During a presentation this past weekend before Apple Corp of Dallas, one of oldest Mac user groups around, I was asked several questions about whether certain applications were available on Macs.
One of the applications, Intuit’s personal finance product, Quicken, has been a mainstay on the Mac for years, as most of you know. But not everyone knows that.
The other request mentioned something more obscure. It seems the questioner was tethered to the Classic Mac OS because he used an aging credit card processing application that was no longer being developed. He wondered if there were any modern equivalents.
With my 17-inch MacBook Pro and a projector at hand, I called up Apple’s Made4Mac [1] pages with a bit of a flourish. Without knowing what the results might be, I did a fast search for some alternatives to handle financial transactions, and came up with nearly two dozen choices.
Now it’s the conventional wisdom that there really isn’t a lot of software available for Macs. This is the argument some deliver to explain why they stick with Windows, despite the agonies of erratic performance and massive malware outbreaks.
However, the simple truth is that there over 23,000 Mac products available these days, and the listing of Universal applications, which run native on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs, is fast approaching 4,000.
Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter. [2]