When I decided to switch to the Mac one of the first things I did was create an application to application comparison matrix in order to ensure I could find an comparable Mac replacement for all my important Windows applications.  I found some great articles written by others who’d made the switch and that really helped in that process.  Now that I’ve had my Mac for a year and a half or so I’ve found replacements for virtually everything I had on Windows.  In order to help others who are making the switch to a Mac or maybe just looking for a Mac replacement for a Windows application they can’t seem to shake, I thought I’d put my cross-reference list here, albeit it in a very informal, unstructured manner (trying to avoid a boring list).  I’ve included links where possible.

My hope was that most of the apps I used on Windows would have a Mac port.  That way I wouldn’t have to learn something new and the learning curve would be shortened.  I’m not opposed to learning something new but switching everything over at once and having to relearn everything is a tall order and I wanted to be productive as quickly as possible.  Luckily many of the apps I used on Windows had Mac ports.  Firefox, for instance, is available for both.  I used Safari for a while but at the end of the day I’m just more comfortable with Firefox.  Plus there are several addons I use on Firefox that I have a tough time giving up (Delicious bookmarks, for example).  Unfortunately the default theme for Mac Firefox sucks; it’s so ugly.  I’ve been using the Silvermel theme and it’s just great.  There’s also Opera, Camino, Chrome, and a slew of others to choose from.

For graphical FTP transfers I used Filezilla on Windows.  Luckily there is a Mac version of Filezilla that works well.  For instant messaging on Windows I used an open source program called Pidgin; the Mac version of Pidgin is called Adium and it’s very good.

I used RealVNC on Windows for remote control.  The default VNC server on the Mac, at least the version that shipped with Leopard, just sucks.  It’s so slow it’s unusable.  I actually had to turn that service off and install Vine Server.  Vine Server is free, but their client is not.  I now use Vine Server to serve up my Mac for remote control, and I use JollysFastVNC as my VNC client to connect to other VNC servers.  JollysFastVNC is free and works reasonably well.  To control my Mac from a Windows box I use the TightVNC viewer (which is also free).

I used Thunderbird on Windows for my imap e-mail.  While Thunderbird is available for the Mac, I actually just use the Mac Mail client that ships with the Mac.  That ties directly in with the Mac Address Book.  I recommend using Mac Mail along with the Mac address book because other Mac apps are integrated with them and it makes life easier.  One of the things I really like about the Mac is that so much of it works together, which is incredibly useful.  Mac Mail also has a nice RSS reader built in; it’s a great replacement.

For word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations on Windows I used OpenOffice.  OpenOffice now runs natively on the Mac and the port is pretty good.  There’s also another port of OpenOffice for the Mac called NeoOffice and of course Microsoft Office is available for the Mac if you really need it.  I’m now using iWork now since it’s got more of a Mac look and feel and better OS X integration.  iWork can read and write most MS Office files and can export in several other formats.  Since I don’t do much file sharing with other office users I’m not too worried about exact compatibility; iWork does just fine.  iWork contains a word processor (called Pages), a spreadsheet (called Numbers) and a presentation app (called Keynote).  It’s actually pretty fun to use too.

For several long, long years I was stuck with Microsoft Outlook at home.  No longer; I use Apple’s iCal along with my iPhone.  Free at last!

For general text editing and/or programming I used Gvim on Windows (being a vi guy).  MacVim is the Mac port of Gvim and it’s very good.  It has tabs which are really useful for working with multiple documents.  I also use another editor called Text Wrangler when I don’t need vi functionality.  TextEdit ships with the Mac and is similar in nature to Notepad.

Audio management was easy; I was already using iTunes on Windows so I transitioned right over to iTunes on the Mac.  The Mac comes with a DVD burner and very nice DVD playback software.  On windows I used Picasa to manage my digital photos.  Picasa is available for the Mac but I use iPhoto personally.  My digital camera just works with the Mac; I don’t need any additional software to unload my photos from the camera.  I also bought a new Canon scanner, the CanoScan LiDE 200 and it works just beautifully.

For image editing I was looking for something to replace Paint Shop Pro.  After a lengthy search I ran across a comparable replacement called Pixelmator.  I found it in a boxed version on Amazon for $51.  I’m very pleased with it.  You could also consider Acorn or Adobe Photoshop Elements as comparable Mac replacements for Paint Shop Pro.

I found I can play back virtually any kind of video file using the Mac.  Quicktime does most everything out of the box but I had to download Flip4Mac to play .wmv files.  It installs a codec that Quicktime can use.  To view .flv and/or .swf files I use SWF & FLV Player.  Both Flip4Mac and SWF & FLV Player are freeware.  For creating video and DVDs I replaced Pinnacle Studio with iMovie.  I like it much better than Pinnacle Studio.  I print DVD labels for all my home movies; on Windows I used to use MediaFace for that.  I found this great equivalent called DiskLabel that’s even better.

MySQL server and client tools are all available native and free for the Mac.

For genealogy research and documentation I used Heritage Family Tree on Windows.  I’m now using Mac Family Tree on the Mac and it is very impressive.  It utilizes some really cool built-in OSX technologies to graphically display family trees in a way I’ve never seen before.  It can also produce an impressive html rendering of a family tree that can simply be dropped onto a webserver (if you run one like me) or the manufacturer’s freely provided webspace.  I was very pleasantly surprised at just how good this software is.

In addition to all this stuff I also had a lot of utilities I used on Windows.  Fortunately I was able to find replacements for all of them.  Beyond Compare was a big one.  It’s directory and file comparison software.  It can look at two files and display the diff or it’ll compare two folders and show the differences, allowing you to easily sync files between them.  I searched high and low but was just stuck on Beyond Compare which has only a Windows and Linux version.  Then I found DeltaWalker.  It’s proven to be a comparable replacement.  I wrote more about it here.

For storing passwords I used KeePass on Windows.  The Mac port is KeePassX and work just as well and can read the same encrypted password files.  I just opened my existing file in KeePassX and was on my way.  Speaking of encryption, I used TrueCrypt on Windows to create encrypted volumes.  TrueCrypt is also available for the Mac and is just as easy to use.

There are some other apps that I used less frequently on Windows but were still useful or even necessary.  For digital books I used eReader and for taxes I used H&R Block at Home (formerly TaxCut).  Both of these have Mac versions.

One of the biggest hurdles was finding a Quicken replacement.  Quicken for Mac is just awful and most of the other personal finance software is still up and coming.  I ended up replacing Quicken with Moneydance, and I wrote a detailed article about it too.

And what if there’s something you just can’t replace yet?  You can always run Windows virtually with VirtualBox.  I used to use VMware Fusion but eventually it just stopped working.  VirtualBox is free and has most of the features you’ll find in VMware Fusion or Parallels.  Save the $80 and just use VirtuaBox; I wish I had from the beginning.  It’s also great for running Linux (and keeping multiple computers out of your office space).  Although I no longer run Windows in a VM I do run Linux in a VM.

So there you have it, how I switched off Windows and moved completely over to the Mac.  I hope you found it useful as you contemplate a switch to the Mac or if you already have switched and just need some some fresh options for turning off Windows.  Feel free to let me know below.  Once you turn Windows off on your Mac it’s like removing the ball and chain; you’re free to just run about, enjoying life again.

"St. Louis" by Orson

]]> http://brianjarrett.com/2010/02/20/st-louis-by-orson/feed/ 0 http://brianjarrett.com/2010/02/08/moneydance/ http://brianjarrett.com/2010/02/08/moneydance/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:52:06 +0000 Brian http://brianjarrett.com/?p=1613 I’ve been a Quicken user for a little more than ten years, since 1999 to be exact.  In the summer of 2008 I made the switch from Windows to a Mac but I had to hang onto Windows XP for a couple applications for which I just couldn’t find Mac equivalents.  One of these two applications was Beyond Compare for which I finally found a suitable replacement.  The other was Quicken.  Quicken for Mac does exist but every review I’ve ever read about it is completely unfavorable.  I’ve never seen a product more universally panned.  It hasn’t been updated since version 2007 and the first proposed update since (Quicken Financial Life) had a fraction of the features of its Windows counterpart.  That initiative was scrapped by Intuit (apparently because it sucked) and has since been tasked to a company Intuit recent purchased called Mint.com.  That product is now called Quicken Essentials for Mac (the title really a euphemism meaning fewer features).  It’s still pretty lame in comparison to its Windows counterpart, so much that I’m not willing to spend $60 on it only to likely have to request a refund (since I can’t get a trial version).

So after having the Mac for about a year and a half I went on the search once again for a suitable Quicken replacement for the Mac.  There were more players than I had originally thought but most of them did not have a comparable feature set to Quicken.  After doing some research I ended up settling on four possible replacements; iBank, GnuCash, Moneywell, and Moneydance.  What I found is that I experienced such poor performance on many of the replacement solutions I was unable to test most of these “feature by feature”.  All of the other applications had problems of varying degree importing my Quicken data as well.  Instead this is more of a review of Moneydance than anything else.

Requirements

I began by compiling a list of my requirements.  First, I was looking for a Mac-native Quicken replacement so I could finally get rid of my Windows XP virtual machine.  Second, I had to have the ability to track all the different account types I had; checking, savings, investments, loans, credit cards, assets, and cash accounts.  It needed to be relatively straight-forward and easy to use and I need to have the ability to create customized graphs and reports that I could save.  I also needed to be able to import my existing Quicken financial records; I couldn’t afford to lose any history.  I also needed to be able to split a transaction between different accounts and categories.  If I could find a replacement personal finance application that did all these things, along with a $60 price point, then I was set.

To test these applications I exported my entire 10 year Quicken history into a QIF file and imported it into each application.  I then tested the various features, as well as how well the import went.

iBank 3.5.4

My first impression of iBank was good.  It looks great visually and it seems like it’s got great potential.  There were a couple things that turned me off to it.  First was how slow it was.  It took 3-4 seconds to view the register each time I clicked an account.  That might sound trivial, but when jumping back and forth between accounts it became tedious.  It has great-looking charts and graphs but they also took many seconds to load.  I honestly didn’t get much further than that in my testing because of how slow everything was.

It also did a poor job importing my existing Quicken data; account totals were all over the place and fixing it was going to take a while.  Also iBank would only allow me 15 minutes of “playtime” with it in demo mode before quitting.  This limited my ability to preview the software thoroughly to ensure it met my needs.

iBank is Mac-only and does not run on Linux or Windows; not a show-stopper but it does impose a limit on where I can use the software.

In the end I had to pass on iBank.  It looks great and it looks to have great potential but for me it wasn’t quite ready.  It also has a $60 price tag, the same as Quicken deluxe, which put it at the top of my price point.  If it had one-to-one feature parity with Quicken Deluxe I could justify the cost; truth is it doesn’t, so it was difficult to justify it.  I would have felt more comfortable at $40.

GnuCash 2.2.9

GnuCash is a Linux personal finance/accounting application that has been ported to both Windows and the Mac.  This is great from a cross-platform perspective.  It also uses double-entry accounting.  The problems for me were that it was extremely slow on my Mac and the import of my existing Quicken data didn’t go so well.  Again, things were all over the place, requiring a massive effort to clean it up.  Generating a single chart took what seemed like forever-upward of 10-15 seconds-and clicking on a register caused me to wait much longer than I had patience for.  I also ran into problems when GnuCash tried to redraw the screen but this could just be the Mac port.  Regardless, it was still a problem.  It looks a little rough, nowhere near as polished as I’d like, but that in and of itself isn’t a show-stopper.  Aesthetics are low on my list though; accuracy is key for a financial app.

Ultimately I had to pass on GnuCash.  Although I can’t argue with the price (free) it just had too many problems for me to make the switch.  I have a friend who uses it so I believe it is a viable option, just not for me at this time.

MoneyWell 1.4.13

Moneywell showed the most promise out of any of the applications I tested but didn’t actually choose.  It also looks great, tapping into OSX built-in technologies (as does iBank), but it too was really slow.  It showed the same lag when viewing an account register or reports.  Moneywell focuses a lot on budgeting but I don’t really have many requirements for that.  My wife does all the budgeting and I just track all the expenses, providing her with information to help her adjust her budgets.  It also had trouble importing my existing data; it was pretty messed to be honest and would have caused quite a bit of rework for me.  The evaluation was reasonable (200 transactions and no 15 minute time limits) so I was at least able to get a decent look at it.  MoneyWell is Mac-only which is, as I’ve said, not show-stopper but is minor limitation for me.

Despite the very reasonable trial I wasn’t able to pull the trigger on MoneyWell in the end.  It looks great and it’s got great potential but it didn’t really do the job for me.  Maybe with less historical data it would be more responsive.  MoneyWell also might appeal to those who are more budget-oriented since budgeting is a key focus of the product.  Moneywell came in below my price point though-around $42-which seems like a very reasonable price given the maturity and feature-set.

Moneydance 2010 r2

Home Page

Moneydance had a lot going for it right out of the gate.  First off, it was fast.  Really, really fast.  Clicking on an account register displayed the transactions immediately, without any noticeable lag.  The interface has been updated to look more like a native OSX application, despite its Java underpinnings.  I used to think Java apps were slow; I now no longer have this opinion.  I imported all my 10 years of Quicken history into Moneydance with only a few minor errors.  Six, to be exact.  A couple correcting transactions and 15 minutes later all my totals were matching to the penny against Quicken.  Moneydance brought in my loan accounts as liabilities so I had to convert the open loans manually over to loan type accounts.  This wasn’t “wrong” per se; I just needed them to be in a loan account type so Moneydance would automatically calculate my principle and interest.  I left all my closed loan accounts as liability accounts since they’re functionally the same.

One thing that really caught my attention with Moneydance was the home page.  It’s simple and useful, kinda like Quicken used to be before all the bloat.  It shows me all my account balances and then calculates my net worth at the bottom.  It shows me a list of upcoming scheduled transactions in a list and in a monthly calendar view.  There’s an expense graph that looks very similar to the graph in iTunes showing used/open disk space (see below).  It looks great and is very useful to see at a glance exactly what you’ve spent for the month.  it doesn’t show percentages like Quicken but honestly I prefer seeing the actual dollar amounts now.  That’s turned out to be more useful to me.  By clicking on a segment of the graph you can drill down to the components that make up that segment and then all the way to the register transaction itself.  Very cool.

Expense Graph on the home page

Speaking of those loan accounts, Moneydance allowed me to easily set up a loan.  It tracks my principle and interest for me and set up reminders for the loan payment.  The principle and interest splits matched Quicken exactly.  Moneydance also allowed me to set up reminder transactions, just like Quicken.  One drawback is that Moneydance only allows for escrow to be sent to a single account.  So if you have an escrow account for both fire insurance and taxes you can’t split them in the loan payment.  I worked around this by transferring the entire escrow payment to an asset account then entering two transactions (one for fire insurance and one for taxes) to account for the split.  It’s a couple extra steps, but I only pay one mortgage, once per month, so it’s trivial really.  Effectively I’m accomplishing exactly what Quicken did.

All the account types I need are supported in Moneydance, satisfying one of my major requirements. As a bonus, Monedydance also allows me to update my Vangard Roth IRA though it’s online banking features.   I can also split transactions just as I could in Quicken; another requirement met.

Graphing and reporting are included but are admittedly not quite as “pretty” as Quicken, MoneyWell, and iBank.  As I said though, I’m not as concerned about aesthetics.  The important thing was that I could recreate all my existing Quicken customized reports and graphs in Moneydance.

Moneydance also allowed me to store additional information for accounts, such as account numbers and other attributes, just like in Quicken.  It uses double-entry accounting for accuracy.  The nice thing is that it does it under the covers, exposing it has accounts and categories, allowing Quicken users to more easily transition.

Another thing that I like about Moneydance is that it’s cross-platform.  With a single license I can run it on the Mac, Windows, and Linux.  I’ve tested it on all three platforms and it works great.  This will allow me to also work on my finances on my laptop (which is a dual-boot of Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux) and not just my Mac .  Similar to Moneywell the trial is very reasonable; 100 transactions before you have to buy a license.  That gave me plenty of time to evaluate the software.

For all the things Moneydance gets right there were a few caveats.  As I said, graphing and reporting aren’t quite as pretty but they’re practical and easy to use.  One drawback is that Moneydance doesn’t have the concept of payee; instead the description field is used.  A memo field is included but only on the main transaction, not the splits.  This means that I have manually type in each payee in the description field for each split transaction if I want to see it on a report.  I do a lot of splits so this is mildly tedious.  I can work around it though, so I don’t consider it to be a show-stopper.  The upside to this is that Moneydance remembers the splits, so I only have to type it in once (under normal circumstances).

Quicken allows a user to store checks and other documents and associated them with a particular transaction.  It also allows a user to store bank statements and associated them with an account.  Moneydance doesn’t support this so to get around it I just store the statement in a subfolder along with my Moneydance file and it does essentially the same thing.  Not a showstopper, in other words.

Quicken also has some retirement planning features but I used them only once or twice and then kinda just dropped it.  Replacement software didn’t have to have that kinda stuff to meet my requirements.

Moneydance also crashed once during the evaluation but nothing was lost or damaged.  Overall it’s been stable; stable enough for me to not really worry about it.  [Update 2/22/2010: Moneydance has crashed a couple more times in the past two weeks or so I've been using it.  None of my data was corrupted but it has been a little frustrating.  I save more often now and the problem isn't chronic enough to cause me any major headaches.]

[Update 2/22/2010: Moneydance has an open API, which allows developers to write extensions for it.  These are free, by the way; you just click through a wizard to install them.  I now use an extension to check my stock prices and to check for software updates.  The coolest one is an extension to help me payoff my debt early.  If I stick with the plan I could be completely debt-free in 10 years!  We'll see.]

Conclusion

If you’re starting from scratch and don’t have lots of existing data to import, iBank, GnuCash, or MoneyWell might very well suffice.  iBank and MoneyWell (from a Mac perspective) both looked very nice. In the end, however, I chose Moneydance.  It had all the essential features I needed and all at a reasonable price ($39.99).  Since it was so feature-rich (and the other products I evaluated were so excruciatingly slow) spending a significant amount of time studying every nuance of the competition soon became pointless.  Moneydance runs natively (well, counting the JVM) on the Mac-as well as Linux and Windows-and has now allowed me to turn off my Windows XP virtual machine, freeing up 1 gb of RAM on my Mac.

Although it doesn’t have exact feature parity with Quicken for Windows, it does have parity with what I consider to be the important features and that was enough for me to make the switch.  It was also the most Quicken-like out of the bunch (I’d say Moneydance most closely resembles the “Deluxe” version).  Not that being different is bad at all, but I was explicitly looking for a Quicken replacement.  I bought a Moneydance license this past Friday and at this point consider it money well spent.

Wow.

I’ve never been this moved by a written work.  It’s brilliant.

This isn’t a review.  This isn’t a critique.  I’m not a critic; I’m just compelled to write about how it made me feel.

I just finished it last night.  I started it two days ago.  It’s a quick read but it’s a tough read as well.  While not reading it I found myself at work thinking about it; wondering what will happen to these two nameless people, genuinely concerned for their welfare.

Click to read the synopsis (warning: spoilers inside)

I was both incredibly inspired by this story and yet emotionally destroyed by it.  I’ve never read anything like it.  McCarthy is able to paint the most vivid landscape I’ve ever not seen with only a few, well-crafted sentences.  The desolation of the world, the direness of their situation, I was there.  I swear I was right there with them.  I’ve never read a book that created mood like this.  I worried the whole time for their safety and these aren’t even real people.

Or are they?  They don’t have names.  They’re symbolic.  They’re me and my son.  They’re you and your daughter.  We’re all real.  That’s what’s so emotionally overpowering about this; we can relate, especially as parents.  The relationship that McCarthy builds between these two people, this everyman father and son, is so deep and so powerful.  The father’s love for this son is his only reason for clinging to life.  The wife told the father once that the only thing between you and death is that boy.  It’s keen observation that proves his conviction.

The relationship.  It’s the relationship every father wants with this son.  It’s also the relationship no father ever wants to have with his son.  It’s conflicting and confusing, while making perfect sense all the while.  They spend all their time together but they spend virtually all of it just surviving.   But that they rely upon each other-almost equally-for survival means that they form a bond like no other.

The little things McCarthy does to humanize the father and son; that particularly impressed me.  They’re carrying their things in an old shopping cart.  In that cart the boy has toys.  Toys in all the wasteland; he’s still a child despite it all.  The boy drawing fangs on the facemask he must wear to filter out the ash in the air.  The boy calling his father “papa”. He’s scared all the time.

All good fathers want to teach and protect their children.  It’s a tough enough job to do as it is in the paradise I live in, much less in those horrid conditions.  One of the dilemmas here is whether or not it’s right to allow the child to suffer so.  He’s starving-they both are-and there’s little hope, but the father can’t give up.  He can’t just kill his own son, despite the humanity such a brutal act might bring.  So he keeps going, providing as much hope and protection as he can.  He does his job.  He even kills others to protect his son.  Fatherhood is both a duty and a privilege and this story captures that.

The real world is full of gray area.  Almost nothing is black and white, right or wrong.  The father tries to simplify the world for his son; he breaks people into “good guys” and “bad guys”.  The bad guys are thieves, rapists, cannibals.  The father and the son are good guys.  He says that he and the boy “carry the fire inside”.  The gray area of the world does creep in though; making it more difficult for the father to talk in absolutes.  The boy, however, is starting to realize this.   He’s becoming wiser.

The end of the book was heart-wrenching for me.  I had trouble reading through the tears in my eyes.  It took an hour for me to be able to talk about it.  At the end of the book there is hope, however slim, and it makes everything worthwhile.

There are many unanswered questions in the book.  Many things are sufficiently vague.  What caused the destruction?  We don’t know.  Nukes, a meteor like the one that killed the dinosaurs?  A comet? It doesn’t matter; the aftermath is all that matters.  There’s a bit of God-talk but it’s not propaganda.  The father both curses and praises God; not unlike many people.  Religious people will see probably see religious undertones.  They might be there but they’re not overpowering or off-putting.  Optimists will see likely see hope, pessimists will likely not.  Pragmatists like the mother will ask “what’s the point?  Why continue without hope?”.  Others, like me, will deny all pragmatism and will want to fight to the end, just for the sake of not giving up.  If the end comes then so be it, but we fought it off for as long as possible.  They had the fire inside and they never gave up.  I think the “fire inside” was the will to live.

Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon has been, up to now, my favorite post-apocalyptic novel.  No detriment to McCammon’s work; it’s fantastic.  It’s well-written, engaging, creative, and thought-provoking.  The Road, however, may very well be my favorite now.  It just spoke to me on every level.  It hit all the right buttons, never missing its mark.  It’s an important book but at the same time a book I think I could only read once.  I know I’ll never forget it.

DeltaWalker Folder Comparison Window

Before I switched from Windows to a Mac I did a lot of research.  One of the things I spent a considerable amount of time on was software.  Could I find Mac equivalents for most, if not all, of my Windows software?  I found that I could find a Mac equivalent for almost everything, save for a couple programs.  One of those programs was a little file/folder comparison and sync utility called Beyond Compare.  Believe it or not, this was almost a show-stopper for me because I literally use this program every day.  I bought it back in 2005 for $30 and have been using it constantly ever since.  I had been certain that a comparable program for the Mac would be easy to find but it just wasn’t.  (I’ll refrain from using a bad “it must really be Beyond Compare” pun.)

So I compromised with a workaround; run Beyond Compare in a virtual machine and set all non-Windows local directories up as network shares.  This works, but it means that I’m still dependent on opening Windows XP every time I need to sync directories.  Every three months or so I’d check back again to see if Beyond Compare had been ported to the Mac or if a comparable competing product had been released.  After a year and a half, I finally found that product.

It’s called DeltaWalker.

Funny enough, I’d evaluated this product more than a year ago but had written it off because it just wasn’t good enough yet.  Well, a lot can change in a year and apparently these guys have been hard at work on this thing.  DeltaWalker 1.8.7 is about 95% of what Beyond Compare 2.x is.  That’s now close enough for me to pull the trigger and buy it.  The biggest missing feature right now for me is the ability to save what are called “sessions” (a file or folder pair with syncing rules).  It’s pseudo-implemented right now; sessions are automatically saved but you can’t name them.  The next version, 1.8.8, is slated to have the ability to name sessions and set favorite sessions; that’ll bring this much closer to a 100% comparable BC 2.x replacement.  What’s also really cool is that DeltaWalker is cross-platform; there’s a Linux, Windows, and Mac version.

Beyond Compare Folder Comparison Window

But there are also a few things about DeltaWalker that make it rise above when compared to Beyond Compare 2.x.  DeltaWalker has sftp support; BC 2.x has only ftp support.  DeltaWalker also has this really great feature that allows you to click on two files being compared in a folder comparison window and then will open a new window below showing a file diff.  This makes it really easy to see the actual differences between the files, perfect for programmers.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat; and more than one way to synchronize two folders.  Beyond Compare was my preferred method and I found after doing some research that I’m not the only one.  There were lots of people looking for the same replacement as me.  I understand that Beyond Compare 3.x has features that the 2.x version doesn’t have, but 3.x is only available for Windows and Linux.  For a Mac user it’s the same as it not existing at all.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d buy Beyond Compare for the Mac today if it existed.  Fact is it doesn’t, and it doesn’t appear that it will any time soon.

DeltaWalker (at the time of this writing) is around $40 for a personal license for a single platform (Linux, Windows, or Mac).  A personal license for all three platforms runs around $75.  Commercial pricing is higher.

So if you’ve switched to the Mac like me and haven’t been able to find a way to replace Beyond Compare, DeltaWalker is a worthy replacement.

The Family - January, 2010

Personally I’ve grown quite a bit in 2009.  I learned how to deal with an incredibly difficult person at work and how to better handle stressful situations there.   I was also able to use what I learned and apply it to my personal life as well, reducing my overall frustration level.  This person has now been effectively neutralized and poses very little actual threat anymore.  I also came off a successful project right at the end of 2009 that, combined with my improved skillset, will help to solidify my role and hopefully ensure my longevity.

2009 ended with me in a very different place at work and in my career.  My confidence level has increased dramatically and I’ve produced some work I’m very proud of.  I’m also steadily moving back toward the type of role I’d played at CPI before I left.  I’ve been at my new job for two years now and it pleases me to say that it’s feeling more and more like home.  My career is back on track again and I feel like I can grow where I am.  I’d love to be able to spend some time here; five or six years (or more) would be great.

I also ended 2009 with a new and improved perspective on the things I believe in (or don’t believe in).  One of the primary reasons I purged the site was because of this change.  I began to let go of some of the anger I hold toward religion, in particular.  I found myself becoming more of an extremist than I was comfortable with.  The site had taken on much of this tone and it really just wasn’t what I wanted to convey anymore.  I still feel these surges of anger from time to time but in order to expect other to simply allow me to follow my heart I have to also let them do the same.  I now represent the concepts of skepticism and disbelief in a far less hostile manner.  I still feel just as passionately but I’m applying that passion in a more constructive fashion.  I can now better represent what skepticism and atheism truly mean without resorting to just another brand of proselytizing.

With the site purge it meant less of my time was spent ranting to a phantom audience and, as a result, I’ve been able to refocus some of that energy into my writing.  With the focus of the site redefined, I’ve now added virtually all the fiction work I’ve completed to the site.  This is something I’d been wanting to do for some time but just hadn’t.  With a career producing a stable revenue stream, combined with a better understanding of copyright law, I’m now less worried copyright theft.  Let’s fact it; none of these stories were ever going to make me rich.  I didn’t get much more than some poems written in 2009 but that was the first creative writing I’d done in years and a step in the right direction.

2009 came in with a bang but 2010 came in with more of a whisper.  I don’t really subscribe to the practice of making new year’s resolutions (since they’re so prone to failure) but I do feel that I need to plan out my year.  Bearing that in mind, I’ll be formulating that plan over the next couple weeks and will hopefully have something concrete soon.  This time next year I’ll see what I’ve accomplished.  Hopefully it’ll be most, if not all, the things on the list.

I have a good feeling about 2010 right now.  Hopefully it’ll play out.