[jdb8167]

Bastion, you appear to be the only person I've heard of who actually seems to like Rosetta. At best it is tolerable and if it was missing or didn't work it would be a disaster for Intel Mac users, but to actually defend it is a stretch.
Rosetta is a memory hog. It also uses significant resources that wouldn't be needed if the software were ported to Intel. Even though I use Rosetta successfully I would much rather it not be needed. Defending companies who release new software that isn't Intel compatible seems more than a little strange to me.
Thank you Apple for Rosetta (and Transitive) but to all software vendors not doing universal binaries, you get a big raspberry. You get no money from me until your software is native on my platform of choice.

[kongjie]

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As I noted earlier, it's not likely that anyone in this thread really knows the actual current or short-term projected breakdown of Mac Quicken users.

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This fact--and any of the other discussion that you've brought to the table that takes into account the development cycle, etc--is true but irrelevant to the point I originally made because I'm making it from the view of a user. There are probably a number of reasons why Quicken has released another insubstantial and pricey upgrade, but I'm just a little ol' user.
So I'm not saying you're wrong--I'm saying we're having two different discussions.
The bottom line is that Quicken for Mac lacks the robustness of Quicken for Windows...and yet there isn't another application I can think of off-hand that issues so many "weak" for-a-fee upgrades. Then they hit you with e-mails begging you to upgrade and offering $10 rebates. Every upgrade boils down to about $50. No, you're not forced to upgrade--except when they tell you, for example, your version has been "sunsetted":
"In an ongoing effort to provide reliable high-quality products and services, Intuit periodically retires (also known as sunsets) older versions of Quicken, thereby discontinuing online services & live technical support for these versions.
Under this policy, the most current version of Quicken (currently Quicken 2006), plus the prior two versions, will be supported, subject to certain exceptions. Sunsetting older versions of Quicken allows us to focus resources on enhancing our products and providing support for more current versions, which are used by the vast majority of Quicken customers."
By issuing yearly upgrades, they remove online services at will from older versions.
Quicken spends a lot of resources advertising their new versions but from a user's point of view it's looking like going for a quick buck. If they were committed to releasing Quicken 2007 because of their business cycle, they might have recognized the fact that they didn't include native Intel support on the release by taking a price cut. I know there are a lot of compelling reasons not to do that from a business/development point of view, but I'm not a developer, I'm a user who is getting turned off to the product.

[MAC_PRO_MARC]

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Since Quicken for Mac has been such a dissapointment for many, why not review some of the other applications from active smaller-developers. Sure they may not have all the features of Quicken yet, but I am curious to know how applications like iBank and Liquid Ledger (just two that I know of) stack up against the aged beast that is Quicken for Mac.
A side-by-side review and comparison of these applications should spurn all the developers involved into creating better products, and help readers pick from a couple of choices. It is inportant to recognize the efforts of the small developers who are putting out high-quality products. Especially in areas where larger developers have all but given up.

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I use Moneydance and it works great. It is simpler to use for the home user than Quicken and cheaper. I tried to get Macworld to review it, but they keep only reveiwing Quicken.... Hummm... corporate ties I guess.

[bayoubengal]

>Or pragmatic. Suicidal would be the developer who asserts an intent to never make such a migration,
>but that's not what's happened here.
What's pragmatic about having your app run in emulation on all currently shipping Apple machines?
When the next big change comes along, you'll find out that you can't play unless you run on intel. Then you are forced to change all at once which creates a big burden. Better to make the changes slowly and keep up with the development universe as it changes.
I don't really care what the breakdown of users are. the future has been laid out for the last year by apple and if you aren't on track to move along with it, you will get left behind technologically.

As a developer who has transitioned a large, complex legacy project from codewarrior to xcode and then to UB, I can assure you that the process isn't that hard....unless you've done something really dumb like embed a BASIC compiler into your word processor (like Microsoft). Its generally a task you can do as part of working on other things. It may be that Quicken's designers did do something really dumb...like assume macOS will always be big-endian and write tons of code that depends on that assumption...and now they are in a hole and there is debate if it is worth it to upgrade the project.

> pesky iBook users with 10-20GB drives?
People who are running a machine with such limited resources in this day an age are not likely to have enough apps on it to worry about UB executable sizes. I certainly would seriously constrain my progress to support customers with very old machines.
>how far along Quicken 2007 was in its development cycle
I didn't say it should be shipping already. I said it should be in progress. They've certainly had enough time to be in progress by now.

[NeoX]

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You left out a critical word in restating my claim: mainstream. PhotoShop isn't.

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Ok. But still that gives some sort of indication as to the performance of Rosetta. I would expect those numbers to be similar in a comparison of iMovie running under rosetta. Quicken is mainstream and it is noticeably slower under rosetta, that is a fact you cannot refute as to your own admission have not used it. MS Office 2004 is also mainstream and there is no comparison. It is much slower running under rosetta then even a previous generation PowerPC Mac mini. I use it daily and believe me it is slower in just about every aspect, including saving of large files. Actually I believe one of the later MW benchmarks bore this out with Word tests.

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'm a major release behind right now, though, so I'll grant that maybe there's something in the current version that's particularly troublesome for Rosetta.

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I haven't tried office v.X to see, but I suspect, since 2004 seemed to be a performance increase over v.X on some things, it would be even slower...
Anyway, bottom line is that Intuit missed the boat on this. They had plenty of time to make a UB version and yeah intel users are in the minority but even so, it could have made even more sales. I also agree that Quicken Mac could use feature parity with the Windows version as there are plenty of features in the Win version that would be most useful in the Mac version. Based on this and lack of UB, I don't think Intuit cares a great deal about the Mac market and likely wouldn't loose sleep over dumping it all together...
Regards,

[Dan Frakes]

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I use Moneydance and it works great. It is simpler to use for the home user than Quicken and cheaper. I tried to get Macworld to review it, but they keep only reveiwing Quicken.... Hummm... corporate ties I guess.

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Macworld has reviewed Moneydance. Granted, that was in April 2004, but to say we've never reviewed it is incorrect. Why have we reviewed the latest version of Quicken and not the latest version of Moneydance? It's really quite simple: Quicken is, by far, the most popular personal finance application on any platform. More of our readers -- many more -- want to read about the latest version of Quicken. That's not to say we won't review other packages, but it explains why Quicken takes precedence.

[otownresident]

Wow from this thread I wouldnt touch quicken if my life depended on it. I was playing with the trial version and found its interface confusing so I looked into learning more about the program. And have been comparing it to ibank2.1. From the article that this thread originates from I would have probably purchased quicken 2007 for use do to some more advanced features. But screw this glad i read the threads. I am getting iBank and dropping Quicken altogether. I have never liked Intuos software. i use to run Microsoft money on my PC and wish they had a mac version. It was far simpler and more adaptive and had plenty of features for the average user compared to quicken and amazingly worked well for a microsoft product.
Thanks sounds like a little reading and research saved some big headaches.

[bastion]

Bastion, you appear to be the only person I've heard of who actually seems to like Rosetta.
I never said I like Rosetta. I implied it gets the job done, and I explained reasons why I believe it's not imperative that Quicken 2007 be universal at this time. One of those reasons is Intuit's "official" rationale for not offering a UB immediately.
Defending companies who release new software that isn't Intel compatible seems more than a little strange to me.
Read the last few paragraphs in this post if you haven't yet. It shouldn't be that hard to understand.

[bastion]

but irrelevant to the point I originally made because I'm making it from the view of a user.
That's fair enough, but Intuit isn't a user. Intuit is a developer and a publically-traded corporation. They're beholden to their stockholders, not their customer base as a whole and certainly not any minority subset of their users. The primary responsibility of those who control Intuit is to protect (and increase) the value of the company. Screwing with a development cycle in progress to deal with a performance issue that relatiely few users will experience and even fewer will notice isn't likely to contribute to that goal. Especially given that, as you note, there's probably another release coming next year whose spec wasn't frozen before universality became an issue.
That's really the crux of the question I originally put to you. Given that Quicken works under Rosetta, why is it so important for the first release of the product in the Intel era to be universal that they should have disrupted their release schedule? You said they "had better make sure" it is, but really, why? How many sales of 2007 are going to be lost on that issue, and is there strong enough competition that those lost sales won't come back when 2008 does come out as a UB?

[bastion]

What's pragmatic about having your app run in emulation on all currently shipping Apple machines?
Given that Intuit's market isn't comprised of "people who bought new Macs in the last 3 months," pretty much everything. Building and testing a UB isn't free - or even cheap - and it's not instant. As I went on to say in the post to which you were responding, the spec for Q2007 was very likely frozen before the MBP shipped. Disrupting a development cycle in progress would make delivering a UB even less free than it already is. So for a product whose prospective market is "users who've bought a new machine in this century and upgraded their OS within the last 3 years" spending extra money and time to cater to the small portion of that would be impacted by the lack of universality and would care enough about it to not buy because of it is, bluntly, not a good business decision.
When the next big change comes along, you'll find out that you can't play unless you run on intel. Then you are forced to change all at once which creates a big burden. Better to make the changes slowly...
I agree with you. You make the change slowly. You add "UB" to the earliest unfrozen spec you've got. You don't throw your development cycle into chaos retrofitting something that isn't critical.
It may be that Quicken's designers did do something really dumb...like assume macOS will always be big-endian and write tons of code that depends on that assumption...and now they are in a hole and there is debate if it is worth it to upgrade the project.
Or it may be that they hadn't transitioned the project to Xcode before development on 2007 began.
People who are running a machine with such limited resources in this day an age are not likely to have enough apps on it to worry about UB executable sizes.
I don't follow the logic in that statement at all. People who have small, difficult to replace drives are the ones who have the most reason to worry about space consumed by code their machine will never execute. I can store a lot of extra transaction records in the 12MB-or-whatever that a non-universal Quicken 2007 isn't taking up.
I didn't say it should be shipping already. I said it should be in progress. They've certainly had enough time to be in progress by now.
Fair enough. I got lost in the context imposed by the thread, which seems to indicate that the version that's available today should be a UB. I agree: any serious developer should have "UB" in any spec that wasn't frozen by the time the MBP was introduced.

[bastion]

But still that gives some sort of indication as to the performance of Rosetta.
Yes, in pretty much a worst-case scenario for the technology. PhotoShop's needs as an app are very atypical, taxing the system overall and relying on various subsystems so heavily that any deviation from "perfect" in the system can be felt almost immediately. That's not what the average user is going to experience in day-to-day use. Anyone can cherry-pick statistics that seem to support their premise, but overall Rosetta and the power of the Intel Macs are making this transition less problematic for the majority of the user base than the PowerPC migration last decade.
I certainly don't want to give the impression that I believe Rosetta is perfect, or that a developer should be taken seriously if they have no plans to move their product line to support current hardware natively. I just don't get why it's so imperative that this release had to be universal given that it does work as-is. Why it even appears to be more important for some people than the lack of features. It really does seem to be far more about principle than about any tangible or compelling need.
Anyway, bottom line is that Intuit missed the boat on this. They had plenty of time to make a UB version ...
Bottom line is that you don't know that, and even if they did having sufficient time to do something doesn't mean that's what you do with that time. I'm about to leave my job to be self-employed. I'm going to suddenly find myself with lots of time, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be careless about where I allocate it.

[NeoX]

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Yes, in pretty much a worst-case scenario for the technology. PhotoShop's needs as an app are very atypical, taxing the system overall and relying on various subsystems so heavily that any deviation from "perfect" in the system can be felt almost immediately.

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Fair enough, but I also mentioned Office. That's not a too terribly taxing app. Quicken is also not a taxing app and you can notice the performance decrease. Also, the performance decrease does affect (or effect /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif) the user experience. I would think that they would want to make the user experience the best they could for all Mac users. A UB would have addressed a portion of this. Apple has sold likely over 3 million intel macs, based on reports and trends, that is nothing to shake a stick at. Wouldn't making a UB version of your app appeal to those that are looking for UB versions of software they purchase?

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I certainly don't want to give the impression that I believe Rosetta is perfect

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Maybe you could get that from the thread, but I didn't think that. The real issue is the speed and there it seems that you think it is on par with native apps, especially faster then any G4, and this is not my experience, nor others it appears...

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Bottom line is that you don't know that

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Just like you don't know that they froze code before the MBP was released. Actually, I am not permitted to comment further on what I know, but suffice it to say that you would be incorrect on that assumption. As I stated earlier, developers have had more then a year to prepare for UB versions and even compile them before intel Macs were released. My guess is that many of them assigned a dev or two to porting and testing code at that point. Personally I know this is the case for at least a few devs that I have talked to in the past.

[Steve_S]

"Saving Quicken data files is disk-bound."
It's at least partially disk bound, but it's also CPU bound. I can demonstrate this by saving large files from two different computers to the same external drive.

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So the asnwer to "why" is "because?"

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Perhaps you're experiencing a reading comprehension issue. I clearly mentioned other relevant issues such as the resource overhead of Rosetta prior to the less tangible issues.

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Generating a UB of any app more complex than Apple's currency converter Cocoa demo is not free.

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Who's arguing this point? It is for this reason that everyone doesn't expect automatic free updates to their existing software. However, it IS a reasonable assumption that vendors should create UBs with the next major (paid) update.

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Where's the real benefit to Intuit and their users to justify the expense of a UB build at this time?

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That's a good point. There isn't much of a benefit for Intuit to put any real effort into their product. Apple bundles the app with it's consumer products and there is generally little reason to update to each yearly release. Further, we're in an unfortunate situation whereby there is no real competition in this market. I have high hopes for products like iBank, etc. but I'm not holding my breath either. I doubt Intuit sells very many retail copies of Quicken, so to your point, there is little reason for them to do much for the Mac market.

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ey're not ignoring them. They're consiously declining to spend the resources on a UB version at this time for the stated and very credible reason that there's no tangible reason to do so.

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You're a bit misguided here. There is a tangible reason to to a UB version. Both for performance and for sales reasons. Anecdotally, most people I know with Intel based Macs will not purchase any new software that is not a UB.
Really, the desire for native applications should be common sense to most. The difference in performance and memory overhead (via Rosetta) is a known fact. Yet, you're trying to make everyone defend the need for native applications?? Bizarre. You haven't made a valid case for why we don't need native apps. Why don't you work on that for a while.
Steve

[bastion]

Who's arguing this point?
It's implicit in the assertions that Quicken 2007, released in August 2006, should be a UB. People may not realize that's part of their argument, but it's inescapable.
However, it IS a reasonable assumption that vendors should create UBs with the next major (paid) update.
It's a common assumption. Whether it's reasonable is highly circumstantial. I don't think it was reasonable for the product under discussion here.
Bizarre. You haven't made a valid case for why we don't need native apps.
I was under the impression that the side advocating change was the one that needed to defend their position. Change being more immediately costly, after all.
I wasn't trying to say that we, as users, don't want or need native apps. I'm pointing out that Intuit, as a developer, didn't perceive a whole lot of incentive to release Quicken 2007 as a UB. They said as much months before release. Their perception may well have been wrong, but given the information available during the development of this product, their decision not to release the product as a UB is at least as reasonable as the assumption that it "should" be.