I can't speak to Quicken 2004, but my wife and I use Quicken 2002 (native OS X) for all of our finances. It's an ok program. I believe its primary problem is that it is ported from classic Mac OS, which was ported from Windows, and Intuit clearly doesn't care enough to make Quicken a proper Mac OS X application. Quicken 2002 works most of the time, and when it breaks, I can usually find a way to work around it (sometimes after wasting several frustrating hours). The new features in 2003 and 2004 are slim and none (ooh, they support a few more banks, whoopee), and their shoddy OS X support in 2002 doesn't give me much hope that they would have changed this in newer versions.
What problems have I had? Numerous, and unfortunately many I've forgotten since finding workarounds. But here is what I can think of...
- Quicken is clearly built as a single-user application from the classic Mac OS days, when there was no concept of multiple users. As of Quicken 2002, they hadn't bothered to fix this. It installs itself into /Applications (which is where I want it, fair enough) and then assumes only the admin user who installed it will ever run it. To use it as a non-admin user, or from other accounts, you have to go and change the permissions within the Quicken folder. You also need to setup the data file to be group writable if multiple people are updating it (my wife and myself, for example).
- Early on, I had numerous occasions where the data file simply got corrupted. Sometimes you couldn't add new transactions, other times it just wouldn't load. Usually the only solution was to export accounts to QIF files and re-import them. The problem is that QIF files do not include all of the data you would want to keep!
- Sometimes transactions vanish. Usually closing the window and reopening it brings them back.
- Numerous random crashes and lockups. Good thing they save to disk every time a transaction is entered.
- The data file uses the resource fork to store much of its informaiton. Fine if you know this, but I was doing automated backups of Quicken data using the unix 'tar' command, which does not pick up the resource fork. I only found out months later when I needed to restore from a backup, and it didn't work! Re-entering all the information up to that point was loads of fun. I now use 'ditto' to backup.
- A ton of little nitpicks about the user interface. It's pretty bad - anything from not recognizing the scroll wheel to unintuitive (from a company called Intuit? heh) layout of common functions and commands. I've been beaten down and gotten used to it by now, but I recall getting so frustrated early on every time I wanted to do something that should be incredibly simple.
Anyway, after reading the reviews on Amazon, I'm glad we didn't bother to upgrade. It sounds like at best, it would have been the same old crap, and at worst, it could have been a nightmare. Unfortunately Quicken is just about the only game in town for personal finances on a Mac. Intuit is getting extremely lazy and it really shows in their latest versions of Quicken. I'd love to see Apple do something like iMoney (or myMoney?) and basically do to Quicken what they did to Adobe Premiere. Quicken is great when it works well, but it just feels unstable to the point that you have to be very careful not to upset it!
Anyway, my $0.02 on an older version. Those who have Quicken 2004 can feel free to say that it fixes everything and is insanely great (since I don't have it) but somehow I kind of doubt it.
