Quick Personal Evaluation of Cha-Ching, particularly as opposed to MoneyWell:
Disclaimer: only played with cha-ching for a little while this afternoon, while I've been using MoneyWell for weeks. Strengths: iCal support for scheduled transactions [edit: unable to get this to work] Address Book support for payees Spotlight indexing of transactions Support for a picture of what you purchased, including iSight to grab the pictures - cute Smart folders - rule based transaction views The quick filters by incoming/outgoing, reconciled/pending, and text search on the top Fast way to view all transactions, since you can just click on Master Vault (or, I assume, any vaults coming over Bonjour) .Mac backup/restore Debatable: Tags vs Categories Folders for additional transaction organization Bonjour sharing .. is this actually useful? The sharing is local only, if the other person is local, why not just use the same instance of the app on the same machine? I guess you could use it to share your joint checking account between spouses and then track their personal accounts independently, perhaps Can have a transaction with no associated account, for things like wishlists? a bit odd Treats each transaction more as a specific -purchase-/-item- rather than actual bank transaction, so there's no split transactions Can specify a "From" individual, as well as "To"/Payee. Is that really necessary? I'd expect differentiating by account to be sufficient for things like personal vs business purchases, or purchases from you vs spouse, no? Can't create multiple files, it's all one. Debatable, since the folders & smart folders would make it easier to manage a large number of different accounts, plus the bonjour support would let you separate things between users on the lan Weaknesses: Claims to support iCal, but there's no control over the supposed syncing, and I've yet to see any scheduled transaction in my iCal, at least with the demo No report generation No envelope budgeting (biggest weakness) No clean reconciliation / balancing interface Weak completion interface, have to press the down arrow then return to complete the top entry in the completion dropdown, rather than just return No way to see an account's balance with and without the future pending transactions, or day by day, they're always included in the balance in the bottom bubble. There might have been away around the former, if you could create a smart folder to show just current or just future transactions, but the date rules in the smart folders can't act relative to 'today', only to a specific date Has completion for To/From, but doesn't appear to support transaction memorization for things like setting category/tag by store Transfers are completely disconnected, the button just creates a deposit & a withdrawal transaction Filtering view by month/year/etc involves more clicks than MoneyWell (dropdown), and has no graphs on the bottom Clearly, I'll be sticking with MoneyWell for the conceivable future, but I was surprised at how much I liked some aspects of the other, so thought I'd throw it out there for the curious. -- Chris Larson clarson at kergoth dot com clarson at mvista dot com Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus Maintainer - Tslib Software Engineer MontaVista Software, Inc. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "No Thirst Software User Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to no-thirst-software@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
