Quicken® Online: 100% Free Online Banking & Personal Finance Software

Quicken® Online: 100% Free Online Banking & Personal Finance Software. Dude, this is an awesome utility that Kristen and I have been using for about 2 months now.

Highlights:

• Free, Free, Free
• Reads account info from credit union and credit card
• Really smart auto-categorization. What used to take hours with other software, this allowed me to quickly see spending trends 5 minutes after signing up.
• Smart Summary Homepage. It shows you what your *Real* balance is until your next paycheck. i.e. Current Balance minus upcoming bills.

We find the software really intuitive and give the Quicken engineers mad-props for creating such an easy-to-use Web 2.0 personal finance web application.

Back to Microsoft

I feel dirty writing this post but it is the truth. I’ve been thinking a lot about developing a particular piece of software that would solve a curtain categories of complex problems in various industries. I’m being vague on purpose. As part of my brainstorming, I needed to determine what platform(s) this tool would support and what technologies need to be used. To avoid boring anyone that actually may be reading this blog, I’ll spare you the details. Although I insanely love the Mac platform for my home use, I’m afraid that due to 1) the scarcity of developers with Objective-C knowledge, 2) the high price of membership fees to Apple’s Developer Center and 3) the outstanding ease-of-use of Microsoft’s recent development tools I have chosen to target development to Microsoft platform.

Specifically, Windows Foundation Presentation (WPF), C# 3.5 and the Concurrenty Extension Libraries will be heavily used.

…and thus continues my Love/Hate relationship with M$.

Rollercoaster Software Development

It’s been very quiet on the blog. This is mostly due to rollercoaster software development cycle we have on the 787 project. The team recently survived the latest “up-n-down” stint for what is called ICD Blockpoint 7. The term ICD is the name for the airplane’s avionics interface and data definition. The ‘Blockpoint 7′ means that this is the seventh revision of the ICD. This particular revision is very significant because, from what I understand, this will be the ICD used on the first 787 Airpane to fly.Knowing the criticality of this ICD, my employer and Boeing pulled out all the stops to insure that this ICD was of the highest quality….all while having it be delivered ON TIME!!!!Both the Boeing team members and our team worked nearly around the clock to make this happen…and I’m glad to say that it is wrapping up….now we just wait for the next blitz…in about 4 weeks. Ugh.

CocoaSharp Spark is still alive

Well, it looks like I’m gonna get read/write access to the CocoaSharp codebase. Miguel de Icazza and Geoff Norton have decided that it would be kosher to do so. I’m actually pretty excited because I’ve made a truck load of user-level additions to the my local copy of the software that any commercial app developer will need. The changes I’ve made are especially important to those developers that need to create custom views….like me.I’m still a little leary of the project but my frustrations have started to fade with the notion of actually having write access. I’ve looked at the python binding for cocoa as well as the ruby binding…and fuck that. Although Microsoft makes a serious shity software…in my book…they are still the numero uno, industry leader for development languages and tools.Now my only worry is whether CocoaSharp will support 64-bit apps? If it can’t and the only way for me to create a true 64-bit app on Leopard is to use Objective-C….we’ll…I’ll seriously have to reconsider CocoaSharp…yikes. Once you go C#…you really can’t go back….beeyatch.

Dwindling Interest in CocoaSharp

For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been using CocoaSharp to develop some tutorials on how to show other C# WinForm engineers how to create graphical applications on the Mac. As I develop said tutorials, it is with ultimate certainty that I will find a function missing from the current CocoaSharp implementation. Well, this shit is open source so I add the damn function and keep moving. After a while, I’ve made about 15 modifications that would be absolutely for others to effectively use this software library in a commercial setting.So, I email the CocoaSharp mailing list and ask for the procedure for submitting enhancments. Holy shit did that start a narled flurry of responses. Apparently, this is a touchy subject. It seems that there really isn’t any official procedure that can quickly get the changes in. It was told that a ‘month or two’ is about average.At the moment, I’ve followed all the suggested directions…..and now I wait. If these ‘extremely’ trivial and obvious enhancements don’t get excepted in less than 5 days….you can forget it. That is a GIANT red flag…that this project is slowly dying.And so, I wait…..In the meantime, I’ve also been learning a ton about Objective-C and Cocoa. I’ve also been really trying to ‘accept’ Xcode as the my IDE (Integrated Developement Environment) as well. Current impressions:

Item	Grade
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET	A
Microsoft C# Programming Language	A
Objective-C 1.X Programming Language	C-
Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language	?
C++ Programming Language	B

From what I’ve read, Apple will be making some crazy awesome changes to Objective-C to finally start modernizing the 1983 language. Unfortunately, there currently advertized enhancements will only get them to the late 90’s. The addition of garbage collection is by far the most important update. Properties are nice and will only add to the productive when compared to the effort of writing software in the 1.x version. However, it still lacks the simplest of constructs (i.e namespace) and a cannot-live-without construct (i.e. generics). However, it this is truely the only language that Apple is supporting on their platform….what are ya gonna do. I’m slowly warming up to it….

OutlineView Example

So, I’ve started an good tutorial and example project for how to use CocoaSharp and Cocoa’s NSOutlineView (i.e. TreeVew). This shit took me a lot longer than I thought, however, I’ve learned alot about some of the nuances of Cocoa and InterfaceBuilder. At this stage of the CocoaSharp’s developement and my learning curve for Cocoa..the same little tutorial performed in C# + WinForms + VisualStudio.Net would have taken be about 20mins…rather than the 5hrs. To be fair, I am battling a learning curve for Cocoa…and that curve is really higher than it should be.I’ll be posting the finished product up on the Google Groups page I started. The current CocoaSharp Twiki royally sucks…so…I’m gonna blaze a new trail…at least for tutorials….

First Impressions of CocoaSharp

I’d like to start out by saying thank you for great job so far on the CocoaSharp progress. My recent dabblings with the software library have got my juices flowing. Unfortunately, I’m joined there mailing list in both frustration and proactiveness.BackgroundI’m a veteran C++/MFC and C#/WinForms software developer….but I run Mac at home (for about the last 5 years). Over the Xmas holidays, I ..finally…purchased a new iMac and I love it. The nerd engineer in me also installed the Developer Tools to just fart around. I took a look at some of the examples for Cocoa using Xcode. After about 3 days the following were my observations:

1. With the exception of Apple, no one uses Objective C/C++ anymore for a good reason…it sucks.
2. My appreciation for Visual Studio .NET is at an all time high. I now realize how much that tool make me productive and…how confortable I am developing with it.

….If only I could write in C# on the mac….enter Mono…So I installed Mono and I was quick coding along…..I was using Xcode for my editor and the terminal and make scripts to build…(ugh, what a cludge). After my 3 command line application developed in Mono….I now wanted to move on to some GUI developement…I chose to work with this CocoaSharp stuff becuase it seems to have the best architecture strategy for developing native OS X GUIs via C#.CocoaSharp TutorialI finally stumbled upon the correct website (because there are like 9 million redirects or broken links) and found a couple of tutorials on the Wiki. I had great success with the helloworld tutorial…so my confidence was growing in Cocoa#. Unfortunately, they were quick dashed when I started working on the second tutorial.I first I was getting some silly run-time error about a null reference exception (great). So, I email the author of the tutorials, Tim Davis, and he quickly determined that the tutorials were out of date and emailed me a zip of the latest-and-greatest. As luck would -not- have it, those broke to….Ugh, okay…so I then I pulled down the latest-n-greatest code from subversion (first I ever have used these tools)…and things started to finally work.What the hell?So, I finally realize why I was having so much trouble with tutorials and examples that came next-to-zero documentation. Everything was written with the assumption that the reader had some knowledge of the Mac developement enviorment (InterfaceBuilder) and all the other crap. Well, I know I don’t. In my opinion, the majority of people visiting CocoaSharp will be Windows C# .NET developers. In the software engineer profession they probably out OS X Cocoa Developers at least 20 to 1.So…I’m taking the pludge…I’m volunteering my time to create documentation with my bretheren in mind and use are really example as the tutorial. Let’s see these CocoaSharp folk bite.

Black Friday

Kristen and I joined in yesterday’s so called “black” Friday shopping bonaza. However instead of frantically waking up a 4am and scrambling, we took a leisure pace, got our Beaners and didn’t get to stores until around 9am. The crowds, at this time, were bad at all…with the exception of Kohl’s. Dear lord, that place was a mad house. Althought, I found very good deals on toys, games, and even jewerly, the lines were sooooooooooo long that I simply dropped everything I had on the floor and left in disbelief. Their deals weren’t that good.Now, some of the deals on electronics were so good…I just could not pass two of them up. ‘My’ new iMac 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM will be arriving sometime this Wednesday. I would have brought it home today, but I wanted the additional 1GB of RAM…so I had to purchase it online. I also dropped by Tivo’s website and found they had some crazy sales on there. So….we got a Tivo box for FREE with the purchase of a 1 year contract. So…Steve…I put you email address in for Tivo Points…I hope it was the right email address .I closed out this shopping-spree of day heading to Target in the late evening to find the place empty of people but stocked to the ceiling with goods. I have now completed….yes…completed all of my holiday shopping in one flippin day. YEAH! Yes, I am ‘done’. I can’t believe it.Dude, I am so jacked for that computer. I’ve been saving up for a new computer for about a year. Unfortunately, everytime I had enough to make the purchase…..something unexpected happens…and that money gets thrown at that instead. But this time, the deals were just too good. Kristen’s pretty excited about the Tivo, too. Again, we’ve been watching the sales on this one for awhile and black Friday FREE Tivo’s, well, it was time to buy.So let the negotiations commence for what room the Tivo will be going in. For nearly a year now, I’ve been pressuring Kristen to move my bigger TV into the living room. Due to the distance our couches are from the TV, a smaller TV really makes your eyes strain and the audio must be cranked up to get the sound to carry to your distant ears. Solutions: move my big TV and stereo into that room and place satellite speaks near the distance couches. So what is the problem? The armoir I have for my big TV……doesn’t ‘match’ the living room colors. Uhhhhhhh. WHAT!? Dude, it’s dark chocolate brown…the colors in the living….are various hues of brown. Again, what’s the problem….”It’s too dark of a brown”. [hair being ripped from scalp...]