KMyMoney Will Make the World Go Round

One of the perennial reasons people give for not using free software is that it is lacking some key piece of software. High on that list is personal finances management, a sector dominated by Intuit in the closed source world. So the following is great news:

The KMyMoney development team is pleased to announce a major step forward for what has been described as "the BEST personal finance manager for FREE users". KMyMoney 1.0 has been released. With over 3 years of development, this new stable release has many new features and a refreshed user interface.

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Since our latest stable release, 0.8.9, a lot of effort has been put in by the developers and the community to add new features and test them to ensure a rock-solid release. Over 2 years of development have resulted in the addition of budgets, a forecast feature, many new reports, report charts, a complete redesign of the import feature, which allows for a much easier migration from other application and a swifter synchronization with online banking. The support of PGP encryption for the KMyMoney files has been improved too, including the option to have multiple keys for a single file, so no one can access your financial records. The summary view has been revamped to show more and more useful information, allowing you to have an overview of your financial situation at a glance. Also, there are now translations for 22 languages, though not all of them are as complete as we would like. We have users wherever KDE3 is installed. That results not only in a greater quality application, but also in one that can be customized to fit the needs of a wide range of users. In between all that work, we have fixed a lot of bugs and little annoyances to make this the best KMyMoney release ever.

Let's hope that the word gets out about KMyMoney, and that more people realise that free software really can cover all their needs.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter and identi.ca.

I Have an Intuition

Of all the complaints about open source - there's no support, poor security, lack of a business model etc. etc. - the one that still has a semblance of truth is that it lacks certain key applications on the desktop. Prime among these is Intuit's QuickBooks personal finance software. It looks like that final obstacle is about to fall. Not only has it set up a Linux Business site, but there are indications it is aiming to break its dependence on Microsoft technologies:

We are actively working on making our product compatible with other browsers (including Safari). We have a large product that currently uses ActiveX and was initially tuned to work with Internet Explorer. Therefore, it will require a large amount of work and will take some time on our part to accomplish. As you can see from the iPhone application, we have passion for Mac within our team!

Additionally, we too would like to use Firefox. We are in this with you; we just need some time to make it all happen.

(Via Jim Zemlin.)