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Quicken 2007 For Mac Lacks EV Cert Support
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."
I mean, it's a bug, and it's being worked on. So what's the big deal?
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
don't use quicken
We have *zero* banks that support Online Transactions. *ZERO*.
Oh, and we can't visit porn sites.
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
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/
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...
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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 is for!!
Quicken-everything is pretty awful (and that's before business tactics). Alas, their competition is all deficient as well -- though that's changing. Hopefully sites like Mint will give them a run for their money, and they'll have to make a decent product again.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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?
"osake no hou ga, biiru yori ii" to omotteiru.
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.
Please do yourself a favor and don't. Its buggy for basic stuff like split transactions.
Maybe try something else, mint.com maybe? there's tons of other money managers for Mac...depending on your requirements.
Fortunately I can get a fake signed certificate, then impersonate the real website, then run the Quicken/bank connection through "openssl s_client", and it all works.
Security flaws can be useful!
Considering that what is now known as Quicken started out as an Apple ][ (and IBM PC) "checkbook" app (written in Pascal, no less!), and wildly popular on the Apple ][, Intuit has completely dissed the Mac for some time now. In fact, a few years ago, Intuit had announced that they wouldn't be updating Quicken and/or QuickBooks for the Mac AT ALL! Several of the Intuit developers talked them out of that decision, fortunately (I think).
So, now that they're all rich an famous and stuff, Intuit has conveniently forgotten more than half of the loyal customers who got them there.
I'm just amazed that after all this time, that no one else has stepped up to the plate, er, platter...
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.
MoneyWell is a generally more elegant solution but lacks investment tracking. http://www.nothirst.com/moneywell
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.
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
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.
When did Slashdot replace bugzilla? It's news I certainly missed on here.
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.
Intuit is dead to me. I use Moneydance. It's cross-platform (try the demo) and works great. Imports wonderfully from Quicken. Aside from that, there are many many many many options for mac. And quite a number of good ones for Linux too. There's even GPL'd GnuCash 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 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 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...
3 years, that's basically starting from scratch.
Their source code must have really been a mess.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
This is one dirty secret of the EV cert industry. Apart perhaps from Verisign, many issuers of EV certs rely on endorsements/chains in order to trace back the EV cert to a recognized root CA. In practice this means that SSL exchanges necessarily involve intermediate cert "bundles" to be downloaded to the client, since many don't recognize the issuing authorities at first glance. In my experience, only recent web browsers can be counted on to have a reasonably recent cacert.pem or equivalent, because these get updated periodically by either the operating system (IE) or the browser vendor (Mozilla). Where this really bites you in the ass is with web services. A random sampling of cURL installations shows that many are using 4+ years old cacert.pem bundles. If you operate any secure web service and have any quantity of programmatic clients, and you are thinking about moving to EV certs, don't. You're asking for a world of pain. And cURL has no green bars, anyway.
Unless the program has the code to recognize EV certs (which requires tables of valid issuers) it can't distinguish between them and ordinary certificates. So, if there's trouble with EV certs, it means suppport was added, but botched.
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.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Intuit's focus on usability and customer support in its early years was legendary. [citation needed]
'Nuff said.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I can't wait to buy the necessary update! Will it include a subscription to your newsletter?
Unless they're an arts program. Then the Mac version is likely to be superior.
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
After all, it's not like they don't have someplace to look for alternatives. Apple itself 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.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
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.
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.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The biggest mistake I made when moving to the Mac wa thinking Quicken's mac product was feature comparable and data compatible with the windows version. Wrong on both counts. But I converted anyways, losing some data along the way. Now I want to go back but I would have to do the whole conversion/data loss thing again. Guess I am stuck for now.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to think "profiling is worse than the slaughter of innocent people..."
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 least not lately. Last time I supported Quark Express was several years ago when OS X was young.
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,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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 have figured out how to get it running properly under WINE (just install normally, say yes to the part about installing gecko, then initiate the Quicken self-update... very important).
I'd guess that you could also use Quicken like this under Mac WINE.
I will also make a point of mentioning Kmymoney and GNUcash as alternatives.
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.
...and try MoneyDance.
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.
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?!)
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 the relevant envelope isn't sufficient. In Quicken and other solutions, you enter in receipts after the fact and then get depressed about always spending more than you planned to in various categories.
I don't work for Mvelopes's company, but I am a very happy customer. I used Quicken from about 2002 to mid-2008, and I have to say that Mvelopes is far easier to use and keep up to date. It saves me at least two hours per week over my previous process, and I used to use Excel for budgeting because Quicken's budgeting modules suck, especially compared to Mvelopes's granular envelope spending and funding plan features. Mvelopes was designed with budgets at its core, which it calls envelopes, and envelopes are funded with each paycheck and other income sources as they come in.
Mvelopes isn't free, but it's competitive with the Quicken upgrade treadmill, and their online customer service is good enough. Bugs get fixed, and they are always adding features and improving usability further. It's reminds me a lot of the upgrade model of my employer, Salesforce.com. There's no software to install, besides Flash, and no action on your part needed to get updates. As a result of being a paid service, versus Mint.com, the data is private, and they don't load the UI with third party advertisements. Their privacy policy might not be as strong as the one at Salesforce.com, but it's good enough for me, for whatever that's worth :-).
Hopefully, this helps..
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.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
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 all have a collective shit-fit.
In either case, QA would have to sign off on this, so the QA manager must be either one of the gutless worm types, or part of the same "The Mac Doesn't Matter" ideology as the rest of the PHBs.
Classic BULLSHIT, IMHO.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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 that worth is and what it will be.
Of course it won't help you find the next big stock to invest in, but you can use it to decide if you can afford 100 or 200 shares.
I leave the merits of Quicken vs gnucash and other offerings up to other commenters.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
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.
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.
Don't be fooled by the looks. I've used iBank and it's not up to par. I abandoned it and went back to using Quicken. iBank's appeal is ALL in the looks, but when it came to actually managing financial data, iBank was buggy and could not display accurate results, especially data that was imported from Quicken.
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.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
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 right now, Quickbooks is the only game in town. You couldn't pay me to go back to Peachtree.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
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. That's partially because OpenOffice doesn't deliver on being a clone or "work-alike" to MS Office. People learn how to navigate a Microsoft package, and they want to make use of that knowledge. They don't want to re-learn where things are, or different dialog boxes that come up when certain functions are performed. But more importantly, it's because the "Microsoft" brand on it guarantees it's the "real thing" to people.
Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with the latest Office for OS X, because they pulled out the Visual Basic macro compatibility. That broke too many complex Excel spreadsheets that used to open in previous Mac versions of Office -- making it a non-option for some people. If they hadn't done that to it, it really would still be the most compatible tool for working with Office documents on the Mac.
Rumors has it they're going to be putting that compatibility back in, next time.
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 simple payroll interface without the payroll tax tables.
Seeing this bug, I know that this will not even be fixed until 2020...
Intuit in general is a company that only listens to their bottom line and not the customers for features that we want. They release features that costs more money and we never asked for it like direct deposit of payroll services (Cheque costs cheaper and easier to do), remote access to Quickbooks (RDP is sufficient to do this) and offline backup services.
I have been trying to find suitable replacements for Quickbooks however, there really is not a simple and more functional software out there that can replace it (Unless I build my own from the ground up)
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!
Obviously mods are fucking retards too, heh. After seeing erroneus modded up for such stupid comments and these modded down, it makes me think digg just might be better after all...
You sir, are a fucktard. You make twitter seem somewhat intelligent.
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.
Half of it's written by Apple these days anyway. There's still a bit in music and video I understand. Me I'm a proud user of PWP on windows, with some PSP on the side when I need vectors. I think Photoshop now has too many features, most of which will never be used, and Elements is missing all the ones that will be used.