By Neil Hughes
Published: 04:00 PM EST (01:00 PM PST)
Looking to quash rumors that it will may never get around to releasing a once publicized overhaul to Quicken for the Mac, Intuit announced Thursday that the latest iteration of its financial management software will finally arrive in February of 2010.
The announcement came on the official Quicken blog from Scott Gulbransen, senior manager of public relations/communications with Intuit's Consumer Division. Gulbransen even
acknowledged in his post that it was reasonable for consumers and pundits alike to wonder about the new Quicken for Mac, considering it was first announced in early 2008 for release that same year.
“But after speaking to customers at Macworld 2009, and opening our public beta of Quicken Financial Life for Mac to thousands of you,” he wrote, “we learned the product was not doing what we – nor customers – wanted it to do. We listened, and we learned.”
In 2008,
Intuit said it would rebrand Quicken as "Quicken Financial Life for Mac.” At the time, it was being re-written from the ground up as a Universal application that better utilizes modern-day Mac OS X technologies like CoreData and Cover Flow.
In Thursday’s blog post, Gulbransen explained that Intuit has, in the interim, continued to tweak the new Quicken for Mac.
“We went back to the drawing board and are making changes to everything from what the program does to how it looks,” he wrote. “We spent extra time building a reconcile mode for the new register, a robust Windows-to-Mac transfer function for new Mac users (and existing customers running Quicken on a Windows virtual machine), and redesigned the experience to make it look and feel like a native Mac application should.”
Preorders for the new product will be available at quicken.com beginning on Oct. 12.
When it was first shown at the Macworld Expo in January of 2008, Quicken Financial Life for Mac was
pitched as a major overhaul to the financial management software. Intuit said it aimed to reduce the clutter and confusion associated with existing versions of Quicken for Mac.
