Greg In The Desert

If your like me and are a Quicken fanatic and are like me a Mac user, then you have most likely been anticipating the latest version of Quicken that was due to be released summer of 2009.

I have bad news for you. An Intuit Quicken blog post says that the next version of Quicken for Mac (Quicken Financial Life For Mac, or whatever they call it) is now slated for February of 2010. It was first supposed to come out in 2008, then 2009 and now 2010.

Intuit will release a new version of Quicken for the Mac platform in February 2010.

I don’t know why I’m having a hard time believing Intuit. They must have one programmer who is new to Mac programming working on Quicken for Mac.

The one killer feature that keeps me using Quicken 2007 is the integration with financial institutions. I can write checks and schedule transactions with all of the banks and credit cards I use and have all of my information in Quicken up to date. I almost never have to visit the individual website of any of these banks and rarely write a paper check.

There are a number of better application than Quicken for the Mac but none of them have this integration with banks that is a huge time saver.

I have attempted to sign up with Intuit to be a beta tester for years and have never been selected. They have a new program called Quicken Inner Circle that might get me closer.

Wow, I’m really ruining my reputation as a Apple Fan Boy and early adopter. I didn’t buy the first iPhone when it first came out (instead waited for the 16GB version) and I haven’t purchased a iPhone 3G. I had no desire to stand in line for one on launch day. I’m not really a people person and I’m not interested in socializing with strangers.

I did look into it last week. The Albuqueruque Apple Store was out and while I was in Portland for a few days, all three of those stores were out.

I can live with the EDGE network speeds. The killer feature for me is the GPS. Since there are no real GPS realtime navigation software out for the iPhone, yet, I think I will hold out. If I hold out long enough a 32GB version might be available.

heard about the Blackberry Curve 8320 a few weeks and and got very excited about it. It is of course a phone with a keyboard and PDA type functionality. It has one killer feature, it can make calls over WiFi and normal cellular networks and this feature is being offered by T-Mobile (who I am already with). This works great for me since I get a very poor cell signal from any of the carriers at my house.

This week Leo Laport posted a review of the phone. Of course, he compares it to the iPhone describing the Curve as not nearly as easy to set up or pretty to look at but has more functionality than the iPhone.

It meets some of my requirements to combine my phone and PDA into one, and has the killer wifi VoIP feature but it’s missing things that I use with my current phone. Sailing Clicker doesn’t yet support Blackberry devices, instead the developers are “holding out for RIM to add JSR82-support (Bluetooth) to Java in their devices”. Whatever that means, I doubt it will happen anytime soon. I not sure how well cross syncing between Outlook on a PC and a Mac will work. Finally, can you use make voice calls over wifi systems that require browser authentication?

Amazon only has two reviews, both positive so far. This indicates that it’s a very new phone. As tempting as this phone was to run out and buy right away, I think I will hold off and see what happens in the next month.

I’ve been looking for a way to organize all the receipts I get, espcially the ones from Home Depot and Lowes. There’s a few programs out there for the Mac but they require you scan them in with another program. They seemed more work than they are worth.

Neat Receipts attempts to solve this problem. They have a program for managing recipts that works directly with a scanner.

Just scan your receipts into the NeatReceipts software. The program will automatically crop, rotate and resize the receipt image, then apply patented Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and character analysis technology to read and understand the text on the receipt.

The killer feature here is that it uses OCR to extract the information from the recipt, eliminating the need to manually enter the information. It also has some sort of IRS certification so that you can keep the scanned doucments for tax purposes, so you can throw out the paper version.

Currently, Neat Receipts on works on Windows XP (a Vista beta is available). They are working on a Mac version for release in 2008, in which I’ve signed up to be notified. The Neat Receipts scanner and softare are $229.

Welcome to For The H*ll Of It 2.0, now powered by Blosxom. I’m not here to bash iBlog, my previous blogging app, it’s been a good system and I paid the full shareware fee for it. But I’ve been disappointed with the slow pace of development and lack of fixes for even the smallest bugs. After studying different system, weighing the pros and cons, I decided to abandon iBlog for a more customizable solution. Blosxom also gives me some features that I really like.

Blosxom has no database to keep track of entries. The file system is the database, so to speak. Entries get filed as text files and saved in folders. Blosxom then generates the site categories based on the folder structures, this means subcategories are easy to make. It’s easy to manage this way and there’s no secret to where your entries are. It’s also very easy to move to another computer if necessary.

Running Blosxom on my local computer is easy. Once I have the single perl script installed in my webserver directory on my local computer (and have personal web serving turned on) I simply access it via this URL: http://localhost/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi. .mac doesn’t allow the use of cgi scripts, this is where the killer feature of Blosxom comes in; it can generate static web pages. By using a proper command in the terminal, I can tell Blosxom to make a static version of the site where ever I want, in this case I have it generate the site on my iDisk.

I will be importing my iBlog entries over and writing more about this and how I did it in the coming weeks. Until then they are still in their old directory structure. (you can fine the old home page here)

Update 05/17/05 8:05PM: Still playing around with Blosxom/MarsEdit and how it saves entries. This one may move around as I figure out how date/time stamps work.