I’ve tried Quicken For Mac, iBank, Cha-Ching, Moneydance and Horizon. They all fell short in some aspect of what I needed. Either they were missing scheduled payments, balance forecasting, or just had a terrible user experience. I thought I was going to have to run Windows XP in a Virtual Machine so my wife and I could track our finances forever and it didn’t feel right.

Fast forward to mid 2008 and I’m listening to the MacSB podcast and they had an episode titled “Battling Big Iron Software Companies as a Micro ISV” where the host “Scotty” interviewed Kevin Hoctor of No Thirst Software about his relatively new product MoneyWell. I started researching the product to see if maybe, just maybe, I could finally stop booting Windows on my Mac.

It turns out, by trying to find an exact replica of MS Money, I was looking for the wrong thing. MoneyWell takes an electronic approach to an old way of managing your money: the envelope system. To do this, MoneyWell uses “buckets” for allocating income to spend. As you spend money, you assign those expenditures to a particular bucket. The amount available to that bucket goes down as you spend it until there’s nothing left to spend. If you go over the amount you’ve allocated for that bucket, and you don’t want to go into debt, you have to pull money from another bucket to cover your overage. In that way, you are somewhat forced to live within your means. It’s this approach to money management that Maggie and I had actually been looking for.

I was going to write a full review of MoneyWell and its use, but I’ll leave usage to the very excellent video tutorials provided by No Thirst. If after watching those videos, you still have questions, then I suggest you join the most excellent user group on Google Groups and ask your questions. One thing I love about the user forum is that not only are people talking about how to use MoneyWell specifically, but how to go about managing their finances.

Something that really sets No Thirst Software apart is the amazing level of customer service Kevin provides. I can not emphasize this enough. While several customers, including myself, try and help those that have questions on the Google Group, Kevin generally gets to them faster. He provides the most amazing enthusiasm for supporting his software and trying to solve user’s problems. I have never seen the care and time spent providing such public support from any other developer.

As for my review, I’ll say that MoneyWell works really, really well for Maggie and I and gives us a very accurate picture of how much money we have left to spend on particular things. It also shows us what we’re not going to get when we overspend elsewhere ( such as eating out, which is our Achilles Heal ).

If you’ve been looking for a finances tracking application for the Mac, I’d very much recommend you check out MoneyWell for yourself.

Enter the XTi. It’s super fast and can take photos as fast as I can hit the button or in bursts of 3 a second or so. I can easily catch Brenden doing what he does and not worry that I’m going to miss the opportunity for the shot.

The camera shoots in RAW format at 10 Megapixels. These are big files coming off the camera. To compare, our P&S has a 2 GB card in it, at it’s highest quality ( 7 Megapixel ), the card holds almost 800 pictures. The XTi in RAW can only put 200 pictures on the same card.

I have two examples of some shots I’ve gotten that I really like and I think show off the camera and lens some.

This is a shot of Brenden staring off at the TV. I really like how the picture captures the light from the TV hitting off his eyes.

This shot is an example of how quickly the camera can get itself together. This was at a birthday party for one of our friend’s kids. I was sitting on the sidewalk when this baby runs up to me. I wanted to get a shot of him because I loved the color of his eyes, so I brought the camera up and shot as fast as it would go and this is what turned out. I really like it.

I’ve already found myself taking more and more pictures that I used to. The trick now is to delete the ones that aren’t so good and only keep the ones that are worth it. I should be posting more photos now since there will hopefully be a lot better selection for me to choose from.

What Today does is provide a very quick and easy interface to iCal that shows you what’s going on “today”. In the top part of their window are the day’s events and appointments. The bottom half is your to-do list from iCal. All the events and to-dos are in the color of the calendar they are assigned to, which makes for some quick browsing.

One of the best features of Today for me is that you can assign a global keyboard shortcut that will bring up the Today window for quick adding of events or viewing of your calendar. This has been a godsend since I don’t have to have iCal open and Today is super fast and responsive.

Lastly, I wanted to comment about the support I have received from Second Gear Software. I had a couple of issues while I was checking out Today, so I went to the support site. Second Gear is using Get Satisfaction, a sort of “social” support service. Users and Companies helping each other to solve issues with products. The developer of Today responded very quickly to my issues. This level of support is fantastic and I believe helps set apart these smaller Mac Software companies.

To keep on top of your busy schedule, I’d highly recommend Today as it provides very quick and convenient access to your iCal calendars. Today is $15 and can be purchased at Second Gear’s website.

Coming up in SP1 for 2008 is some very nice changes for Team Foundation Server/Team Explorer, which is the source control piece. The biggest one that is going to save me headaches is that the “Add files/Folders” dialog has been made smart enough to only show files that are not already under source control.

Also added is some really nice performance comparison tools when running code to check to see how much a change to some code changed the overall performance. This analysis also shows so called “hot paths” that tell you some part of the code that takes the most amount of time, or makes the most calls. It also allows you to see the most called functions and methods.

Coming up in Rosario are a couple of really cool sounding changes: Historical Debugging and Architecture Modeling.

Historical Debugging takes the way we currently debug and basically stands it on its head and allows a “step back” to go backwards. This helps when you’re trying to find out where an exception is being thrown. Normally, when you’re stepping through code, you step over methods until you find the one the exception is occurring in, set a breakpoint there, restart the program and step into that method. This is repeated until you get to actual line with the problem. This can be a very time consuming process. Historical debugging removes the rerun piece by allowing a developer to step back, everything is restored to how it looked before executing the method with the problem, allowing the developer to then step into the method immediately instead of having to stop the application and step back to it.

Architecture Modeling allows someone to define how they feel their architecture should look like, defining all their layers. Then, Visual Studio can look at your classes and their references to each other to catch when you break out of the architecture you wanted to follow. The example given was a web page using a direct access of a data access class instead of going through the data access service layer. Visual Studio will flag this and let you know your architecture has been violated.

Also coming in Rosario are “Gated Checkins”, which won’t allow a checkin if it breaks the build. This means that the build server should never get a build that’s broken on checkin. In addition, the current build available to QA isn’t broken.

One last really cool feature around testing is the addition of being able to test interfaces automatically via scripts. These can be recorded and replayed by testers, or played to a particular point ( i.e. Login, click this, click that ), and the tester takes up manually manipulating from that point. If during this testing, the tester finds a new bug ( or why they are doing manual testing ), the testing can be recorded and this recording can be added to a bug report along with the historical debugging info. This allows the developer to replay the video for showing reproducibility, as well as the state of the application during the bug and the ability to step back and forward around the bug.

This was a great talk, but it’s too bad so many of these features aren’t available for us to use today. As with most things Microsoft, everything I wanted was in the “next release”.

git tag 0.1

What that means is I tagged version 0.1 of my first Cocoa App. I was able to get this version done in about 3 hours and it has all the features I’ve learned from the weekend. The UI took the longest part as I had to keep changing things as I learned more. In the end, I went back to a super simple UI to start and will be building up from there.

I’m purposefully not divulging much information because I want to get more complete before I announce this app to the world. It’s not a very exciting app, but I still want to keep it under wraps.

I’m still impressed with Cocoa. Now, I’m to the point of searching the API docs to get most of the functionality I’m looking for. Although I still need to read the basics of using Core Data.

This book is what I have been looking for to help guide me into Cocoa after several weeks of just trying to figure it out on my own. Now with Hillegass’ foundation, I think I can easily move on learning just by looking at the regular Apple docs.

I want to note that this is the first tutorial/learning type computer book covering an environment that the sample apps actually do some amazing things. Before being halfway through the book, I had a pretty sophisticated sample app that had document saving/opening and full undo/redo support. More amazing was how easy it was to do those things. The total amount of code for that project is 150 lines of code that do the work. ( I’m cheating and not counting the code on the model or the header files, but they are quite small ).

Building the GUI with Interface Builder is initially a little awkward, but I’ve gotten used to it and can operate pretty quickly. I think it’s very ironic that Interface Builder is quite possibly the least intuitive application on my Mac. Considering the amazing intuitive applications that get built with it.

All-in-all, I’m very impressed with Cocoa and the tools used to build OS X applications. I’m going to get my app started this weekend and report on it’s progress and my progress through OS X technologies over the coming months.

Tonight I received “the book” on learning Cocoa and will be starting my learning process. I’m hoping to blog as I go along. I have an application in mind to build, but I’m going to save what it is for later.

So those of you who follow for personal updates, well, expect some technical ones for a while. I guess the good news will be that I’m posting!

So here’s to a fun adventure with Cocoa.