For the past few years I’ve been using iBank / Bankify for my personal financial management. I documented my move to iBank in a previous post. Finding a Mac compatible financial application was the final app that I needed to completely go Mac only not require a virtual machine for my personal use.
I’ve been generally okay with iBank now Bankify however there been some lingering challenges. First and foremost I keep getting duplicate transactions even after I downloaded from my bank. What that means is I sometimes have to spend hours each month trying to reconcile my accounts because a single transaction might have three or four transactions in my register. It also might turn out that several of those transactions if the account transfers might show up as a transfer to the wrong account thus throwing off balances across multiple accounts.
This year one of my financial goals was to automate bimonthly banking and bill payment as much as possible. This bug has caused challenges to completing the objective. This month I had a renewed desire to find an alternative. I tried you need a budget however the downloading of transactions from my bank seemed to be clunky. It also focuses on budget only. That’s important to me however I need an app that can do more. My sites then turned to Quicken since their 2016 Mac upgrade it seems to have been a big improvement over the 2015 one. I know it doesn’t have all the same features as the Windows version however I wanted to stay native Mac. I did contemplate trying the Windows version however I don’t think I need some of the advanced features that the Mac version does not offer. That is why today I bought Quicken for the Mac 2016.
The import process went surprisingly painlessly. My export from Bankify went over without any problems. The import of that file to Quicken also appears to of been painless. I need to go through each account and confirm the balances make sure everything is correct. For now it looks like this is the easiest migration I’ve had to do. In the past I went from Quicken for Windows to Mac and then back again. Then I went from Quicken to Bankify. Each of those migrations was painful and took a lot of time to validate things right or to tweak the process in order to get a good copy of my data. Part of my problem is trying to keep and migrate 16 years of data. I don’t need it but I want it and since it’s all in one file should be straightforward to migrate. I do have an additional eight years of data in other files that I don’t migrate but I have all of my financial transactions going back to my freshman year in college in some sort of backup or another. At some point soon I need to archive old transactions to an off-line backup so I don’t have all of it on an Internet connected machine. That’s my next step.
Mac
Mac OS Yosemite
Its that time of year again. Apple has come out with its new OS. This time around I tried the Beta on my personal laptop. I was pretty happy with it so i installed it my remaining computers today when it became available.
One thing that is always a challenge when Apple OS upgrades come out is that some apps just don’t work. Typically it is my VPN app or Dragon Dictate or something specialized. This year I was pleased to see that everything worked without needing upgrades.
The biggest challenge for me isn’t upgrading my personal machines (I already did that). it will be upgrading MC’s and getting my parents iMac upgraded. I think MC is on Mavericks but her Macbook is getting up there in age. My parents are now 2 OS versions behind and getting time to go over there and upgrade is challenging.
My 2nd Attempt at an iMovie Did Include Babies and Animals
After our trip to Jayson & Gretchen’s we had a ton of video of Teagan. I wanted to share it with our family but some of it was long clips with not much action and then we had several clips that were very short. Lauren’s awesome job of putting together my dad’s 70th birthday video got me to finally try iMovie a week or so ago. It went so well that I wanted to take the footage we had of Teagan with Jayson’s dog and clip it together. By doing that I learned that 1, it is pretty fun and cool to do. 2, its a huge time sink. Thankfully it was only 3 minutes of video i created in the end but i can see even slightly more elaborate videos sucking up my time. I already want to go back and make a montage video of Teagan’s first year, but I just dont have the time to do that right now.
Maybe i didnt try the software enough but I don’t remember iMovie being that easy a few years ago. I know Final Cut Express was not very easy and after trying both of them I gave up on video editing for a while. I am glad I gave it another try. These video’s wont be my last that I work on!
A New MacBook Pro
My mother in law is fond of saying you don’t know if you don’t ask, or something to that effect. i don’t always agree with that but most of the times I do. Earlier this month I asked for a new laptop from work. I have been without a work laptop since early summer (long story I wont go into). I have used a desktop I had an my own Macbook Air. My company allows personal Mac’s on a bring your own support type model. I was wanting something more powerful than what my Air could provide and I really didn’t want to keep using my personal gear for work. I researched my options and the Dell developer build laptop they offered was powerful but very big. I liked the power but I didn’t’ really want to go back to a windows machine. I looked and noticed i could get a Macbook Air bundle that wasn’t much more than the Dell and it was basically just as powerful. Since I can do my entire job on a Mac i asked if i could just get one of the new Retina Display Pro’s instead of a Dell. My boss got approval and said yes i could get it. I was extremely pleased.
Today the computer arrived unexpectedly early at the office. I was on vacation but got the tracking information. I talked with MC and she agreed to let me go in to the office to pick up the computer and come home. That would allow me to start migrating my stuff off the Air onto the new Pro before I got back to work after the new year.
The Pro is bigger than anything I have had since a 15″ Powerbook, but it was just as heavy as my 13″ Macbook Pro I used to have. It is much heavier than the Air I had and that will take getting used, however that extra weight comes along with the more ram and much more powerful processor. Not to mention the bigger screen. I wont need the bigger screen most of the time but when i am not plugged into a monitor it will come in handy.
Automater Script Gone Bad
Automation is great, but you have to be careful. A few months ago I setup a script to look in a folder were i download videos and based on certain criteria I gave the script move them to another folder. It worked great but today I dont’ know what happened. I noticed all the videos on an entire hard drive missing. I ended up finding them in one folder. It seems that the script started applying the rules to all folders on the drive not just the one I told it to. I had to spend several hours re sorting everything back to were they came from. I was trying to be careful since I didn’t want to put in the wrong place a home movie or accidentally delete one.
I think the script went bad when I moved to my new Mac Mini. Even though I ran the migration wizard to copy my old computer setup to the new one I think something went wrong. I am on my new machine for less than a week and I dont believe in coincidences. I do believe I have it fixed it so it should be working correct now.
The Decision To Get Another Mac Mini
I know that I waffle on what approach I take with regards to my computer equipment. I have been known to swing between wanting one laptop I use for everything to a laptop and desktop, to just a desktop and using works laptop. Right now I have a semi-new 2012 Macbook Air. I sold my main desktop, a 27″ iMac that I bought and tricked out in 2011 over the summer. I also am selling my old 2011 Macbook Air because I wanted one computer, a laptop. At the time my thoughts were I wanted a single machine so I can go between work and home and have my stuff with me. I had the iMac because I previously worked from home 2-3 days a week and having the more powerful desktop made sense. Since I am in the office most days as of early summer that didn’t make much sense anymore. I also have a 2010 Mac Mini I have been using as a media center. Its no longer plugged directly into my TV but is hosting all my media and acts as a headless server that my Apple TV or Macbook Air connects to. I can’t use it as a desktop since the Thunderbolt display I have is not compatible with the older Mini.
Flash forward to now, and I am happy with my Air however I am finding myself wanting a desktop that is always on. I still need my laptop for now for if I need to work from the bedroom or anywhere else if the baby is in the area were my computer is, but having a desktop for me and the family has its advantages. Having a super powerful iMac still doesn’t make sense. My current solution is to get one of the new Mac Mini’s that were just announced. It is 1/3 of the price I paid for my iMac, and if i need to I can unplug the Mini from my display and plug in my laptop as needed. The 1TB Fusion drive looks like a good compromise for speed and storage space. The new Mini’s looked good enough that I ordered a new one on the 5th. It arrived Friday. So far the Cinema Display and the Mini is a great alternative to a laptop or an iMac. I still have to carry around a laptop to work but I like having a flexibility the mini provides vs an all in one iMac. Only time will say if I remain happy.
Thanks to Quicken 2013 I am Now Using iBank
I would like to thank Intuit for releasing Quicken 2013. It was what I finally needed to ditch Quicken (hopefully for good) and try a native Mac application.
I have been using personal-finance software since my first year of college. I remember getting a free copy of Bank Street writer Pro. From there I moved to a copy of Quicken. I’ve been using various versions of Quicken since. Things were easy for almost a decade. That all started to change after I bought my first Mac in July 2002. At that time I still had a Windows machine and didn’t switch to a Mac as my primary computer until late 2002 or early 2003. Back then I still had several machines so there was always a Windows box to run Quicken. At that point I’m using that software for so long there was no way I was going to stop. Microsoft Money didn’t appeal to me. By then the ability to download transaction data from banks and credit cards locked me in.
The problem turned out to be was using Windows less often as the Mac dominated my computer use. As I transitioned from Windows to Macintosh try to identify all the pieces of software that I used on Windows so I could find the equivalent Mac software. This is where I ran into a problem. Quicken for Windows is great. On the Mac not as much so.
After a time I made the decision to export my data from my Windows Quicken import into the Mac version. That was a generally painful process but I did succeed. I happily used the Mac version of Quicken for a year or so, maybe longer. The limitations became pretty painful. I am not going to go into the limitations of Quicken for Mac. They are well-documented all over the Internet. Let’s just say I wasn’t pleased. The only viable option I had which was to bring all my data back into Windows Quicken. That process was equally painful than the previous conversion. After moving back to a Windows version for a time (somewhere in the area of a year or more) I had a laptop or desktop basically for the sole purpose of running one or two pieces of Windows software. One of those was Quicken.
By the time Apple came out with Intel-based Macs most of my personal computing was all Mac except for some pieces software like a mentioned that didn’t have a Mac equivalent. For work however I was very dependent Windows centric software. Parallels and then later VMware fusion allowed me to consolidate down to one computer. I was able to use a Mac running a VM of Windows. That was a huge win for me and probably millions of other people. To this day I have a Windows VM on my MacBook Air. The reason I bring all this up is after the Intel Macs came out I was able to transition pretty much every application I use to a native Mac Application or to a web-based application. At my current job they have a bring your own device policy which allows me to bring my Mac and use it on company networks. I stopped needing a VM for work a little over a year ago when the exchange server was on got upgraded and outlook for the Mac work perfectly with it.
By this point the only reason I need a Windows VM regularly was to allow me to use Quicken. It is the last piece of software that I rely on Windows for. The problem was I really liked it and I hadn’t been able to find a replacement for it that was a native Mac app. I had used mint, the web service ironically owned now by Intuit but without the ability from you import almost 2 decades worth of data I was never going use it full-time. No other Web service allowed me the ability to import either. That got me looking at Mac programs that did personal finance. Surprisingly there were several I tried a few of them but none of them have the features that would equal Quicken. I probably went back and forth trying out applications on all for the past year or two with no success. During this time I had a growing desire to be able to use my smart phone to sync with my desktop bank software. It bothered me that years ago I could do this with my Treo and Quicken yet I couldn’t with a modern smartphone.
In late June hyper down and force myself to try iBank. It had the smart phone thinking that I wanted and the major features I was looking from Quicken. It wasn’t perfect but I thought it was a better choice than Moneywell or Money Dance. I spent several hours exporting my data from Quicken importing it and cleaning it up in iBank. I was all set to cut the cord from Quicken when I ran into some reconciliation issues using iBank. Turns out if you have transactions in your register with iBank that are from the same payee and for the same dollar value as a new transaction being downloaded the software will sometimes get confused and think you’ve already downloaded it and not suggest that it’s a new transaction even know the date may be different. I’ve never really had a problem with Quicken doing anything like that. The first time it happened with iBank it took me about 45 minutes to figure out what happened and fix it. It spooked me to the point where I didn’t really trust the software and fell back to Quicken.
That brings us to this month. By now I accepted the fact that I would be stuck with my one holdout piece of Windows software. I figured I have been using our virtual machine for years and it wasn’t such a huge deal to continue using one. It bothered me to do it but it was something that worked even if it was not very elegant of an option. I also figured at some point into it had to offer a smartphone app.
I got excited when I read about Quicken 2013 and the option for using your iPhone just as I had wanted. I went out and purchased a copy, and downloaded it right away. I didn’t do too much research online because they offered a 60 money back guarantee. I should’ve looked at reviews and forum posts before I bought it. Downloading and installing the new version was trivial. The problem was you it wouldn’t sync to the iPhone, or technically to their cloud service at all. I wasn’t a fan of the fact that they needed to sync my data to their systems before it could goto my smartphone in the first place, so it totally aggravated me to find out that because of that the data wouldn’t sync at all. At that point I went online to check out the forums and noticed lots of people with similar problems. There didn’t seem to be a solution other than Intuit was hard at work fixing the bugs. I deal with software development and if a major function of the software doesn’t work you don’t release it. I personally wouldn’t have purchased the upgrade without that function.
I was really pissed off. First I thought I should just downgrade. Then I decided enough was enough and it didn’t seem like there ever really was going to be a stable solution from Intuit so I decided to sync up my iBank file again with my current Quicken data and give it another try knowing the limitations that I learned in June. I also immediately requested a refund from Intuit. The only positive out of this experience was intuit was true to their word and I got a refund without any hassle. Now they might fix their bugs but at this point their lack of an up-to-date Mac version of their software that isn’t crippled and the fact that their new Windows software is still so buggy they convinced me to use to finally go all Mac and use iBank.
It has been only three weeks or so and I am still getting used to the new software. There are things I liked much better in Quicken but now that I have a handle on the transaction download issue I am pretty happy. Some of the bulk edit and change functions of Quicken I miss but I don’t use them that often to have that really be a reason not to switch. Am I at the point of no return? I hope so but don’t know. After 3 months you can’t retrieve your data from banks online anymore (typically so wanting to switch back after that will be problematic For now and hopefully for good I running all Mac.
Dragon Dictate 3 Upgrade
Since I like writing, but typing at the end of the day after working at a computer all day is not the most fun thing to do I have been using dictation to write. It has been fantastic.
The issue is since I upgraded to mountain lion my dictation software on the Mac has not been working. I’ve actually been using the dictation on my iPhone 4S. I think I’ve written about that before. It’s actually quite good, but nowhere near as good as using the computer. As if to prove a point, the WordPress app on my iPhone 4S just crashed for the second time in a day. I lost about two paragraphs of this post and had to write it over. That sort of thing doesn’t happen on the Mac.
Today, Nuance the makers of Dragon Dictate released an upgrade for Dragon Dictate for the Mac that works with Mountain lion. Because of the limitations of the iPhone dictation I am pleased to be able to upgrade. But I’m not pleased about is the rather expensive price of the $149 to be able to upgrade. I don’t typically buy software is expensive. The only other software that comes anywhere close to this price is Microsoft office. Even that I got a rather steep discount through work the last upgrade. I just hope the price was worth it.
I am downloading it now, and I hope to have it working tonight. I’m wondering if I need to train it again. This software I like the mobile phone versions of the software requires you to train the software by reading. It does not take very long, but it does require some minor concentration to read to a computer. I will give my opinion in a later post.
Next Gen MacBook Air
After much pondering I broke down and put an order in for a new MacBook air 13 inch. I bought a 2011 model last August and I’ve been very happy with it, except for a few drawbacks. The new model seems to correct all the drawbacks I’ve experienced. The only thing I had to do to get it was spent a lot more money for it. I think it’ll be worth it in the long run. I have been generally upgrading laptops every year so, and in the near future I don’t think that’s going to happen with a baby on the way so I want to get the upgrade out-of-the-way and be happy with additional capacity now.
This new MacBook air is sporting eight gigs of RAM and a 512 gig SSD drive. The old model didn’t have enough memory for what I was using it for, especially running a virtual machine. I also maxed out the 256 gigs on the old one SSD, so going for the 512 gig SSD was a must. But that upgrade broke the bank. I contemplated going for a MacBook Pro 13 inch with the regular hard drive but the cost difference and the performance difference really didn’t make it worthwhile for me. I’ve been spoiled with the SSDs in the Air’s for the past two years so going back to a 5400 RPM hard drive wasn’t really something I wanted to do. Other notable improvements is the USB three, but I really don’t have any use for it at this moment. Also the Core i7 dual core processor is slightly faster than what I’ve been used to all my old air.
It doesn’t come with Mountain Lion, but I get a free upgrade when it comes out in a few weeks. I will probably buy the upgrade anyway since I have other computers I want to upgrade anyway, and the free upgrade is only for this laptop.
So far I’ve been extremely pleased with the upgrade. Now all I have to do is eBay my old laptop.
Almost All Mac, Well Sometimes…
For over a year I have opted into a “bring your own equipment” pilot with my company. It basically allows me to use a Mac at work. There has been a great community helping with how too’s, what apps to use to replicate Windows apps, etc. For the bulk of that time I have generally opted to continue to use a Windows machine. It wasn’t because I wanted to, but it was because of limitations of email. More specifically it was Entourage was a horrible app that came no were near its Outlook for Windows equivalent, and then it was that Outlook 2011 wasn’t compatible with the Exchange system I was using. Last month that last part changed and I was able to use Outlook on the Mac. It was the last major piece to my going all Mac again at work.
Over the past month I have been going days using all native Mac apps when working remotely and then days of using my Windows machine in the office. For the most part I am able to work 80% or more on native apps on my mac when I try. There are a few websites I need that require IE, plus doing certain things in Sharepoint is better looking or just easier to do in IE. I can do a lot in Sharepoint on the mac but I do default back to IE a lot.
I also had a few issues with Webex on Lion. I still have issues if logging in via one of the two Webex portals I use. The other I found a work around for and it does work. So half the Webex’s I need I have to goto my iPad or a VM.
As I mentioned earlier the big hold back was email. Now that I can use outlook 2011, for a while I didn’t want to. It is Outlook and much better than Entourage, however it is not as feature rich as Outlook 2010. Plenty of reviews covered that. But even with its limitations it is growing on me. I am not yet ready to go all mac every day but I am getting closer. Right now I am at 2-3 days a week. Since I sit at a computer 8+ hours a day a change like this will take a while to get used to. For now I hope to continue to be mostly Mac at work more days a week.