After procrastinating for years on updating Quicken, and after testing many other products including iBank, See Finance, Checkbook Pro, Moneywell, that Ching product and several others which don't even deserve mentioning, about 9 months ago I finally purchased Quicken Essentials. I must say that I am very pleased. It's been rewritten from the ground up and it's really a Mac product now. Let me put it this way – if you hated the old Quicken, you'll probably love Quicken Essentials. I've used it once or twice a week for the last nine months and it has never crashed nor even presented a perplexing error.

The reason why I took so long is that there was no way to get a free trial, and because Quicken 2005 was such a dog, I didn't want to buy before try. But then I found that Intuit was offering Quicken Essentials for $9.95 if you signed up for a stupid Chase VISA card. So I did it. I haven't used the Chase card, but Quicken Essentials for $9.95 is a steal.

Regarding the other products, MoneyWell was the only one that was able to correctly import my 12 years of Quicken data. But I don't like MoneyWell's "buckets" system of budgeting. If strict budgeting appeals to you and you can't get the $9.95 deal, try out MoneyWell.

As for not being able to print checks, uh, well, don't we have electronic banking nowadays, and are we not paying 98% of our bills electronically? I need to write out a check once or twice a month. I have a box of several hundred hand-write checks that will last me the rest of my life. There is an amazing tool for that called a ball-point pen. They're cheap, reliable and readily available. You can find them in the "stationery" aisle of your favorite drug store. I can write out three checks in the time that it takes the "can't print checks" whiners to load the special paper into their printers. And I don't have to worry about paper jams.

The main new feature added in the latest update, 4.3, activation by "double tapping and holding the ⌘ key", instead of just holding it down for X seconds, sounds complicated, but it is a huge improvement. Although I do naturally hold the ⌘ key down when I can't remember the keyboard shortcut, I also do it while I'm thinking of what I want to do next, and in these instances KeyCue was annoying. The new activation method is a great idea and, if the developer has not done so already, I'd recommend making it the default trigger setting for new users. Users who were annoyed as I was by previous versions should give 4.3+ a try. Open the KeyCue Settings ► Activation panel and set to "press ⌘ twice and hold".

Cool app. Next challenges for the developer: Give me cues for my function keys (F1, F2, etc.), and cues for keyboard shortcuts that I have set using QuicKeys X3.

I had been using a previous version 1.3.2 and found that, when reading in sdef files, it would wipe out the 'type' of the 'direct parameter' of the 'open' command of the 'Standard Suite'. This version 1.5.2 has that bug fixed. Works great now. Thank you, Jean-Daniel!