If I had issues like that I'd replace the warehouse instead.

Nice report.
I am currently thinking of going all Apple.
Iphone, Ipad, Imac.  They all seem to work very well together and seem to be easy to use.  I do not have a warehouse, so that is not my concern.  I remodel and build new homes.  But right now, I have NO software for the business.  I am all old school.  And this is getting old.  Time to become modern.
I am looking at Quickbooks Premier Contractor, which seems to be a good tool for the business.  (Not sure though, because I have never used it.)  BUT, Quickbooks Premier Contractor does not work on Mac.  So that hurts.  If it did, I think I would be set.  And very organized.  I like many, am the laborer, carpenter, bill collector, bill payer.  That said, I realize I should start my own thread, but way say all of you, how are you guys set up?
Thanks!

If you decide to go the Mac route, do not buy the Quickbooks for Mac.  It has serious flaws in it.  The quickbooks for contractors version is very stable and will work well once you train yourself to use it.  Not meaning that it is hard to learn, just means that whereas you are used to doing it a different way, you will need to force yourself to use it.

As mentioned you can use one of the software programs to enable you to run windows programs, but remember that you will also have to purchase a full version of Windows 7 to use on the Mac.

Good luck!

Peter

Michael, what you're calling a clearly expressed story, looks to me like more like a clearly expresed opinion. Any story that uses a lot of "perhaps" and "appears to be" is bound to be more speculation than fact. Interesting article though, thanks for the link.  

Furthermore, the stealing (borrowing?) of ideas is commonplace in the computer industry and always has been, and few of the players are above doing it.

The GUI was first developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated) by Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Dan Ingalls and a number of other researchers. It used windows, icons, and menus to support commands such as opening files, deleting files, moving files, etc. In 1981 Xerox introduced a pioneering product, Star, incorporating many of PARC's innovations. Although not commercially successful, Star greatly influenced future developments, for example at Apple, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

In 1974, work began at PARC on Gypsy, the first bitmap What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) cut & paste editor. In 1975, Xerox engineers demonstrated a Graphical User Interface "including icons and the first use of pop-up menus.

Beginning in 1979, started by Steve Jobs and led by Jef Raskin, the Lisa and Macintosh teams at Apple Computer (which included former members of the Xerox PARC group) continued to develop such ideas. The Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first commercially successful product to use a GUI. A desktop metaphor was used, in which files looked like pieces of paper; directories looked like file folders; there were a set of desk accessories like a calculator, notepad, and alarm clock that the user could place around the screen as desired; and the user could delete files and folders by dragging them to a trash can on the screen. Drop down menus were also introduced.

There is still some controversy over the amount of influence that Xerox's PARC work, as opposed to previous academic research, had on the GUIs of Apple's Lisa and Macintosh, but it is clear that the influence was extensive, because first versions of Lisa GUIs even lacked icons.

Going back even further, Doug Engelbart's Augmentation of Human Intellect project at SRI(Stanford Research Institute) in the 1960s developed the On-Line System (NLS), which incorporated a mouse-driven cursor and multiple windows used to work on hypertext. Engelbart had been inspired, in part, by the memex desk-based information machine suggested by Vannevar Bush in 1945. Much of the early research was based on how children learn. Engelbart's work directly led to the advances at Xerox PARC. Several people went from SRI to Xerox PARC in the early 1970s.

So how can anyone today accurately say who has stolen what, and from whom?  


BTW: As you well know, I am also a huge Macintosh partisan, especially when they're baked in a pie.

There's no problem here, John's right.

Jobs did take a lot of ideas from Xerox PARK but the people that ran Xerox
weren't interested in developing them. It's different to copy ideas from a direct competitor.

Well, to just bottom line it, I like my Mac better than I have liked any of the multiple PCs I have owned. I don't particularly care much (not anymore, anyway) of how things got to be this way, they are what they are. In my most humble opinion, I think that today, Mac products are better for me than PC products. Boing.

indeed... I dont derive any income from either Apple or Microsoft, so I certainly dont feel compelled to enter discussions about one or the other.

I bought my first PC (Dell) in 2000.
I bought my first imac PC in 2006.

I know nothing about computers in general. But I find the apple computers a lot easier to navigate than microsoft products.
I have recommended apple to other computer illiterates, like myself, because it is a very user friendly experience.

Looking forward to purchasing the ipad 99.

Justin.

Not to get into the PC vs MAC battle, but an historical note on Xerox - I once met one of the early innovators in Ethernet over telephone wire (CAT 5).  Before CAT 5 ethernet cable was a huge orange bulky affair.  He said that he previously worked for Xerox who pretty much saw Ethernet as a way to connect printers and his manager told the team to stop working on it.  When they tried to convince him how great it would be, he said "If you really believe that, you ought to quit and start your own damned company."  Well, they did - and became rich.

I was told by Quickbooks that using the parallels I will still have problems.
Has anyone used the moneyworks programs?  They seem to be like quickbooks but for mac.  But I don't think they have a contractor edition.
Also, I found goldenseal by turtle soft.  This looks like it could be a good program.  Has anyone tried it?
My neighbor was telling me to just keep the pc and use quickbooks on it.  And send things via email to the mac.  Seems like more work to me.

If this is for a business, and you have an accountant, you'll want to make sure that your accountant is also on board with whatever accounting software you select. QuickBooks runs fine under Parallels for me, but I'm also not a very heavy user of it, so maybe I just haven't run into those problems yet. Though to be honest, I don't know many people who don't have some level of problems with QuickBooks.

One other option to consider would be QuickBooks Online. You only need a web browser to access it, so it shouldn't matter if you're using Mac or PC.

- Mike

I used to run Quicken under Parallels on my Mac... the hard drive crashed and have not been able to get an inexpensive version of Windows.

Been using iMac since 2008 with quick books Mac 2008, upgraded to lion and upgraded to quickbooks Mac 2011 couple weeks ago, never had any issues and so far so good with lion and quick books 2011

This is highly uninformed, and I'm led to wonder if you did ANY research or asked for help before giving up on this, or if this entire story was completely made-up...



Mac OS X is built on a UNIX platform; the kernel is open-source, and there is a wide range of open-source UNIX/Linux software that runs on it.  Apple does have a proprietary GUI interface, but the APIs are completely open, so anyone who knows how can install the developer tools and write software for it -- I've done it.

Windows is built on a closed-source platform.  While there is a collection of open-source software that runs on it, many of the projects have to fight to get their predominantly UNIX-oriented code base to work with the platform, and often it doesn't work as well, or isn't nearly as fast.


Windows is FAR more "proprietary" than Mac OS X.




It lets you do MORE than a "PC" will.  If you install VMWare, Parallels, or Boot Camp, you can even install Windows on it (assuming you still have a license of such) if you really want to put up with the more "proprietary" Windows software -- but you can't (legally) run Mac software under Windows.

Apple does NOT lock you in to a proprietary software ecosystem with Macs -- only with the iDevices (which is why I refuse to buy an iPad).



Better for her...

It looks like safari 5.1 has issues with citrix runing in 32 bits, i heard some people fixed the problem changing safari to run as 64 bit.