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.