OSX Environment and IE

In our vision for an All-Mac office we sort of expected to be able to pull that off without any bumps. I mentioned previously that I ran into early bumps of some office environment management apps that required windows. Later I found out that our bank (Silicon Valley Bank) and our payroll group (ADP) both have web sites that are not friendly to non-Windows/Internet Explorer environments. I proceeded to setup a new VM with Vista Home ($199 for the full install) for our office admin to run just for IE for these sites but otherwise to use the Mac side of things. When you run into mainstream companies that lack support for non-Windows platforms with their websites you really get a sense of the size of the Linux/OSX market on the business side of things.

Another thing i'm amazed at is that Vista Business sells for $300, but I can buy a full Netbook with Vista Home for $300, or a Dell Inspirion 531 with Vista Home for $249. Vista Home sells for $199 for a fresh install which is required for VM use. So the hardware is worth $49. You can setup a VM for $199 or you can have dedicated hardware for $249. While I went the VM approach mostly because I dont want more hardware to deal with (power, cooling, all that) the economics just don't make sense. 

EveryTrail

Just got back from a bike ride with the kid. Got to use my new iPhone attachment for the bike and EveryTrail iPhone app. Thats a nice combination and lets you keep track of rides.

Ride with Lydia

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

Netflix, Flexplay, and RedBox

I'm currently a Netflix subscriber (cheap plan, 1 out at a month unlimited with Blu-Ray = $10.99/month). I average about 3 movies a month. This means each movie costs me about $3.65 to watch. Whenever possible I watch them in BluRay format. 

The other day I noticed how many RedBox outlets there are around where I travel. Gas stations, grocery stores etc. With RedBox you pay $1/night and you can reserve movies. They have pretty current movies, but no BluRay options. There's no subscription fees and you only pay for what you use. This could possibly drop my monthly cost, but i'd have to know in advance that i'd be able to watch a movie in a given night or i'd end up paying for an extra night (and feel the pressure to watch soon). The fact that the price can stack up if you don't watch it once you take it out puts me off. The lack of BluRay is disappointing too. 

Shortly after running into RedBox I noticed a 48-hour self destructing DVD option at Staples called FlexPlay. It chemically self destructs its playability (in a way that doesn't break your DVD player) 48 hours after you open it. Staples generally sells the disks for $1. The outlets aren't as convenient (in this case tied to Staples store hours) and the movies aren't usually as new as Netflix and RedBox (or updated as frequently). On the positive side your expense is capped at $1/movie and you can "queue" them up by buying several and having them handy and watch whatever suits your mood. If you rent via their web site they "rent" the movies at $4.99, they're not going to win the war with that kind of pricing. At $1 and with more outlets I can see how they could be competitive with RedBox. With the limited availability, older movies, and poor pricing direct they're out.

Ok, you're probably wondering why I dont just do video-on-demand and pay just for what I watch. A couple reasons, my bankruptcy-declaring cable company charges $5.99 per rental (HD). Thats more than my average cost via NetFlix. In addition, their movie selection is worse than Netflix and RedBox. And finally about 50% of the time there are issues with the video on demand playback.

Currently NetFlix appears to be the best option as it gives me the most flexibility when I play the movies and the quality/availability of what I want. Its largest downside is the fact that I have to wait 3-4 days after watching one to watch another. I could pay more to have more flexibility but given how few I watch it doesnt seem worth it. If someone could deliver HD video on demand at an equivalent cost to NetFlix then i'd switch but given where I live and the monopoly of the local TV provider, i'm stuck for a while.

iTunes Music Video Playing Problems

If you happen to be having problems playing music videos in iTunes I
found an odd behavior: If you use multiple speakers normally for
playing music, then Videos won't play when you have multiple speakers
selected. You have to choose just the speakers of your mac and then
the videos will play. Seems like a bug to me -- there should at least
be a warning.

Side track - The Mace

A side track from my ramblings on IT setup. Why is this blog called "The Mace's Musings"? What/Who is "The Mace"?

This goes back to high school in the days where the internet barely existed and computer bulletin board systems (BBS) were the gathering spots of the geeks like me. Basically they were computers with modems attached to phone lines that one person at a time could call from their computer to that BBS and post their comments/download stuff and log off for the next person. Some more advanced ones had multiple lines but that was pretty rare in the early days. Back then they were places to chat with people, but more often than not they were used to distribute "Warez" or software. For the most part, in those days, there wasnt much freeware/shareware and the bulk of software getting downloaded was commercial/stolen. Those were the days of 300 baud apple cat modems (with a later huge upgrade to 1200 baud) and software applications that fit on a floppy. Still downloads took forever and new file transfer protocols like xmodem and zmodem were being pushed to help speed things up and recover from broken connections etc. There was a huge culture around all of this and it was mostly an Apple II/Apple Cat world.

Anyway, I started with my Apple II and a modem and started dialing into the BBS's. Back then everyone used a handle so nobody knew who really was downloading the software etc. The handle was your bulletin board identity and people and groups like the Legion of Doom had them and became well known in the community. 

I was in my basement one day with a good friend and we both were getting started in the community and figured we needed handles. He was into comic books, especially "Thor" and picked Odin, a Nordic god associated with war. We both liked the war and fantasy games like Wizardry. My choice was a weapon, a mace, personified to The Mace. The choice was both due to the weapon(ness) of it as well as an indirect reference to my last name.

From there I used this new handle and visited many BBS's across the country and eventually ran my own, starting with a single one and eventually franchising out to multiple states and I became fairly well known for a while. I dropped off the grid when I turned 17 and decided to follow a more legal path in life. I heavily modified some base BBS software to give my own stuff its own unique feel and draw and this was the beginning of any real programming with a purpose for me.

So thats where The Mace came from. 

As an amusing aside, about 20 years after I picked "The Mace", I was chatting with someone who worked for me at work many states away from where I grew up and we were talking about the early days in computers. We eventually got around to BBS's and he found out I was "The Mace". He had frequented my system and knew who "The Mace" was. Small world.

Those formative years in remote connections, tunneling through AT&T's computers, hacking/crack systems, distributed work, and programming have shown their influence on me for the last 20 years. While i'm not proud of some of it, I wouldn't be who I am without it.

OSX Server Day 1

Now that we were limping along from an IT perspective it was time to get a real server created. I took my OSX Server, 10 Client edition, popped it in my new MacPro (Nehalem) turned it on and got a white screen. Nothing. Odd. I booted off the pre-installed Leopard and it was fine. So from there I decided to just install it from the CD versus booting the CD. It installed fine and I rebooted and had OSX server. Then I was presented with a LOT of system management options and terminology and concepts I didn't know. I thought OSX server was supposed to be easy? Turns out there are 3 modes to OSX server - Standard (simple), Workgroup, and Advanced. When you install the way I had to it treats it as a server upgrade and forces advanced mode. 

Why couldn't I boot the CD? Turns out the OSX server I bought (several months ago) was older than the hardware I had just bought and was missing drivers etc and I could not swap the disk for a newer one without paying $500 to apple again. This was nuts, I got on the phone and after speaking to 5 Apple people (just to get to the correct department), I got told that since my OSX server was purchased a while back, and even though it wasn't used, they shouldn't be supporting me. Nice, so much for planning ahead. But then they said, if you do the install by booting Leopard and then running only a piece of the OSX server install package it may let me avoid advanced mode. I got one blurb from them on how to do this:

"Install OS X client onto unit, creating an admin user with the name & password that you want on the server. 

Update all SW and then insert OS X Server install disc into unit. 

Go to Finder>Go>Volumes.

The name of the metapackage file to be run is "MacOSXServerInstall.mpkg", which is located in /Volumes/Mac OS X Server Install Disc/System/Installation/Packages.

Run this metapackage file to install OS X Server on unit. "

Nevermind the fact that this information was limited and flawed, it gave me just enough to find the package I needed. The best way I found was to do this through the terminal and then "open" the referenced package. After doing this I got OSX server setup in the way it was meant to be. 

It took a great deal of time because each attempt required OSX updates (over my crazy aircard setup) as well as OSX server updates. A few times as they were setting up the rest of my network I had wrong IP addresses/configurations which were difficult to change in OSX server so I had the pleasure of doing this several times.

In the end I think the steps are something like this (none of which I could find with google searches):

1) Boot Leopard install CD (even if your new MacPro has Leopard pre-installed)

2) Go into disk utility and set up your disks the way you want (OSX server install would have had this step but you can't boot that). Your options may be more limited than OSX server but I had 4 1TB drives and created 2 mirrored 1TB volumes. One I called "OS" and one I called "Data". I'm so creative.

3) Now install Leopard and do all the updates. If you're doing this with an Aircard bring a good book.

4) Now, while logged into leopard after all the updates/reboots are done, put in the OSX server CD and run the package above. You'll walk through OSX server install. Oddly it doesnt force a reboot. 

5) Next, don't do any updates (if you do, start over at #1 - found that the hard way), eject CD and reboot.

6) Now you get the OSX server install screen asking you about standard (stand alone) vs workgroup vs advanced. I originally chose standard but later found out I should have chosen workgroup so I started over again.

7) Now once it comes up you can do the OSX server update (another 200MB+ over the aircard). Note that if you plan on making mistakes like I did its helpful to download these update packages and squirrel them away (I put them on the data drive that I wasn't wiping on each attempt).

8) Now you have an installed OSX server. Time to figure out what it can and cant do. Thats for another episode.

The alternative is to buy/get an OSX server CD that works with your hardware. My first experience with OSX server has not been pleasant.

IT early pains

With our new office we rented space and I hired a group (Rockport Technology Group) to come in and do the wiring, phones and basic network setup. They're a great bunch of guys that i've used before and they always do a first class job. What I was left with was a CISCO ASA5505 firewall, 2 Cisco 521 WAPs, a 48 port GigE switch, a Nortel BCM 50 phone system and a Keyscan card reader system for physical security. 

With that gear I have a wired and wireless network as well as phones and card access for my office which can sit about 40 people. Note that I haven't mentioned an internet connection. Thats because we don't have one yet (!). I ordered dual T1 lines from Verizon, but T1s take time (4-6 weeks). The fallback was Comcast since they were supposedly in the building already and had a 2-3 day install time. Even though they pre-certified the site/install when the guys turned up they found no Comcast in the building. They said they need to run cable to the building and they need to wait for the ground to thaw first (yes, though its April our ground is frozen after you get down a few inches -- welcome to New England). So I cancelled that order. I had had 5 phone lines installed by Verizon for the normal phone system so we asked them to convert one to DSL. You'd think that would be fast, but it takes Verizon 7-10 days to do that too. The DSL should be live next Tuesday. The T1's follow 3-4 weeks later.

So I have an office full of people that need internet access, what do I do? My crazy fallback idea from the beginning was to use my Verizon Aircard. I bought it a while back and used it to be on the net at all times, in the car, in airports, etc. Its a decent card and fast. So in the beginning I had it in my MacBookPro and was just doing internet sharing from it to the Airport. Apple makes this dead easy and it works well. The problem is the office space is 7K+ sq ft so there's no hope of covering much range that way. I could try to extend it with other network gear like Apple's airport express but i'd be buying them to use them for a week or two. I could try to bridge it to our new Cisco wifi but that was still coming online and having its own challenges. The other issue was that I needed to use my MacBookPro for stuff and so the network connection would come and go based on what I was doing which didn't help the others.

What I didn't have were any servers set up yet. I had bought 2 of the new Nehalem MacPros to be used for "IT stuff" and decided to use one of them to bridge to the net. I used one with the base Leopard install, installed the aircard and Verizon software and turned on internet sharing bridging the aircard to the wired ethernet port. Since the Cisco WAPs (wireless points) were also connected to the same network, all of a sudden everyone had internet access whether they were on Wifi or wired. The Verizon software (VZ Access Manager) just pain stinks. I have a conspiracy theory on these cell companies and the aircards -- its that when you use too much bandwidth they drop the connection just to see if they can stop the traffic, if nothing else its a brutal throttle. VZAccess doesn't automatically reconnect. But if you look in your network settings when connected with VZaccess, they have a new network location setup with the Verizon modem. In that new location I added in the ethernet port I wanted to share. I also set that location to be my location whether I was connected or not. I then when into the advanced settings of the modem through the OSX network preferences pane and set it up to auto-reconnect, never disconnect etc. With that done the network drops at times but reconnects without my involvement and we've had a productive few days downloading tools, updates, email etc. Its no speed daemon but its something you can live with.

I used that same MacPro to create the VMWare environment for the management apps for the Nortel and Keyscan pieces that I spoke about in my previous post. I also created a basic file shares so we could move things around internally.

Now I needed a real server with permissions for the different elements of the business, that was stable, could be backed up etc. More on that to come.

OSX Office Environment

I've had the fortunate experience (kidding) to become a part time IT guy for my new company. The plan is Mac's all around to limit the IT noise and then virtual machines for those that have some need of Linux/Windows. The basic setup is OSX + MS Office for the Mac + VMWare. Note that despite recent benchmarks of Parallels vs VMWare Fusion I went with VMWare, I did this because like MS Office, they're the leading VM environment and I can download more pre-configured machines etc for that environment than any other. 

The developers need Linux to do their thing and I expected that. What I didn't expect was that some basic applications like the ones to run the Keyscan card key access to the office doors and the Nortel phone system are windows only apps. For those I spent the whopping $300 on Vista Business, installed it in a Windows VM and then installed the apps in there. Generally these infrastructure apps don't need to be running all the time so that makes it even easier. Still, not having web based management or cross-platform apps in this age just shows you how far Apple has to go.

Over the next few posts i'll be talking about my experience in setting up an OSX based office environment and in the process you'll see how little I know about basic IT concepts :)

Cloud Reliability

Building stable cloud services is a difficult thing. Even google is

struggling:

iPhone 3.0

I wont re-state all the iPhone 3.0 features they announced today as others have done that well. But there are a few that to me were key that may not be highlighted by others:

MMS - I left everyone behind on Verizon when I broke my contract and joined AT&T just to get the iPhone. I imagine there are tons of others in that camp. They all send me MMS pictures which are too painful to try to access so I miss all those family pics. 

Voice Memos - An obvious oversight. I wonder though about them putting so many 3rd party guys (iTalk for example) out of business. Why?

Search - Across apps is nice but not needed to me, but within an app like Mail and Calendar its required.

And finally one that not too many are pointing out, I can finally send stuff from my address book on the iPhone to someone else. That was a major one for me.

Note that I didn't point out other things like Copy & Paste, Tethering and some others. They'll be nice but not as basic/fundamental.

Its great to have a phone thats so flexible that they can roll out serious updates like this and do it for free. While the iPhone is still not the best phone on the planet with dropped calls etc, it sure is my favorite electronic device.

Sirius XM almost folded

I 'm on a roll. First I wrote about Apple and the DRM challenges forcing me to buy from Amazon MP3, a short while later Apple went DRM free. Then I wrote about XM radio and its flaws for me, and then they narrowly avoided bankruptcy. Perhaps if the Sirius fools han't done a $500M deal with Howard Stern and other questionable business practices they wouldn't have come so close to losing it all.

As with so many other things, companies need to study and learn their about their customers preferences, likes and dislikes etc and then work with a total focus on meeting the needs of those customers. I'm just one voice with my own set of preferences, but there are common things to learn and do if you study analyze and get to know your customers. Apple, Sirius and others, take note or perish.

Is the mac a gaming platform?

Apple has come a long way with hardware and software and has made significant inroads in its ability to be a desktop system in business. I've been using Macs for work in small and large companies for the last 6 years and its been pretty rare that that's caused me grief (the major point being Exchange/Outlook support which I hope will be fixed in Snow Leopard)

I wish I could say Apple has made a lot of progress on the video game front, but the reality is that it hasn't. Despite having some leading edge Video cards like the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT that  I have in this MacPro and essentially the same Intel-based hardware, there are few games for the Mac. Why is that?

Part, I would say is that Apple has continually ignored the video game industry while MicroSoft with its "Games for Windows" drive and others has encouraged the PC as a gaming platform. So the company is not supportive. Thats a major point.

Next is that the hardware support for games is not complete. I recently spent a lot of time looking for a way to get 5.1 sound on my Mac for gaming. The issue is that you can't get that. Sure it can output 5.1 sound optically from DVDs etc, but generated sound from games cannot be piped over the optical output and you can't buy a card, USB device etc that does it in the current MacPro generations. Griffin Technology did make a FireWave product that outputs sound over FireWire to a device that gives you 5.1 sound output, but both FireWire and the FireWave have been discontinued. So there is no 5.1 sound support for games on the Mac. 

Along similar lines, if you really want the best bleeding edge video cards as they come out from vendors like Nvidia that offer "upgrade" programs so you can continually upgrade your card you're out of luck. The mac hardware lacks the specific power connectors that the current generation video cards require so Mac video cards end up being custom made for Apple. If you could make the power problem work your next issue would be the total lack of video diver support for the platform.

Ok you say, I can use my Mac HW and then run windows games in VMWare or Parallels. Well, no, you can't really, while some DirectX support has been added to the virtualization platforms, the performance and compatibility limit you to games that have fairly modest requirements.

Fine, then just play games under BootCamp and let Windows own the Mac hardware. Well, thats what I do, but you still wont have 5.1 sound or the latest video card. It does well and you can play Far Cry 2, Crysis, etc in this mode, but you wont have as good as an experience you get on a PC. And you're not running OSX and you've paid a premium for Mac HW to get less out of it.

If you're a serious gamer, don't buy a Mac. That's what Apple is telling us. My love of the OS (and dislike of the alternatives) is stronger than my need for the best video gaming experience but I long for the day when Apple either gets "with it" or legalizes the hackintosh.

My good friend recently sold me his MacPro (at a great price!) and went back to the PC. He's a serious gamer. He loves the Mac and hates Windows, but the gamer side of him won. 

Wii Fit

My daughter got a Wii fit for Christmas and i've been amazed with the device. While it looks like a simple slightly raised step platform they've dramatically changed the video game experience with the introduction of this wireless board. When you step on it it knows your weight, and where the weight is placed on the board. From there you can snow board, ski, do push ups, jog etc. While I don't think its a good substitute for a gym (and some are quite upset about it) I do think forcing some more movement into video gaming beyond just the fingers is a great idea. The fit, along with the Wii itself has innovated on the video game front and despite its very dated graphics capabilities it has continued to have a serious impact on the video gaming industry. If you have Wii and dont have a Wii fit, I'd suggest you get one. Not to get in shape, but to experience one more incremental step of progress in the video gaming industry.

iPhoto and Face and Place Recognition

With the latest iPhoto update Apple added two key new features: faces and places. In faces, iPhoto does a decent job of recognizing faces in pictures and then tries to match the patterns to find the people. You give it a few hints and it tries to find more of the same person. For years i've used keywords to identify key people so I can find pictures, say, with myself, my daughter and my wife in them. With faces in theory this is made more automatic. 

My experience though has been a little different. It did force me to tag more pictures and put some structure around the naming of pictures. The actual face similarity piece is about 50/50 in my experience. An odd side benefit I found is that I enjoyed the process and we actually had fun with the program guessing a completely wrong person for a given face. How could my friends face match my sister? Combine that with an OCD tendency and you can entertain yourself for hours matching faces and names. But in the long haul, given the lack of accuracy I don't think the addition added much value and you can't rely on it.

With Places, Apple goes through a lot of trouble to point out GPS camera support and that certainly works with the poor pictures that the iPhone takes. But if you go and stroll through Best Buy, the now defunct Circuit City, or Wal-Mart, how many GPS enabled cameras do you find on the shelves? Zero. None. So is this feature solely aimed at the poor pictures taken on camera phones? If so i'd argue that Apple and iPhoto isn't the place to store them but something more online, more accessible since these cheap shots have limited use and quality.

You can, after import, add location information to your pictures, and again thats another time sink for OCD people and it provides little long term photo management value.

Would I buy the update again knowing what I know now? Probably, I love iPhoto and want to have the latest updates. But if you're buying it for new features, think again.

Voicemail

I'm amazed that in this digital age there are still very few options for managing voice mail for the services I use. My home internet is through Charter Communications which does not provide for emailing voicemail messages or even sending you alerts that you have new messages via txt or email.

On the iPhone there is no software way to export a voice mail despite the much touted visual voicemail feature. You can't export from the phone, or from desktop software, or even through AT&T's web site. This is an oversight that many web sites are complaining about.

Anyway, the quick and dirty solution is as follows:

1) Find a simple 3.5MM male/mail audio cable plugged into the iPhone (easier with a 3G) and into the Line In on your mac. 

2) Make sure "Line In" is selected in the Input tab of your Sound preferences. 

3) Run Garageband, create a new basic track, picking something like "Male Basic" for type

4) Press record at the bottom of the screen and then hit play on the iPhone visual voicemail to record. 

5) When the voicemail play is complete (watch the iPhone screen). press record again in Garageband to stop recording

6) In the menu choose share, export song to disk, choose MP3 and "Good Quality" and give it a name

You can do something equivalent on the PC. I used Garageband because it was there, there are free programs out there for all platforms that can do the garage band steps for you. 

Sounds complex, but this whole process took me 2 mins including finding the cable in the basement and running Garageband for the first time ever (i'm not musically inclined (which is why I like country :) ))

Circuit City

Must be my week for silly things in the mail. I got a Circuit City Advantage (their extended warranty) renewal form in the mail with choices of 1, 2 or 3 years. I always question the value of extended warranties, but in the case where a company has filed for bankruptcy you'd have to be just plan nuts to sign up for this.

With the loss of CompUSA and now Circuit City I wonder if we're heading to an age where there will be no instant gratification for electronics and you'll be relegated to the internet and the good, but not quite as instant, services of NewEgg and Amazon

XM Radio

The concept, advertising free radio you can receive anywhere with high quality, was good. The execution has not been. In multiple cars by multiple providers i've seen poor XM radio reception. And when digital radio doesnt come in it goes out completely, not just fuzzy, but gone. This is on main roads (route 495) in Massachusetts so this isn't an edge case. Its not under a bridge, in a tunnel, its on open highway. 

Then look at stations like XM station 11 (Sirius 61), its full of advertising. Why am I paying to be delivered ads? Oh because SOME of the stations don't do ads. I see.

And now the ultimate insult, they're raising their prices. 

Don't get me wrong, XM has entertained me for my 2+ hour commute for the last few years, but when the 1 year subscription I paid for runs out in May i'm not renewing. While Pandora Radio finally caved in to ads at least its a free service. 

I'm thinking iPhone 3G with a audio out cable and Pandora and i've got my replacement for XM better tuned to what I want to hear. If I want ad-free I buy songs online at $1 each and play the playlist. At the rate I buy songs its cheaper than XM.

Another broken business model. 

Off topic - Disney

I don't usually write about non-technical things on this blog but
having just gotten off the phone with Disney Dining Reservations I
can't resist. The reservation agent was extremely helpful and the
process was as efficient as a human could have been. But my point was
I had to speak to someone. Now all the guide books etc recommend
booking dining spots for your stay in disney and doing that as far in
advance as disney allows so you can get into the places you want. We
like to eat and i'm a planner so we mapped it all out where/when then
I needed to book the 12 reservations. They have NO ONLINE SYSTEM.
Thats NUTS. Can you imagine the volume of calls, duration of calls and
human mistakes they're experiencing with a manual dining booking
system? This should not be a complex technical problem and they have
piles of "Imagineers" on staff. What are they thinking?

And yes, we're off to Disney in April. We promised the kid when she
was 5 we'd take her back when she was 10 (5 year decompression cycle).
With that booking experience complete all we have to do is turn up.

GPS Updates

Today I got an ad in the mail for a GPS update for my Lexus. The GPS update is $265. Sure the Lexus is a luxury car and you should expect to pay more when its involved. But $265 for a $0.50 DVD that they're mass producing? And one thats out of date the day its produced? Thats getting a bit crazy. You can't even plug in addresses while you're moving, it has no traffic updates etc.

Lets see for $247, I can buy a high end Garmin Nuvi 760 or dozens of other types for that or much less and most include more advanced features than the Lexus GPS. You can get a decent portable GPS for $129 these days.

So I could have a GPS that moves with me from car to car and I could buy the latest version every year or I can pay for a DVD from Lexus.

What are they thinking?

Along the same lines, those portable GPS's sell updates for $80. So you buy a GPS for $129 and the software update is $80. 

Folks its time to figure out the model and drop the price and get more people to do the upgrade. 

I, for one, am not paying for GPS updates when they don't make sense.

(p.s. its my wife's car anyway!)

Quicken Online & Mint

Quicken Online's recent failing for me led me to go off looking for other solutions. I started looking for a desktop app to replace the ancient Quicken 2005 I have installed. After some searching and trials I found a lot of pretty poor apps that were either free or shareware. 

Eventually I found iBank which is trying to be the replacement for Quicken on the Mac. Its not free and one thing that really bugs me in app trials is where they limit you based on content versus time, especially when the content has no online effect. For example, I can see Evernote limiting you on content as they're paying for the space online to cover your free capacity. But with iBank all the data is local, there's no reason to limit the number of transactions. Just limit my trial period so I can really try the product. With the demo version they limit you to 75 transactions in a single account. I suppose for many that will be a sufficient trial, but my test was to load in 3 months worth of real data for all my accounts and see how it does. I hit the limit and couldnt do the test. Sure I could pay and then use the 30 day money back guarantee but thats a pain. Anyway, thats no way to do demos, give them the full product and then limit by time or online (i.e. stuff that costs the developer money) capacity ONLY. 

So now you're probably wondering, ok so its a lousy demo but how was the product otherwise? Its a decent desktop money management application. But in using it I came to a couple realizations:

1) Whether its online or offline you still have to categorize your downloaded transactions and fix payee names. None of the solutions out there get this right for you. And even though you can remember a classification to automatically rename VendorX or categorize it on import that generally doesnt work with real and electronic check payments as they all come in as "Check" and "Uncategorized". This means you have to do some data entry (even if its just drop downs). This means all services collect some data from you that has some value for you. Mint, Quicken Online and the offline apps. That means its harder to use more than one and it means its harder to jump between them.

2) With local financial management apps you have to find a place to save your data thats secure, back it up, etc. With the online apps you either trust them or not.

 

3) With the local apps you're limited in how fast they update the application and roll it out whereas the online ones evolve much more quickly. 

The above led me to back to the online side, I tried Mint.com again and found they had fixed my Citizens bank support. This means I really got to try Mint for the first time. 

Mint has some nice features like the automatic alerts, and even the "ways to save" area I found interesting and potentially useful (although their data was skewed). The interface was nice and clean. The had a nice investment section which Quicken Online doesnt have. They seemed to have some issues connecting to some of my financial institutions and I got intermittent results there.

Along the way having used Quicken Online for a few months and now using Mint I noticed one glaring difference. Quicken Online lets you enter transactions yourself, Mint doesnt. This means if you're trying to use one of these services as an electronic checkbook to know what your balance is etc, only Quicken Online meets that need (assuming it doesnt lose your transactions). 

I went back to Quicken Online and found they had, at least for now, fixed the lost transaction bug and my balances were correct once more so i'm back to using Quicken Online.

I think the local financial management apps are doomed and the competition by Mint and Quicken Online and others (I did look at Wesabe but wasnt interested in its approach) will be interesting. There are a few core use cases and features that must be there and be reliable for the service to win. Neither Mint nor Quicken Online has the perfect set yet. Quicken needs more reliability and investments (eating into their desktop products which is probably why it isnt there). Mint needs more reliability and the ability to enter your own transactions.