Friday, February 18, 2005

Apple's mini-stores not living up to expectations. Gary Allen of the ifoAppleStore, a site that closely follows Apple's retail efforts, says that Apple... [MacNN | The Macintosh News Network] It's obvious after reading the article linked into this article that mini-stores are a panacea, created to cover the unfortunate territories like Rochester, NY and Syracuse who don't warrant a full size Apple Store. Rochester gets looked over many many times. So CompUSA gets the bulk of the business, because they're still hanging on with their Apple store within a store. Hopefully they will rethink the mini-store, ditch it and reconsider the allocation of full sized Apple Stores. 5:54:35 PM    comment []

Update: Moneydance 2005. Moneydance 2005 is a finance manager with support for multiple budgets, scheduling of recurring and future transactions, graphs for visualization, and more. [MacInTouch] After the long forum posting at Macintouch about all the grumblings over Intuit's less than spectacular port of Quicken to Mac, I went out and looked at the Moneydance website. At $25 I may just buy it and run it in parallel with Quicken 2005. That way the next time my Quicken file spontaneously corrupts, I can at least keep on working and tracking all my assets and debits. I just sucks that Quicken Mac and Quicken PC cannot be the same F'ing codebase, so that feature for feature the two are equals. I've said in the past that Quicken alone has almost made me get a PC and forego the mac for anything other than video editing. But Moneydance may help me stay on the Mac a while longer. We'll see. 5:52:25 PM    comment []

Other News: Final Cut Pro 5. A "Tiger"-dependent FCP 5 is due at NAB in April. [MacInTouch] No doubt Apple is doing everything they can to promote their 64/32 bit hybrid OS, 'Tiger'. Hopefully Final Cut will the be the first must have killer app that puts a 2X2.5 Power Mac G5 through it's paces at 8GB of RAM. Then hopefully Motion will also be revved to provide the same performance upgrades as Final Cut. We can only hope. I for one will be waiting until I purchase a new machine Feb. of 2006 before I can benefit from the 64bit-ness of Tiger. Here's to a wonderful NAB 2005! 5:48:43 PM    comment []