| > Does it really make sense to use Quicken (?) with a dialup modem that called into my bank once a day to update my balances like I did in 1996 Well, the modern hot garbage Intuit forces people to use takes 5-15 seconds to save a transaction, 3-5 seconds to mark a transaction as cleared by the bank, it sometimes completely errors out with no useful message and no recourse other than "try again", has random UI glitches such as matched transactions not being removed from the list of transactions to match once matched (wtf?), and is an abject failure at actually matching those transactions without hitting "Find matches", because for whatever reason the software can't seem to figure out that the $2182.77 transaction from the bank matches the only $2182.77 transaction in the ledger. That one really gets my goat, because seriously, WTF guys? Not to mention the random failure of the interface to show correct totals at random inopportune moments. Oh, and it costs 5x as much on an annual basis. I sure would take that 1996 version with some updated aesthetics and a switch to web-based transaction downloading versus the godawful steaming pile of shit we have now- every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Hands down. This idea that we've made progress is absolutely laughable. Every single interaction is now slower to start, has built-in latency at every step of the process, and is fragile as hell to boot because the interface is running on the framework-du-jour in javascript. Baby Jesus weeps for the workflows forced upon people nowadays. I mean seriously, have none of you 20-somethings never used a true native (non-Electron) application before? |
What kills me about Intuit is that they _can_ make decent software: TurboTax. Obviously, I’d rather the IRS be like revenue departments in other countries, and just inform me what my taxes were at EOY, but since we live in lobbyist hell, at least Intuit isn’t making the average American deal with QuickBooks-level quality.
It’s not like the non-SaaS version of QB is any better, either. I briefly had a side business doing in-person tech support, and once had a job to build a small Windows server for a business that wanted to host QB internally for use. Due to budget constraints, this wound up being the hellscape that is “your domain controller is also your file server, application server…” Unbeknownst to me at the time, there is/was a long-standing bug with QB where it tries to open ports for its database that are typically reserved by Windows Server’s DNS service, and if it fails to get them, it just refuses to launch, with unhelpful error logs. Even once you’ve overcome that bizarre problem, getting the service to reliably function in multi-user mode is a shitshow.
> I mean seriously, have none of you 20-somethings never used a true native (non-Electron) application before?
Judging on the average web dev’s understanding of acceptable latency, no. It’s always amusing to me to watch when web devs and game devs argue here. “250 msec? That’s 15 screen redraws! What are you doing?!” Or in my personal hell, RDBMS. “The DB is slow!” “The DB executed your query in < 1 msec. Your application spent the other 1999 msec waiting on some other service you’ve somehow wrapped into a transaction.”