Quicken 2007 For Mac Lacks EV Cert Support 108
adamengst writes "If your bank uses the Extended Validation certificates that require a higher level of identity checking on the certificate authority's part (as at least one Seattle bank does), you may not be able to download transactions using the Mac version of Quicken. Quicken doesn't gracefully ignore extra information in EV certificates as older Web browsers do, but instead throws an error and refuses to download transactions. Intuit says they're working on a fix — but users may have to wait 'a couple of months,' and even then the fix may not be applied to versions before Quicken 2007."
Is this really "stuff that matters"? (Score:2)
I mean, it's a bug, and it's being worked on. So what's the big deal?
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what if it was "news for nerds"?
don't nerds like to know about bugs and how they're being worked on?
does everything have to be a big deal?
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I can't wake up in the morning if there isn't something to completely freak out about in the tech world
i have a problem :(
Re:Is this really "stuff that matters"? (Score:5, Informative)
It's Quicken, arguably the largest personal finance software developer giving paying customers the cold shoulder.
This isn't even a "bug" in as much as they decided they would ignore the issue on the Mac platform in hopes that they could just point at the (*still* unfinished) Mac product and say "there's your patch buddy, $60 please".
On the up side, this is not nearly as wide spread a problem as it might be. Based on my own experience there are a not insignificant number of Macintosh based Quicken users that bought Parallels and an XP license just to run Quicken for windows.
No baloney, I know 5 and I didn't even suggest it to them.
The OS X product sucks that bad.
It's the bitterness that lasts (Score:5, Interesting)
One more thing...
Quicken Online... Their free product... It works better than the for $ product on the shelf.
It actually gets QFX files from your bank (even if you're on a mac). The primary reason those Parallels users switched in the first place.
Sure there are a few features missing, but it's a product that caters directly to a growing market segment that all other financial products ignore.
People living paycheck to paycheck. Not because it's free. Because it's features are built around telling you how you are going to make it to the next paycheck.
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So your are willing to put your private personal data *online* in the hands of a company you already known is incompetent.
Intuit must think its customers are really dumb.
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You left out those of us who bought VMWare Fusion and an XP license (well, okay, used my university site license) just to run Quicken for Windows.
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This isn't even a "bug" in as much as they decided they would ignore the issue on the Mac platform in hopes that they could just point at the (*still* unfinished) Mac product and say "there's your patch buddy, $60 please".
I'm assuming you're referring to the "still unfinished" successor to Quicken 2007 as a "patch." To be fair to Intuit, the next version is a a rewrite "from the ground up" in Cocoa [arstechnica.com], so it's hardly a patch.
The OS X product sucks that bad.
That's for sure (the 2007 version). Also, a Cocoa rewrite doesn't guarantee the next version won't suck.
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Bug in very popular software that is a show stopper for many users, and you will have to upgrade to a VERY recent version to get the fix, even when it becomes available.
How do you expect them to make money if you keep using an old version, just because it works for you? Now it does not work for you!
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easy fix (Score:3, Insightful)
don't use quicken
Re:easy fix (Score:5, Informative)
It's a good product line, to be sure, but they're stuck in the incremental upgrades cycle a la Madden football, and it's starting to stink.
Re:easy fix (Score:4, Interesting)
When I moved from Windows to Mac three or four years ago, one big sticking point was losing Quicken (because the Mac version, even to a relative naive person such as myself, was so very obviously sub-par). I ended up going with MoneyDance [moneydance.com] -- and because it's cross-platform compatible, as I slowly switch from Mac to Linux, I won't be stuck out in the cold again.
And they do respond to bug reports. It isn't free (as in beer or as in open source), but it was less expensive and have gotten numerous upgrades without having to buy a new license.
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1, The first of January makes life easy, so *use* it! As in, by Jan 3rd - 5th you will have very, very little paper to 'balance' the books with, so Do It, and Stay on Top of It (like a hawk) and the repetition over time, plus relatively small workload of a few items of paper to balance and account for, download from the bank, etc. works in your favor. Much easier than 'catching up' later in the year.
2, I did the above
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Rolling your own solution?! All financial software (that I have ever used) is awful, because it is intended to be an accounting tool. We use QB as well, but mainly as a broad brush tool. Things like project-based accounting are stuck in spreadsheets. Is there really a better way yet? Curious about what you are doing for your solution.
In Australia (Score:4, Funny)
We have *zero* banks that support Online Transactions. *ZERO*.
Oh, and we can't visit porn sites.
Re:In Australia (Score:4, Funny)
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... and nothing of value was lost. Except the online transaction part, that is.
Intuit's Mac support stinks anyway, these days.... (Score:5, Informative)
Quickbooks Pro 2009? No Mac version to be found yet.
Quicken? No 2008 or 2009 version for the Mac! 2007 is *still* the latest one they offer! WTF?
They've been promising they're going to replace Quicken for Mac with a whole new financial management product, but it's not even scheduled for release until Summer of 2009!
http://quicken.intuit.com/personal-finance/mac-personal-finance.jsp [intuit.com]
Personally, I'm looking at switching over to a shareware product called iBank. It can import all your info from Quicken, looks MUCH nicer, and actually has regular updates:
http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibank/ [iggsoftware.com]
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I was drawn to mint.com by the lack of fincancial software on OS X. I'm sorely dissappointed with it. Here are my main gripes.
Re:Intuit's Mac support stinks anyway, these days. (Score:5, Insightful)
New Flash!!
Mac users have always been second-class computer users. Mac gets fewer games made for them and fewer applications made for them. The applications that do get made for them have decreased functionality, service or support in some way. This is especially true when there is a Windows version of the same. (* insert microsoft conspiracy theory here *) But given the recent surge in Mac netizenship, it is past time for these vendors to start paying more attention to Mac users. But it wouldn't hurt to join some users groups and start circulating petitions... and if those fail to get notice, pool a VERY large amount of money and contribute heavily to open source products with emphasis on the features and functions most needed and most missing in the commercially negligent. I'll bet some $20 donations from individuals could amount to a LOT of money fast -- just make sure that Intuit and other vendors know that you're doing it. They say that voting with your dollars makes a difference, but I think if they see that open source is their competitor, it will get a LOT more attention.
There are certain exclusions to this, of course -- forget about ever begging Microsoft to write a more feature complete version of Office for Mac. It is NEVER going to happen. Instead, skip right by the begging/petitioning stage and advance DIRECTLY to supporting Open Source projects.
When large sums of money are pooled prior to donation, you have the power to help steer a project in ways that smaller, individual donations would not receive.
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I might have said the same thing, but lately, the quality of Adobe Creative Suite has REALLY started to fail... both on the Windows and Mac sides. Users are coming up with great interpretations of what "CS" means. "Crappy Suite" "Creative Shit" and all sorts of things like that. As the product grows, it seems to get less stable. Once again, this is true both on Windows and Mac as I support both platforms and both have similar problems.
I am not familiar with other "art" software used by Mac users... at l
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Hmm. With one or two exceptions, I actually prefer the mac version of MS Office (the most recent version notwithstanding...it's a huge step backwards)
Apparently, the mac version of office is hugely profitable for Microsoft. It'd be foolish of them to discontinue it, especially given that it'd hand a huge segment of the market to a competitor.
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Yes, but if only Entourage version would do ALL the things with Exchange server that Outlook will do. But in one respect I like Entourage better -- you can have MULTIPLE Exchange accounts under Entourage. Only one MAPI account per user on a Windows box. (What the hell were they thinking?!)
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Actually, Entourage* in my situation has one advantage over Outlook. My school's email is Exchange, and the only way to access it is over Outlook Web Access. Entourage hooks in to it (and my other email accounts) no problem. On the other hand, I've been totally unable to get Outlook to do the same.
*Evolution also supported this, but it's not compatible with Exchange '07.
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You can have multiple MAPI profiles as well as open additional mailboxes within a single MAPI profile. You need rights to the other mailboxes, but it's not that complicated.
I do agree with the broader complaint, though, that it would be nice if worked in more straightforward manner.
I wish MAPI would die and be replaced with something else; my favorite has always been an enhanced & extended IMAP.
Ummm (Score:2)
Having seen the trouble other programs have with importing Quicken data, I'd say we need to petition them to fully document their file formats. Otherwise, people will feel trapped and unable to migrate to Mac or Linux (WINE notwithstanding) if they want to use all of their old account data.
re: Mac as 2nd. class citizen (Score:2)
Sometimes what you propose can work, but honestly? I don't think so with a "flagship product" like Microsoft Office.
People generally aren't buying it because they think it's the best tool for the job. They buy it because they're afraid using anything else will be less compatible with all the documents out there.
Years after the open source advocates pushed for using OpenOffice instead of MS Office, you still see pretty much every college student buying a copy of MS Office for their new Macbook notebook. T
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I beg to differ about the second class citizen part. As a former Windows user there is no good Windows complement of some of the Mac software I have, especially GarageBand, TextMate and Xtorrent. If you're basing your opinion on Quicken just know that I gave up on Quicken back when I was still running Windows 2000. It was terrible.
Source code (Score:2)
3 years, that's basically starting from scratch.
Their source code must have really been a mess.
It makes absolutely no sense (Score:2)
Quicken for Windows is a nasty tangled beast, and mainly that is because of its custom UI. You can actually see it painting the display in agonizing detail on machines 1.5GHz. Clearly they are not getting much use out of standard Microsoft libraries.
Why, then, not jump to Java as other apps are doing? Moneydance, an up-and coming program with most of Quicken's functions runs on any desktop platform because of Java. Its easily 5x as nimble as Quicken too.
FWIW, my bf uses Quicken and is moving to Linux. We ha
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I don't use either, but the words "Java" and "nimble" are enough to describe how bad Quicken is.
You should take the advice of others here (Score:2)
...and try MoneyDance. [moneydance.com]
It has online functions, will run on any desktop platform, and (unlike Quicken) its file formats are fully documented/open which will help prevent your data from being held captive by that program.
Also your sensitive data stays on your computer, not sitting on the software vendor's server waiting for god-knows-what to happen.
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Certificate FAIL trifecta in play? (Score:2)
So earlier, browsers happily accept a forged cert, and now Quicken bails on "double secret probation" certs issued by some CAs? Methinks there's a fundamental problem here...
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We are talking about a company that charges banks extra licensing fees to distribute identical (to the Windows version) QFX files to Macintosh users.
I mentioned it above, but I really do think it's true. Quicken 2008 (excuse me Financial Life with cover flow BS) for Mac was supposed to be released a long time ago. The patch was supposed to be a $60 upgrade.
Pfffft (Score:5, Insightful)
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GnuCash doesn't support EV Certificates either, which is what this story is about, so I have no idea what your point is besides general smugness.
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What are you talking about? GnuCash uses Perl's LWP for HTTP transactions, which generally uses the Net::SSLeay (or similar) interface to OpenSSL, which supports (i.e. can parse, validate, and generate) EV certificates without a problem.
So I have no idea what your point is either than "troll, troll troll".
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TFA is talking about the OFX interface to their bank not working. OFX in GnuCash is handled by the aqbanking library, which switched to using gnutls rather than OpenSSL a while ago. I didn't find any specific mention of EV certificates on the GNU TLS [gnu.org] web page, but since it does support X.509 certificates I wouldn't expect there to be a problem.
I suspect the post you labeled a troll is in fact just someone who has an earlier version of GnuCash and/or aqbanking that's not setup correctly, because it's only
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Does GnuCash actually choke on EV certs, though? That would be surprising.
And, at least in the case of GnuCash, fixable.
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I'm not going to fork over $50 just so some company can sell me a few hundred megabytes to balance my checkbook. That's what GNU Cash [gnucash.org] is for!!
I thought that was what OpenOffice.org Calc was for. Seriously, I don't run my own business, so a spreadsheet is good enough for me.
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Cute, but two things:
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One thing that HAS changed is stock price downloads. You'll see what I mean in 2010 when your 2006 Quicken stops downloading quotes - what Intuit calls "sunsetting" and I call "extortion."
Quicken-Everything is pretty awful. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quicken-Everything is pretty awful. (Score:4, Insightful)
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That said, yes, it is a deficiency that's just not acceptable for some people.
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And giving your password to Qucken.app is any better? They could be emailing your credentials to a hotmail address for all you know.
Quickbooks (Score:2)
Quickbooks, for those of us who aren't accountants, really kicks some serious ass. Everything about it is easy, from accounts receivable, to accounts payable, to payroll, to customer statements, to financial statements, to inventory, to every damn thing.
I hate accounting, and Quickbooks makes it so easy that I don't have to spend much of my time at it.
Just wondering.... (Score:5, Informative)
Wouldn't offering this as an update to '07 break Intuit's business model of requiring full-price purchases to get updates that should be free?
OT -- sig commentary (Score:2)
Nice sig, Kenshin, but for one minor quibble -- osake means booze in general, *including* beer. If you just mean rice wine, use sake instead. :)
"Ima wa, kyuuto ga nijuu paasento appu!"
Cheers,
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Or to be absolutely correct, try nihonshu.
Has anyone noticed that Slashdot fails with Unicode? The Kanji for nihonshu turns into "æ--¥æoeé...'".
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Yah, I'm not sure why, but the Slashdot devs never made the site Unicode-compatible. Not even regular Latin accented characters work properly unless entered as the HTML entities, like "á" instead of just "á", which can make copy-and-paste from other threads a bit tricky. And then some entities fail outright, like "ā", which just vanishes when rendered by slashcode: "". I suspect it might have something to do with string processing and maybe how their DB backend works, but that
Apple should just write a Personal Finance app... (Score:1, Interesting)
They own the database tech.
They can reuse a lot of code from their office apps.
The various financial protocols for electronic banking are straightforward [and yes, I've written to them.]
It would fit in with the "iLife suite." There's even a lot of opportunity for .Me tie ins, syncing; iphone; etc.
Seems like a no brainer.
Re:Apple should just write a Personal Finance app. (Score:1)
one of their demo/sample code projects is a little app called iSpend. It's very simple and would need work to be usable, let alone a competitor, but I agree with your sentiment.
What Have You Done For Me Today? (Score:2, Informative)
So, now that they're all rich an famous and stuff, Intuit has convenien
From the Wikipedia Article: (Score:3, Interesting)
Intuit's focus on usability and customer support in its early years was legendary. [citation needed]
'Nuff said.
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[citation needed]
I really hate Intuit (Score:5, Interesting)
I use Quicken as nothing more than a glorified check register where I enter everything manually, so none of their sunsetting-features-to-force-upgrades shenanigans ever bit me. Having said that, it still pisses me off what a half-assed product Mac Quicken has always been, and it *really* grinds my gears that Bill Campbell sits on their board *and* Apple's board and *still* the Mac gets short shrift. I don't know how Jobs hasn't broken his foot off in someone's ass about it-- especially since people have their lives in Quicken, and the fact that it's a HUGE pain in the ass to migrate from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac has probably dissuaded more than a few people from switching to Mac. I don't know what's so fucking hard about using cross-platform data file formats and providing 100% feature parity with the Windows version, I really don't.
I wish Apple would roll their own financial iApp as a shot across Intuit's bow, to get them to straighten up and fly right.
~Philly
IMO: Intuit competition is desperately needed (Score:4, Informative)
Intuit has about 80% of the US SMB market, in spite of the fact that they suck. Intuits hates to fully support any non-microsoft platforms. I really wish there was a good alternative. Intuit actually has me hoping that microsoft's office-accounting will get some traction.
A f/oss alternative would be ideal. But, for some reason, there does not seem to be any worthwhile f/oss alternative.
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Xero seems to be one among many web-based services that will introduce issues of uptime and privacy, which for myself (and hopefully most people reading this) are frankly unacceptable.
Good Luck With That (Score:2)
Intuit has about 80% of the US SMB market, in spite of the fact that they suck.
Quickbooks has their insane market share because Quickbooks is, hands down, the best SMB accounting package.
I wish I could possibly tell you how much my life has improved since converting from Peachtree (which I got free after rebate) to Quickbooks (which I paid full price for). It really is that much better. I used to fall way behind in my books because of how much I dreaded fighting with Peachtree. Quickbooks just works.
Competition is a good thing, and I'd love to see someone else raising the bar, but
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Wow is my experience/opinion different from yours!
I find Quickbooks to be just horrible. I use the Windows version (under VMWare Fusion on my Mac) because the Mac version doesn't even pretend to support the only thing I still use it for (the credit card billing). But even the Windows version (which all of the following is about)...
Well, it is full of just plain bugs. For example, there is an obvious trivial bug in the forms entry for credit card expiration date for a customer's preferred payment method. The
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Which bank do you use? I download transactions from B of A with no problems. Could the problem be with your bank?
I didn't mean to imply that I thought QB was perfect, but just try Peachtree once and you'll see what I mean. QB just blows Peachtree out of the water.
I'm Missing Something (Score:1)
So quicken gets security related data back while doing something and doesn't "gracefully" ignore it. Instead it lets the user know that something is wrong and refuses to allow anything happen. Isn't this what its supposed to do?
"Gracefully" ignoring this type of thing while potentially convenient strikes me as somewhat like ignoring buffer overruns. We all know how convenient that security related decision has been.
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"Gracefully" would be informing the user of the issue and allowing them to say "Screw it. This needs to get done NOW, insecure or not. Not X months from now when they get around to fixing it."
On Slashdot? (Score:2, Insightful)
There are alternatives... (Score:3, Informative)
Intuit is dead to me. I use Moneydance [moneydance.com]. It's cross-platform (try the demo) and works great. Imports wonderfully from Quicken. Aside from that, there are many [maxprog.com] many [benandruby.com] many [fastforwardsw.com] many [fortora.com] options for mac. And quite a number of good ones [sourceforge.net] for Linux too. There's even GPL'd GnuCash [gnucash.org] for more sophisticated accounting.
And because I don't like Intuit, here's an offtopic tip-- did you know that thanks to a certain pre-Bush president, any company who wants to sell tax efiling software also has to provide free tax filing [irs.gov] to the general public? Because if you think about it, why the hell are IRS tax filing servers (paid for by the public) not made available to the public? Rather, only certain corporations who then SELL their services to the public to use them? Seems a little unfairly tilted towards big business, doesn't it? Wouldn't you think the government would provide software to the public directly?
Well the Clinton administration thought so too, but negotiated with Intuit and others [irs.gov] to let them keep their oily grip on the tax filing software in exchange for this "free filing software" deal. Never heard of it? Well, they certainly don't advertise it widely. And I've noticed that in years past they've lowered the maximum income to qualify. Currently it's an adjusted gross income of $54,000.
According to the web site, more info for this year becomes available January 16th.
Pass it on. The more you know...
Has to be an out and out bug. (Score:3, Informative)
Unless the program has the code to recognize EV certs (which requires tables of valid issuers [wikipedia.org]) it can't distinguish between them and ordinary certificates. So, if there's trouble with EV certs, it means suppport was added, but botched.
Not making it platform independent is stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of all the applications that could be made in a platform independent language such as Java Quicken/Quickbooks would be high on the list. No massive requirement for graphics modest processing of data, displaying of pleasant however mostly simple forms. Its value is in all the exceptions and rules it uses to follow.
Not porting to Java is a stupid move for this app. Besides allowing Mac, Linux, Windows or whatever user ability to access the app and sell more copies and have the same version across them. There is less work on their part having a Mac Unit and a windows unit all trying to to get each part working, probably having to get lessons learned relearned across each platform. Going with Java or some other platform independent way of processing common logic.
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You're thinking like a programmer, not a business.
Porting costs money for something the majority of your users don't care about and which the minority affected can at this point do nothing. When the market share that competitive products on the Mac amounts to a more money than it costs to do something, they'll do that thing, which will be the cheapest thing they can do to address the problem. Which won't be a complete rewrite.
That kind of thing only happens when people who care about the product itself
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When the market share that competitive products on the Mac amounts to a more money than it costs to do something, they'll do that thing, which will be the cheapest thing they can do to address the problem. Which won't be a complete rewrite.
Then again you gotta spend money to make money, don't throw good money after bad, and invest in long-term gain. The story absolutely addresses the idea of doing the cheapest thing, which is not always the cheapest in the long run. That is to say: maintaining multiple plat
Use quicken for Windows before Mac (Score:3, Interesting)
From everyone I've talked to they say Quicken for Mac isn't worth using over the Windows version. So Install XP Home on VirtualBox and then run the Windows version of Quicken if you must. Mac users are 2nd class citizens to Intuit and that shouldn't be supported.
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So Install XP Home on VirtualBox and then run the Windows version of Quicken if you must.
I'd use XP Pro, or, more likely, Wine. But whatever...
Mac users are 2nd class citizens to Intuit and that shouldn't be supported.
Erm, WTF?!
Ok, that behavior is basically telling Intuit, "Hey, you don't have to support the Mac after all! Your Mac users are so desperate for your product, they'll do the work for you -- including spending hundreds of dollars on Windows and virtual machine software!"
No, if you actually don't want to support them, don't buy their software. Give that money, instead, to an open source project (like GnuCash, say), or find someone else -- there are a few in
I wouldn't feel too bad for Mac users... (Score:3, Informative)
After all, it's not like they don't have someplace to look for alternatives. Apple itself [apple.com] has a whole section on their downloads website dedicated to third party business and financial software. This includes freebies, shareware, and demo versions of larger, more robust packages that they can try out. (Yeah, I know, that covers everything.)
Can anyone recommend any of the software available in there? I need to recommend something for my parents sooner or later too, come to think of it, and the 2006 version I'm using now is getting a little hoary.
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People still use quicken? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bank accounts, bonds, stocks, and most other items in your portfolio can be viewed online nowadays so why are people still using quicken to track this stuff? It was the cat's meow in the 90's when you didn't have access to all of your financial information online, but nowadays I got better things to do than type in or download all my financial transactions each week. Besides, most peoples' spending and savings habits don't change whether you use financial software or use not...software ain't going to make you a great investor.
but it could make you a good saver/spender (Score:2)
Quicken, like all similar financial software, is designed to allow you to see what your income is, what your outflows are, make estimates, and gauge in a moment whether you have the money or not to do something. That's an incredibly valuable tool, one that most anal ./ers (should) respect. Quicken just happens to be the biggest name out there. Quicken is not about making good investments. Quicken is about being able to see your net worth in a moment and make spending and saving judgements based on what
Mvelopes.com (Score:2)
To add myself to the set of Quicken alternative comments, I'd like to promote Mvelopes.com. It's an easy-to-use software as a service (SaaS) solution that runs as a full-page Flash application and uses a proactive budgeting approach rather than Quicken et al's reactive budgeting approach. With mobile browser access, it's possible to check the balance of each virtual envelope before making purchases, which helps make it proactive -- you can avoid spending money in the first place if the current balance of th
missing tag: !QA (Score:2)
This is a failure of either the QA team who simply didn't bother testing on a mac, or they did test it and reported the bug, but (as SO often in software dev) the mac is seen as a "fringe" platform and the time spent fixing / retesting it would blow the milestone and/or due date to GM the product, and the PHB's would a
Avoid Intuit (Score:2)
I made the mistake of buying Quicken when I moved from Linux to mac a few years ago. It sucked. I won't buy from intuit again until there is feature parity.
The free options don't meet my needs, I want more investment tracking. So I'll stick with my spreadsheet for now.
Support for Quicken/Quickbooks is bad... (Score:1)
I have used Quickbooks for the past 13 years and I must say that the support for fixing features and getting new features added to quickbooks really sucks. I know this first hand as I have requested features several years back and still they did not implement it.
Quicken may be a yearly purchase but Quickbooks is setup as a subscription system and even though I have requested features, they do not want to implement simple features like Customized Duplex invoice printing, FIFO/Average cost pricing, or some s