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Day: November 18, 2011

Why Intuit? Why?

Dear Intuit, why is this option in Quicken 2012 necessary? I would have hoped that a modern application would be able to detect a date change and handle this itself without needing a restart.

UPDATE: Here are two posts that Nick found where Quicken support folks explain the issue away as “…this would have required extensive reworking of Quicken, and possible other bugs while working it all out” and “The “Quicken Restart” process is like a mini reboot of the program, to make sure that all services are properly dated/timed/synchronized.”. Isn’t sorting those things out what the sales of Quicken are supposed to pay for?

I suspect that Quicken reads the date on startup, that gets used a bunch of places, and it’s presumed by most of the app to be static. I imagine this option is because they aren’t interested in doing the heavy lifting to have the date-consuming pieces of the app handle being notified of a date change. Or something. Either way, needing to restart an app just because a date changes smacks of incompetence.

Having been a regular Quicken user for more than ten years now, I’ve noticed that Intuit seems to have little interest in moving the app forward. I wonder if this is because they are hoping to get most people over to mint.com or something and let Quicken die.

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Keyboard Cleaning Time

A visible build-up of finger gunk on the flat surface and laser-etched numbers on most-used keys shows that it’s time to clean my keyboard. To do this I first use Simple Green All Purpose Cleaner at full strength, then a generic glass cleaner to remove the Simple Green residue, then 99% isopropyl alcohol to remove any remaining residue. Each is applied to a clean paper towel and used to carefully scrub both the keys and gaps between. Being one of the (excellent) modern, flat, metal-body Apple keyboards it’s particularly easy to clean, and after I’m done the keyboard feels like new.

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