I am now mere moments away from finally switching off my windows box and making the iMac our primary home machine.

The last hurdle was cleared this week when I found a replacement accounting package for the family treasurer to use and replace the copy of Quicken 2002 we have been running for many years on the PC.

The reason I took so long in finding a proper replacement was that I’d failed to listen to my stakeholder (my wife, Liz) on what her actually requirements were for the new package. I had investigated all sorts of shinny new software, from the free GNUCASH (that took me half a day to build) through to some fancy stuff from Igg Software called iBank. Everything I looked at seemed to do the the job (at least the trial versions allowed me to import the data) and looked good.

However, each time I ran the stakeholder demo I got the response ‘its too complicated’, or ‘I don’t want to learn a new package’, ‘I just want it to look and work like the old Quicken’.

Now Quicken isn’t the most fantastic piece of software, but it does a job, Liz knows how to use it and we’ve got several years worth of transactions in it. Its satisfied my stakeholder’s needs. So here I was trying to find something wizzy and new, when all Liz actually wanted was to have Quicken run on the iMac.

Unfortunately there isn’t a Mac version of Quicken (there was one, but they stopped it in the UK a while back and they’re promising one later this year), but in my searches I stumbled across an offering from Codeweaver called CrossOver Mac that claims it allows Windows programs (albeit a specially selected list) to run on a Mac. So last weekend I downloaded the trial version, installed Quicken 2002 and rebuilt all my transactions using a backup file and hey presto! we were in business.

After running the Mac and PC in parallel for a few days my stakeholder made the call to make the switch permanently. So we are now fully Mac’ed’ and I have a delighted treasurer.

Lesson learned, listen to what your stakeholder really wants, don’t assume you know better. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

Now the only thing I have to crack is convincing my eldest that the Mac’s parental control really is a good thing!

I finally got ‘Mac’ed up at the weekend and bought my first iMac. A thing of beauty! I’ve seen a lot of them recently, but have never set one up so thought it was the ideal opportunity to do some real  ‘out of the box’ ‘Consumability’ testing.

First up, the whole lot comes in one box that’s easy to carry out of the shop. I got home and opend it up and decided to get as far as I could without reading the manuals. First out of the box comes the wireless keyboad, then the power cable, then the machine itself. Lastly a long white box with some books the mouse and some sort of remote control.

So the machine goes onto the table, the power lead can only go one place and there’s only one power on button that I pressed. A few seconds later a screen comes up telling me to sort the mouse out – simple enough.
Then the next screen tells me to get the keyboard ready. Easy – except I put the batteries in the wrong way and had to refer to the booklet to check (actually on closer inspection the keyboard had a little diagram on it telling me which way they went – so lets put it down to a user error)

Once the keyboard was on everything went smoothly – it asked me to run a few tests to check it was connected properly, then off it went setting up the machine.

So my out of the box experience and consumability testing have scored pretty high. Next step the ‘11 year old test’. Could my daughter sync her phone up with the iMac using the bluetooth connection? Of course she could, it did take her a couple of minutes to work out which folder she need to connect to, but otherwise easy peazy!

Now onto some load testing……