Perhaps the most standout feature of this revamp is the improved categorization that takes a ton of work off the plate of the user. The guys at Quicken have developed a learning algorithm for Quicken Online that allows users to self-tag, with the Quicken Online software remembering those tags and then applying them to other people's data. The more people who use it, the smarter the tagging gets. In my tests, the automatic categorizing/tagging works exceedingly well. Though Quicken Essentials takes a lot of cues from Mint.com, it's method of categorization is different (and superior). Mint obtains its categorization by performing a relatively simple Yellow Pages look-up. Later in the year Intuit will be combining the two approaches and hopes to achieve 95% categorization accuracy (Intuit bought Mint in 2009).
Out of the box, Quicken Essentials supports 12,000 US and Canadian banks. That will grow to 16,000 banks in the next 2-3 months. That's full coverage of every credit union and bank in the US. Transferring and converting your data from Quicken for Windows to Quicken Essentials worked pretty well in my tests. I just saved a copy of my Quicken for Windows file, moved it to my Mac, and double-clicked on it. All my data was easily imported without any errors. Keep in mind that I was only working with two years of Quicken data though. Quicken Essentials allows for conversion from previous Mac programs, Quicken for Windows 2007+, and the now defunct Microsoft Money.
If you're like me and just want a simple program to view all your financial accounts, see where your money is going, and keep track of balances and upcoming bills, I highly recommend Quicken Essentials. If, however, you're a Quicken power user who needs investing and planning tools, investment buy and sell tracking, TurboTax integration, or in-app bill pay, then QEM is not for you. Think of this edition of Quicken Essentials as iPhoto for your finances. It presents a snapshot of your finances and transactions in a simple to use interface. If you need more than that, it's best to look at iBank or Quicken Premier for Windows running under VMWare Fusion or Parallels.
Quicken Essentials for the Mac goes on sale today for $69 and requires Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6, an Intel-based Mac, and 1GB of hard disk space.
There are several ways to look at the next presidential election in 2012, especially since the current and new president, Barack Obama, appears unuusually vulnerable to being limited to one term.
This early vulnerability, after only about one year in office, could, following the 2010 mid-term elections this year, provoke an intraparty challenge to the president, as happened in 1980 when then-Senator Ted Kennedy took on incumbent President Jimmy Carter. Kennedy ultimately failed in that effort, but a politically wounded Carter went on to defeat by Ronald Reagan in the November election that followed.
Although it would take a huge wave reversal this year in the congressional elections, the Republicans might take control of one or both houses of Congress as early as this year.
All of this remains speculative, at this point, since so many events and conditions can intervene in an eight-month and thirty-two month interval. Political fortunes rarely go very long in a straight line either up or down.
But if all this predictive caution isn’t enough, I suggest that an even much longer period of time may be in order for political and policy planning for candidates and their political parties if they are not only to win the next political cycles, but govern successfully as well.
Barack Obama has been a political phenomenon. In 2008, the odds-on favorite to win the Democratic nomination was Hillary Clinton, then a U.S. senator from New York.
But it was the novice US.senator from Illinois, Mr. Obama, who survived a long, closely fought battle up to the Democratic convention, and then went on to defeat Republican nominee John McCain in November. Although the latter was in the end a decisive victory for the first black U.S. president, it should not be forgotten that following their own convention and just before the mortgage banking crisis, the McCain-Palin ticket had pulled ahead in the race. The financial meltdown effectively ended the presidential race, but without it, it is not dispositively clear who wins.
In any event, Barack Obama did win, and did have a reasonably good idea for some time before election day that he would become the next president. While there is some evidence that Mr. Obama and his advisers, and certainly Democratic congressional leaders, had some idea of “what” they wanted to do if they won, there is now little evidence that any of them, especially in the executive branch, had thought out “how” they would accomplish their goals.
The “what” of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid political team has turned out to be a radical series of public policies which are mostly quite unpopular with U.S. voters. Even with huge majorities in both houses of Congress, they have been unable to pass very much legislation. In an historically brief time, in fact, they have squandered their decisive 2006 and 2008 victories, and appear he…
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Gregory Riley