BrianJarrett.com

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. Read more…

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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. Read more…

Popularity: 39%