David and Katie talk about the changes in the upcoming operating system and what you need to do to get your Mac ready to ensure a smooth install. You’ll want to listen to this episode before you install OS 10.7 Lion.
Links of note
Apple Lion Site
Feedback Links:
Please support our sponsors:
Makers of DiscLabel allowing you to make beautiful CD, DVD and package designs
The premier Mac OS X launcher.
Save 20% off the price of 1Password using coupon code MacPowerUsers or through the above link.
Makers of fine Mac productivity software
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (31.6MB)
Thanks for yet another excellent and informative Podcast!
I have two issues with the forthcoming Lion OS.
1) I think my good old Mac Book Pro may not be up to it. I have one of the first Intel Mac Book Pros, with an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2,33 GHz. I have 4 GB of 667 MHz Ram and I installed a 250 GB HDD. But in System profiler under “Software” there is a line stating “64-bit Kernel and Extensions: No” which I understand to mean that this MacBook Pro can’t run the 64 bit Kernel.
2) I am the in-house IT person for a small company (in Munich, Germany) with 3 Powermacs, 7 Imacs, 2 macMini Servers and a few MacBooks. So the question is: is there going to be some kind of company deal in the App store or am I supposed to set up accounts for each user’s machines?
Personally I too love the app store for my own MacBook Pro and my Office IMac, but I very much hope there will be a solution for offices and small businesses that run Macs.
There is a website being run by Roaring Apps ( http://roaringapps.com/ ) that claims to evaluate “Application compatibility for Mac OS X Lion”
The developer claims:
“RoaringApps brings you a collaborative wiki community to track, discuss and dissect application compatibility for Mac OS X Lion. Powered by Wikidot.com, RoaringApps utilises advanced wiki technology that allows anyone to contribute to the knowledge-base”
Great points about how to deal with running Quicken/QuickBooks on the Mac. I bought one of the new iMacs and have shifted my entire workflow to the Mac – except for Quicken. Much as I’d love to have a decent Mac version of Quicken, or to move away from Quicken entirely, I have a decade’s worth of financial information in Quicken and can download transactions from all my financial institutions. I bit the bullet and installed Parallels and Windows 7 for the sole purpose of running Quicken.
A comment or footnote to Jeffrey Fisher’s post July 1, 2011. I tried going the Parallels/Quicken gambit for the same reason. More than a decade of financial data tied to Quicken plus its ease of use with Turbo Tax for my tax estimate guessing. I found converting Quicken 2007 data file to a PC Quicken program next to impossible and quite frustrating. To see what’s in store for you if you try this route, go to Quicken’s web site and in Support search Transfer Quicken 2007 to PC Quicken. You will see that over the past six or so years, Intuit has spent nothing to help us Apple users with this process as well. If Jeffery has done the conversion, I’d appreciate knowing how much time it took him to make the conversion.
I’ve also tried all the other Mac Quicken-like programs none are Quicken’s equal. The best I’ve found is iBank. It’s published by a true Mac devotee. The 2007 Quicken Export and iBank Import process is seamless. I can download all bank and credit card transactions just as in Quicken and my stash of Quicken voucher checks print perfectly using iBank’s voucher check default preset.
iBank doesn’t have Quicken’s Report functionality or Bill-Pay but I can live with it. At the end of the day, I agree completely with David Sparks. I am better off with a Mac software publisher rather than a PC developer who treats the Mac world like a spittoon.
Just look what Intuit did to those people who decided to shift to the joke product Quicken Essentials. You can’t easily move from Quicken Essentials to iBank. Why? Because when Intuit developed Quicken Essentials, Intuit created a non-giff proprietary export system thereby essentially locking down a customer’s data in Quicken data bases unless that customer spends a lot of time/money working through a comma delimited export.
I understand Apple and Intuit are negotiating a license for Intuit to use part of Rosetta to dump into a Quicken 2007 upgrade. Even if this deal were done today; my guess is Quicken 2007 won’t be Lion-ready until the end of the year.
My bet is that if Intuit does something like this and I upgrade, they will put my database on lockdown just as they would have done had I upgraded to Quicken Essentials.
One final point. I’ve corresponded with IGG, the iBank software developer. IGG confirms iBank is Lion-ready.
I really enjoy your podcasts! Although as a practicing attorney myself, and managing partner, haven’t figured out how you two have the time to do all of this and practice law. With that said, keep up the good work!
Couple of comments.
In discussing Lion, you raised the Quicken issue. Like everyone else, I’m looking for an alternative. So if Quicken 2007 isn’t going to be Lion ready until the end of the year, I assume that it is a given that Quicken 2006 will never be Lion ready, correct?
Thought I would pass on that Ibank is severely panned on Amazon. Based on your show, I ended up listening to MPU 35, which addressed the issue in more depth, but wish you would have discussed Moneydance more. I’m evaluting it, but barely got a mention on the MPU 35 show. BTW we use Account Edge to run the firm and it is excellent, but would be overkill for an individual.
Finally, in MPU #35, Katie finally converted to Omnifocus because of the Ipad app. It made me think that I too should give it another look. I was an early adopter of Omnifocus, but jumped shipped due to lack of reminders and alarms. Based on some quick Googling, doesn’t seem much has changed. David, since your the Omnifocus Guru, can you save a Mac User since 1982 some time and effort, and enlighten me on the current status of Alarms and Reminders in Omnifocus? Maybe you already covered this in one of your excellent screen casts, but I have only had time to watch the first one. Thanks in advance.
Mark,
What do you mean by “iBank is severely panned on Amazon”?
I was planning on checking iBank out real soon as well so I’m curious what you meant to type.
Severely panned means lots of 1 star, 2 star, or otherwise negative reviews. Ironically, I just meet an experienced user who said it works great except for check printing issues.
I’ve spent three months attempting to find a substitute for Quicken.
Here’s the report as of July 5.
The most full featured Mac equivalent is iBank. iBank excels at bringing in data from banks. It shines when auto-categorizing repeating transactions on import.
My problem with iBank, and the other Mac alternatives I tried including Jumsoft’s new Money 4, Moneydance, Moneywell, and several others of lesser “fame” and capability, is the user interface. The iBank transaction window opens at the very very bottom of the iBank Window.
Made me move my Dock to the left, Katie.
If every transaction were a single line, no biggie. But I often need to do split transactions, and there iBank is, if not awful, close to. I found no way to do splits without taking my hands off the keyboard to “mouse” click the + to add a line. By contrast, think how Quicken splits work. An empty table to just tab through and enter.
Jumsoft’s just released Money 4 does a better job of splits. Its transaction Window is on the right side, and it is possible (though kludgy) to create new split rows and enter into them without taking hands off the keyboard.
Surprisingly, I found the best Mac split transaction interface in Splasm Software’s recently updated Checkbook 2.2. Its splits work very much like Quicken’s, BUT if you want to do reports or print checks, you’ll be exporting to a spreadsheet or via QIF to a more full featured program, such as iBank. There’s a free trial on the Splasm site.
I tried, and rejected, QuickBooks online. It imports nothing and exports only to Excel. Thus I was going to have to create my chart of accounts laboriously by hand, then laboriously type in the month of the year that had gone by. Then Intuit would have owned my data, and me. Plus, it was going to be expensive, month after month. Only upside: multi-user in multi-locaiton.
AccountEdge is a very good local full-featured double entry Mac oriented accounting system. Far beyond an individual’s needs. And even though I’m running a substantial “business” in Quicken, one really more suited to a full-featured accounting system, I rely on the ability to import and merge from different locations. To do that with any of the “real” accounting systems would require running multi-user over a VPN.
In the line of “real” accounting sytems, MoneyWorks has several versions. Its most simple one is CashBook, available on the Mac App Store. You’ll have no trouble Googling up Moneyworks, and the site, much as AccountEdge, offers free trials.
I bought Parallels, Win 7, and Quicken 2010, and thought I was home, if not free, for about $250. Maybe not.
Lamike, above, posted of problems converting from Mac Q 2007 to Win Q. The instructions in Q Mac 2007 for exporting to Windows Qkn worked flawlessly when I did it, and for several complete Quicken setups (different individuals, organizations). The big deal seems to be setting your date format in System Preferences, and the transfer just tumbles into place. On the Mac side, you want to export everything. On the Win side, you want to import into <>. I also found it very helpful, since I was exporting accounts with categories I’d customized, to open a blank Win Qkn file with no categories (if any are there, delete ‘em before importing).
But today my Parallels Virtual Machine installed from Bootcamp reported it couldn’t “verify” to Microsoft and was turning off Security Essentials if I didn’t get verified. Not sure what that is about, yet. Then I tried to import a QIF export from Checkbook 2, and Quicken told me it was not allowed, offered a link entitled “Why?” which unhelpfully dumped me in Intuit support.
“Why?” In truth, Intuit decided to kill QIF. I won’t rant, but that’s why.
Since I had no trouble transferring via QIF from Mac Q 2007 to Win Q 2010 and just presumed I could QIF into WIN Q 2010 as I’ve been doing since, oh, Ronnie was President. Nope. “Newer” versions of Quicken don’t allow imports into bank accounts via QIF. I Googled up one “workaround, but in the waning hours of the workday, wasn’t successful. At the least, the “workaround” requires using TextEdit to modify the QIF export, and it has to be exactly right to fake out Qkn.
One final program to mention: Numbers. I don’t use Numbers because I live in Excel. But Numbers does one very slick thing Excel doesn’t: import OFX files from banks. If you’re mostly banking online, you can probably just skip a personal finance program and keep your local records in Numbers. It is dead easy to import your transactions, then set up a reconcile process in the Numbers spreadsheet.
I know I’ve gone on and on. But here’s the wrap. I’m going to TRY to use Mac-native programs. Even with “Coherence Mode” I’m concerned the Virtual Machines would confuse my co-workers.
So I’m with David. If I have to run Quicken for Windows, a couple of cheap Win boxes might be the best way to go. Let’s hope it won’t come to that; Macs are so much easier to keep running!
I have just thrown the switch to iBank after building up data in Quicken since the mid 90′s and this is my input after a full weekend of deep tweaking.
Data input – Fortunately I never made the switch to Quicken Essentials and the qif export/import was seamless. Given the sheer number of accounts and data I had built up over the years this was impressive.
Data entry and keyboard navigation – not as fast as quicken but not as bad as I had feared based on reports. I also think this will get better as my muscle memory makes the change.
Overall UI – Way better than quicken in every respect, cleaner, clearer, more logical and generally apple-like . I agree with George that the transaction entry window being at the very bottom is annoying (surprisingly annoying) but thats the only UI negative.
Reporting and budgeting – I had read so many negative comments about this I’d have to say it was the main reason I hadn’t made the transaction sooner. However IMO it is the one of the best features. Yes quicken 2007 allows you to extract basically any bit of data you can think of relatively easily whereas iBank is a bit clunky to customise if you need other than the pre-set reports, but once set up far more valuable, relevant and readable.
Speed – I hadn’t read anything negative on this aspect but how does 18.5 seconds to open the file sound? unbelievably poor !!! Yes I have a large file but most of the data is in hidden/dormant accounts and quicken never had a problem opening the same data. Once open it is basically fine apart from the odd random action that seems to take forever. This is the aspect that the developers really need to look at.
Overall I am very happy though. It is certainly a better product than Q2007 for me and will hopefully improve as it evolves.
I will post this in comments for MPU035 as well.
Once again – another great podcast that is both timely and very informative.
I thought I would post/add my situation here as I not sure how many of us early, (pre Sept. ‘06) adopters of the intel Mac there are. In my house, i have two Macs. One pre Sept. ‘06 and the other post. What does this mean? Well one is Core Duo 1.83 and the other Core-2-Duo 1.83. The later, based on your podcast and that of Apple tell me that I should be able to upgrade to Lion with little difficulties. The first one, is a bit of another issue as it is 32bit processor and won’t the 64bit that Lion requires.
A search of the internet and an article in a Mac-Life details how one can swap out the core duo processor with a core-2-duo processor, thus creating a 64bit processor environment. What it does not tell us is if Lion will run in this environment, as Lion was not yet a topic of the rumor mills. The concern is with the logic board and firmware of the iMac. Profiler tells me that my pre Sept. ‘06 is a model 4,1.
I have contemplated cracking the case and swapping the processor with a Core-2-Duo but am hesitant to do so if when done, I get a “cannot pass go” response when I attempt to upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion. Will the Lion OS look for eligibility based on model and logic board or will it be happy knowing that it has friendly 64bit processor?
Thanks David and Katie for another very comprehensive show!
I just found out that some Marketcircle products, including Daylite and Billings Pro, likely won’t be fully Lion compatible when Apple lets this latest cat out of the bag. If you rely on these products, I HIGHLY recommend you read the post on Marketcircle’s website before upgrading to Lion: http://www.marketcircle.com/blog/
Hi David, hi Katie!
Quickcal 3 is “In Review”. Let us know if you want to test it early.