Revisiting Old Work
I worked on an issue today on a site I helped design and develop about 2 years ago. While I was poking around looking at code and using the site I kept thinking “Man this is BAD!”. It is interesting how as you continue to learn and expand the stuff that you have created in the past becomes something you dislike and don’t want to put your name to anymore. I have looked back at the old FUMC Round Rock web designs I created from the time I was sophmore in high school (1999/2000) to 2007 its amazing how different each one is and how much better I got a design and coding.
The goal should be to get to a point were the code that you are righting is good enough that it just needs updating never a full re-write. But with web work and how quickly standards and the “correct” way to do things change it hard to know if you are really getting there or not. Guess I will just have to wait a few years to find out.
Quest for Financial Managment Software for Mac.
On March 11th, 2008 I got my first Mac. Well it really isn’t “Mine” the company I work for bought it, but it’s mine. After getting my hands on it I started the process of finding Mac apps that would do the same tasks as the applications I had found for windows. I got my hands on textmate, Adium, changes, . . . the list goes on but the one thing I didn’t quickly find a solution for was Quicken. I had been using Quicken on Windows to manage my finances since 2005 and didn’t want to loose all that data. I also didn’t want to loose out on the money I had put in to Quicken and the license. So since March I have been running Quicken on a Windows virual machine (VMware Fusion rocks!).
I started out on my quest to find a Mac Quicken replacement about 2 weeks ago. I was getting sick of all the errors Quicken kept giving me when it was downloading new transactions and was sick of having to start up the VM just so I could do my morning finances. My first thought was Quicken for Mac, after some quick google searching I found that Mac users had not been to happy with Quicken for the Mac comparied to the windows version. I then signed up for a few of the online financal managment tools, Quicken Online, Mint, Wesabe, Mvelopes, Geezeo. Most of which were ether way to basic for my needs or not emplemented that well. My next step was to find other app for the Mac. I found iBank, Cha-ching, and MoneyWell. Of those the one that seems to have the most features that I used in quicken was MoneyWell. MoneyWell is currently in beta for their next version in which they are attempting to add the ability to download Transaction automaticly rather then doing the my hand download. So far I have not had any of my banks work with the automaticly download but they seem to be making progress. It uses buckets instead of categories and work a little differently but so far I am enjoying it. We will see how it goes after another week or so.