New Software!!

I've been spending lots of dough on new software lately.
It feels good to know that I'm up-to-date on all of the programs that I use daily.

Here's a list of the latest:

Quickbooks 2005 (PC)
First of all, I bought Quickbooks 2002 3 years ago to use on my PC.
Why the PC version?
At the time, Intuit wasn't making any updates to their Mac version. (they just came out with an update for the Mac last year)
I only use Quickbooks to create/send invoices, and receive payments for my clients. I do all of my personal finance stuff in Quicken on my Mac.
The main reason why I wanted to get Quickbooks on the PC was because (at the time) you could write up and invoice, and send it to your client via email. It was very cool - they would receive an email from you with the Invoice right inside the email. No need to open up any additional documents.

Okay, here's the lame part:
When I started sending out invoices around March of this year, Intuit informs me that in order to coninue to email invoices after April, 2005, that I'll have to upgrade to Quickbooks 2005.

WTF?!

What a rip-off. I'm only using the program for what I bought it for, and I don't need any of the fancy scmancy updates. Of course, since I bought the program to email invoices in the first place, I had to buy the upgrade to continue to do so.

So that's $150.00.

Which I'm dealing with, and it's all fine until I find out that the new version of Quickbooks converts your invoices into PDF files and attaches them to email files! This blows, because that's not what I want. I want my clients to be able to see their invoice in their email window. Now, they have to download a PDF file, and open it with whatever program (outside of their email program).

What bites even more is that this is the exact reason why I didn't buy Quickin for Mac when the new version came out last year. They also convert your invoices to PDFs. I suppose this is fine, because it enables the invoice to look exactly how it should, and not have the potential to have the formatting messed up in email.

So anyway, there's my rant about Quickbooks, and how Intuit made me upgrade.

(end rant)

Next up: Macromedia (soon to be Adobe) Dreamweaver!

I LOVE Dreamweaver so far. I can't believe that it took me so long to buy it.
I'm created 3 seperate sites with it so far, ALL with CSS (yeah, Baby!).
So far, the tools in Dreamweaver are far superior to the last version of Adobe GoLive that I had been using.
Dreamweaver rocks. Two thumbs up.

Apple OS 10.4 (Tiger)
Well, after amazon.com lost my first order, I finally got my copy of Tiger last night.
I loaded it up, and so far, so good.
It took about 1 1/2 hours to load, which seemed like a long time.
I haven't had much time to check out all of the new stuff yet, but so far, I think I like the Dashboard stuff. Kinda cool.

I also got Adobe Photoshop CS2 and GoLive CS2.
Sweet!
I have the boxes on my desk, but haven't had a chance to install them yet.
(see what happens when I have a 10-6 job?! It's crazy!)

I'll try to install them within the next couple of days to check 'em out.

stay tuned....