MoneyLounge

Tired of hanging on to that old PC just to run MS Money when you wish you could keep track of your finances on your Mac? This is the situation I’ve found myself in for the last 3 years since switching over to OS X and finding a serious scarcity of applications that could load all my old MS Money data and allow me to do all the same things that MS Money could. I know there’s Quicken, and Moneydance and a whole host of financial programs on the web that I could potentially use but aside from the various lackluster reviews I’ve read there’s also the issue that none seem to have anything close to the groovy Mac interface that we expect from programs running on OS X. Why can’t we use a Coverflow like interface to swipe between our bank and investment accounts. How about dragging a transaction from one account to another to setup a transfer or throwing $100 from your Visa Card to the petrol pump icon to record that money you spent at BP last week. Let’s face it, keeping track of your finances is a pretty boring chore for most of us and the spreadsheet style interfaces of most of the applications we have to choose from aren’t exactly making this task any more interesting.

The idea of building something like MS Money for a Mac as been floating around in my head for a few years now and I’ve decided to take 2008 off work to have a crack at actually doing it. I’ve got a whole bunch of obstacles that’s going to make this a tricky ask, the trickiest being that I haven’t coded in Objective-C or Cocoa before. Objective-C is a ominous looking language that has been chosen by Apple as their preferred development tool for building OS X applications. I’ll be working alone on this at the start and keeping myself motivated is going to be a challenge. When you’re working at home and it’s a nice sunny day outside it’s sometimes hard to stay focused on fixing that annoying bug or researching some obscure piece of Cocoa API. The actually code required to keep track of financial transactions, download stocks and so on is actually quite simple, it’s going to be the User Interface that will be the big ask. I’ll try and keep updates of my progress coming through on this blog, so stay tuned and I hope I can come up with something to impress.