

Problem: Mac OS X Lion (10.7) is imminent

Yesterday, I got this email from Intuit:

It links to this blog post on the Intuit site.  The options are not pretty:

  1. You can switch to Quicken Essentials for Mac.  It’s a great new application written from the ground up.  In their words, “this option is ideal if you do not track investment transactions and history, use online bill pay or rely on specific reports that might not be present in Quicken Essentials for Mac.” Um, sorry, who in their right mind doesn’t want to track “investment transactions”?  Turns out, at tax time, knowing the details of what you bought, at what price, and when are kind of important.  At least, the IRS thinks so.  And they can put you in jail and take everything you own.  So I’m going with them on this one.  No dice.
  2. You can switch to Mint.  I love Mint, and I’ve been using it for years.  But once again, “This option is ideal if maintaining your transaction history is not important to you.”  Yeesh.  For me, Mint is something I use in addition to Quicken.  Unfortunately, Mint is basically blind to anything it can’t integrate with online.  Which includes my 401k, for example.
  3. You can switch to Quicken for Windows.  Seriously? 1999 called and they want their advice back.  Switch to Windows?  Intuit would get a better response here if they just sent Mac users a picture of a huge middle finger.  By the way, to add insult to injury:  “You can easily convert your Quicken Mac data with the exception of Investment transaction history. You will need to either re-download your investment transactions or manually enter them.”

This is an epic disaster.  I’m not sure how many people are actually affected.  But the Trojan War involved tens of thousands of troops, so I’m going with Homer’s definition of “Epic”.

What’s the Problem?

There are really three issues at play here:

  1. Strike 1. Around 2000, Intuit made the mistake of abandoning the Mac.  Hey, they thought it was the prudent thing to do then.  After all, Apple was dying.  (The bar talk between Adobe & Intuit on this mistake must be really fun a few drinks into the evening.)  Whoops.  This led Intuit to massively under-invest in their Mac codebase, yielding a monstrosity that apparently no one in their right mind wants to touch.  From everything I hear, Quicken 2007 for the Mac might as well be written in Fortran and require punch cards to compile.  Untouchable.  Untouchable, unfortunately, means unfixable.
  2. Strike 2. Sometime in the past few years, someone decided that Quicken Essentials for the Mac didn’t need to track investment transactions properly.  I’ve spent more than a decade in software product management, so I have compassion for how hard that decision must have been.  But in the end, it was a very expensive decision, and even if it was necessary, it should have mandated a fast follow with that capability.  It’s a bizarre miss given that tracking investment transactions is a basic tax requirement.  (See note on the IRS above)
  3. Strike 3.  Apple announces the move from PowerPC chips to Intel chips in June 2005.  Yes, that’s *six* years ago.  Fast forward to June 2011, and Apple announces that their latest operating system, Mac OS X Lion, will not support the backwards compatibility software to allow PowerPC applications to run on Intel Macs.

Uh oh.

This is Intuit’s Fault.

With all due respect to my good friends at Intuit, this problem is really Intuit’s fault.  Intuit had six years to make this migration, and to be honest, Apple is rarely the type of company to support long transitions like this.  You are talking about the company that killed floppy drives almost immediately in favor of USB in 2000, with no warning.  They dropped support for Mac OS Classic in just a few years.  It’s not like Apple was going back to PowerPC.

If you examine the three strikes, you see that Intuit made a couple of tactical & strategic mistakes here.  But in the end, they called several plays wrong, and now they are vulnerable.

Intuit would argue that Apple could still ship Rosetta on Mac OS X Lion.  Or maybe they could license Rosetta to Intuit to bundle with Quicken 2007.

Apple’s not going to do it.  They want to simplify the operating system (brutally).  They want to push software developers to new code, new user experience, and best-in-class applications.  They do not want to create zombie applications that necessitate bug-for-bug fixes over the long term.  Microsoft did too much of this with Windows over the past two decades, and it definitely held them back at an operating system level.

A Proposed Solution: VMware to the rescue

I believe there is a possible solution.  Apple has announced that Mac OS X Lion will include a change to the terms of service to allow for virtualization.  If this is true, this reflects a fundamental shift in Apple’s attitude toward this technology.

The answer:

  • Custom “headless” install of Mac OS X 10.6.8, stripped to just support the launch of Quicken 2007.
  • Quicken 2007 R4 installed / configured to run at launch
  • Distribution as VMware image

OK, this solution isn’t perfect, but it is plausible.  Many system utilities are distributed with stripped, headless versions of Mac OS X.  In fact, Apple’s install disks for Mac OS X have been built this way.  A VMware image allows Intuit to configure & test a standard release package, and ensure it works.  They can distribute new images as necessary.

The cost of VMware Fusion for the Mac is non trivial, but actually roughly the same price as a new version of Quicken.  I’m guessing that Intuit & VMware might be able to work out a deal here, especially since Intuit would be promoting VMware to a large number of Mac users, and even subsidizing it’s adoption.

Will Apple Allow It?

This is always the $64,000 question, but theoretically, this feels like really not much of a give on Apple’s part.  They are changing the virtualization terms for Mac OS X Lion, so why not change them for Snow Leopard to0.

Can We Fix It? 

I’m a daily VMware Fusion user, which is how I use both Windows & Mac operating systems on my MacBook Pro.  If Intuit can’t work this out, I just might try to hack this solution myself.

In the end, I’m a loyal Intuit customer.  I buy TurboTax every year, and I use Quicken every week.  So I’m hoping we can all find a path here.

Feel free to comment if you have ideas.

 

 

Quicken 2007: How to Repair A Broken File

/ Adam Nash / 43 Comments

Only a long time Quicken user will empathize with the trauma of having your Quicken data file fail to open.  It happened to me this weekend, and after a couple days of experiments, I finally solved the problem.  I’m posting this here on the blog because my Google searches on the topic turned up *nothing*, and the Intuit boards were useless on this topic.

First, background:

  • I’m using Quicken 2007 for the Mac, updated with the R2 updater and the R3 Certificate updater.  This is the most recent version.
  • I’ve used Quicken since 1994 to keep track of my expenses and investments.  That’s right, this file has 15 years of meticulous data in it.
  • Quicken for the Mac users at some level are masochists.  Circa-2000, Intuit decided that the Mac market wasn’t worth supporting, and effectively ended support for the product.  As Steve Jobs brought the Mac back, Intuit brought back support… but very little enhancement to the product.  Quicken 2007 is largely the same as the Quicken 1999 product, except far more rickety and long in the tooth.

OK, so here’s the story:

  1. About 3-5 weeks ago, when downloading stock quotes, I got a very strange error.  It said something like “Unable to create INTC. Security already exists.”  (Of course it exists, I’ve been tracking INTC for more than 10 years…)
  2. About 2 weeks ago, I quit and relaunched Quicken for some reason (my machine tends to stay up for weeks at a time.)  On relaunch, all of my “manually entered” stock quotes were gone.  After a brief panic, I restored a file from Time Machine from a week prior, and all was forgotten.
  3. Periodically, I received that error when downloading stock quotes.
  4. On Friday, I restarted Quicken and got a spinning beach ball.  I thought it hung, so I force quit it, and restarted.  Spinning beach ball.
  5. No worries, right?  I have multiple backups.  I use Time Machine to get an older file.  I launch. Spinning beach ball.
  6. Uh oh. Mild panic.  I tweet.  No one tweets back.
  7. I go to the “Quicken Backup Folder”, which is created automatically in your Documents folder.  I select several of the backups, duplicate them, and try to launch them.
  8. Good news, the file from November 12 actually works, but all security prices are missing.
  9. Bad news, it’s missing two weeks of data!  A lot of manual re-entry of the last two weeks.  Not too bad though.
  10. On Saturday, I quit Quicken and relaunch as part of a reboot.  Spinning beach ball.
  11. Uh oh. Time Machine backups don’t work.  I tried five of them from the last three weeks.
  12. Double Uh Oh. The only file that seems to work is that one from November 12.  But it gives me an error “Unable to save security”.  It works, but is missing all security prices. But it’s missing the two weeks of transactions.
  13. A bit of panic here. I search Intuit boards.  No luck.  I post a question anyway, even though the community on the boards gives me no confidence of ability to help or desire to do so.
  14. I delete Quicken 2007 and all preference files, and try to reinstall + updaters.  No luck.
  15. Tweets return nothing, except strange semi-taunts like, “I hate Quicken too.”
  16. Finally, I realize I may have to create a new file, then export/import all the transactions to create a new clean file.  Creating the file works.  Trying to export QIF and reimport into the new file leaves totally bizarre numbers and transactions.  Seriously, has QIF export ever worked in the past two decades?  Will it ever work?
  17. Desperation.  I start seriously contemplating doing all my finances in Mint… except Mint doesn’t actually support managing accounts without online access that well.  I like Mint, but I use it differently than Quicken…
  18. Hail Mary. The Quicken file isn’t really a file, it’s a Mac OS Package.  It’s a fancy name for a directory of files that is tagged to act like a single file for the Finder.  Looking inside, I find a data file for “Quotes” and a directory for “Quotes Details”.  I delete both.
  19. Salvation.  I launch Quicken.  No beach ball.  Works beautifully.   All stock quotes are gone, but a quick click to download quotes fixes that.  I manually re-enter the few securities that don’t have ticker symbols.  Everything is wonderful again.

So, just to capture some trouble-shooting for you, here is what I saw:

  • Launching Quicken with the corrupted file led to a spinning beach ball for over 30 minutes
  • When it did finally load, it gave me an error “Unable to open file”
  • There was a history of getting errors related to the downloaded stock quotes for securities

Solution was:

  • Make a duplicate of your Quicken file (always, always have a clean backup)
  • Right-click (or control-click) on the Quicken file.
  • Select “Show Package Contents…” from the Finder.
  • Double-Click on the “Contents Folder”
  • Select the “Quotes” file and the “Quotes Details” folder
  • Drag them to the trash, and empty trash
  • Relaunch Quicken with the file

Thus, I am still a Quicken user, at least for a little while longer.  Intuit, if you are reading, please get Quicken 2010 (which has been promised for two years) out the door.  And make sure the import from Quicken 2007 files is *flawless*.