I’ve been playing with the preinstalled Quicken 2006 for Mac after exporting most of my data from Quicken 2006 Premier Home and Business 2006 for Windows.
Quicken for Mac is annoying and cumbersome at best. After using it for two days, I am amazed at why Intuit even bothers with this version. It is extremely painful to navigate and since it’s not a Universal binary, it’s pretty slow. It’s virtually impossible to find all the functions and features. It is so different from the Windows version that it appears to have been written by a different product team that decided to develop a completely different product. I agree that there are some things that should be done with the UI to take advantage of the native OS that the app is running on. However, if you’re going to do that, think it through very carefully. The Quicken for Mac developers haven’t thought it through at all.
Since Quicken for Mac is horrible, I was poking around to see if there’s a version of Wine for OS X. The guys at CodeWeavers are going to be releasing a version of CrossOver Office for the Mac but no one knows when.
I came across Darwine, an OS X port of Wine. Darwine installed perfectly on my MacBook. The helper application even let me install Quicken Premier Home and Business 2006 for Windows. When I tried to launch Quicken, I got the same error that I’ve been getting on CrossOver Office for many many months – “Your Quicken program files (not your data files) may have been damaged. You will have to reinstall Quicken”. Looks like the CrossOver Office problem is upstream in Wine itself (just today, I was able to get QPHAB working on Suse 10.1 with CrossoverOffice 5.0.1).
Though I would love to have a complete native version of Quicken on the Mac, I can’t hold my breath for Intuit. They were never respnsive to the Linux community’s request for a Linux version so there’s no reason to believe they’ll listen to all the Mac users asking for a complete version for OS X. Until then, I look forward to having Wine meet my needs.