“Long-time Mac users who manage their personal finances on their computers have something to fear with the release of Lion right around the corner: Quicken For Mac 2007 (and earlier) will not function on Lion as it stands right now,” Dave Hamilton reports for The Mac Observer. “This is because these versions of Quicken are still running PowerPC code, while Rosetta, Apple’s transparent translation engine that allows PowerPC code to run on Intel Macs, is reportedly NOT going to be included with Mac OS 10.7.”
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“Mr. Patzer explained that the PowerPC codebase for Quicken For Mac 2007 was started decades ago and has many intricacies — including its own custom-built database engine — that are very much PowerPC specific. Simply porting this code over to Intel is not possible and would require a significant amount of work. So much so that Intuit decided to focus those resources on developing an entirely new application, Quicken Essentials for Mac,” Hamilton reports. “Unfortunately, Quicken Essentials’ initial release left a lot of Mac users wanting more — or less, as the case may be — and many folks simply remained with Quicken Mac 2007 despite its older codebase.”
Hamilton reports, “[We chatted] with Aaron Patzer, VP/GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group, today about this… Some might ask, ‘why not just get Apple to let us run Rosetta in Lion?’ Apple likely has its own answers to this question, but the good news is that Intuit is working closely with Apple to possibly do just this. The project has been underway for the past few months, with Intuit working to possibly embed specific Rosetta libraries into Quicken For Mac 2007 to get it to run. This is not a simple project and may never come to fruition. Mr. Patzer indicated we would all know that answer by the end of this summer.”
More details and possibilities for users of personal finance apps in the full article here.
MacNN reports, “Patzer’s comments suggest that there is little technical reason why Apple couldn’t include Rosetta with Lion — apart from the company’s desire for users to update to modern technologies and frameworks for the best experience and performance in current systems. It also implies that Apple may be interested in licensing the technology to select companies that would otherwise be unable to offer full 64-bit versions of their apps in the near-term, a goal Apple wants developers to move to as quickly as possible. The company has made it clear to developers for years that Rosetta was a transitional bridge with a limited lifespan, and was only included as an optional install in Snow Leopard for those who needed it.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Has a company with more excuses ever had a former president and CEO on Apple’s BoD? Hey, Mr. Campbell, got any pull left at all? Think you could, you know, go to bat for Mac users who, for years now, haven’t been valued enough to even get a native version of Quicken with feature parity to other platforms? It’s a personal finance app, not rocket science.
Apple discontinued the use of PowerPC microprocessors in 2006.
Intuit is a joke. And they’re obviously cheap, too. They don’t need Rosetta, they need a lesson in commitment to a platform. You call Adobe lazy, Mr. Jobs? Why not Intuit? At least Photoshop will run on OS X Lion. Intuit? Indolent is more like it.
Good software companies offer solutions for users, not unending excuses and problems. If Indolent spent half as much time coding as they do making excuses, we would’ve a modern Mac version of Quicken several years ago.
We wouldn’t use Quicken if you paid us. Mac users should look elsewhere for personal finance software, preferably from companies that are committed to the Macintosh, not lazily hoping to apply a band-aid that’ll let them continue to do nothing beyond peddling their stale, old spaghetti code.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]