I awoke groggily and with blurred vision, grabbing my MacBook Pro and sitting down to wake up to the ding of new mail this morning. What did I find? Google Alerts telling me that what I feared was going to happen had happened. Intuit is taking Quicken online as a service rather than as a program.

Why was this something I feared? Because I’ve used Quicken on the Mac since version 7 back in the late 90s. I, personally, have years of data inside it. As a customer, I’m seeing the writing on the wall for the product.

As I related once before on my personal site, this has been rumored for quite a while so the actual service is not a surprise. What it means for the users of desktop Quicken is the surprise.

It’s about time. After working on the project for a while myself, we hired on two additional coders a few months ago to kick-start development of Prosperity and have now reached a point (at version 0.5) where we want to start getting input from people on the project.

Quicken for Mac has been a real problem of mine for years and it’s always been a dream to get rid of it on the Mac. It does little useful for anyone and it’s a codebase that hasn’t been truly updated in a decade. It has some useful features but, in general, it’s old and done.

We recently did the job spec shuffle on the Cocoa jobs. We received a lot of applications for those jobs and after looking at the talent pool for Cocoa folks in Austin we decided to outsource the UI design and just bring in some good Cocoa guys to do the core code.

So we’ve closed out the previous positions and reposted a new one with the new specs. If you applied for the other positions you’ll still be considered for this one as we re-review all the resumes against the new criteria. If you reapply, however, we’ll see you twice.

We’re a startup and not rich, but we don’t give insulting offers, either. If you’re in town, or want to be, take a look.