The first application we'll look at today is FreeCellX, a freeware version of Free Cell. Now, I haven't played Free Cell in a long time, having moved to Eight Off in Mac OS 9, so I had forgotten how to play the game. It's similar to Eight Off, but in Eight Off you can only play cards on the same suit where in Free Cell you have to play on alternating colors. A bit easier in Free Cell but that's offset by only having four offboard spaces -- Eight Off has eight.

In any case, I'm not too wild about the graphics in FreeCellX, although they are not unprofessional. A bit too big and narrow for my tastes. There is no undo, I don't think there is any scoring, no help or other documentation, very little autoplay (it'll play out towards the end of the game), and a somewhat clunky interface. At least it's in color. I guess I'm spoiled by Eric's Ultimate Solitaire.

Free Cell is harder than Eight Off, even more so without an undo. At best I think I won 80% off Free Cell games whereas I had a streak of over 200 straight wins in Eight Off (no losses). Only having four offboard spaces means that you have very little stack movement. Once you set up a stack it's tough to move it to another column. Much easier in Eight Off.

Yesterday I played a lot of MacBlox with my brother. That is a fun two player game. It being a bit slow doesn't matter because you're competing against someone else. You add a random line of blocks to the bottom of the other guy's screen when you complete two lines at once (and two or four lines of blocks when you complete three and four lines at once). Mostly it's a race to get a couple of big four liners done which really hurts the other guy, although Chris was able to come back and beat me once when I ran into trouble and couldn't complete any two liners.

The next application I want to look at is Moneydance. I've gone ahead and paid for it, perhaps it a bit prematurely since I haven't started using it yet. But there aren't that many alternatives around -- Quicken is the only one that I can think of. And I still remember Intuit dropping QuickBooks and even Quicken for the Mac and telling people "switch to Windows." Like that kind of attitude inspires customer loyalty. So as long as I can balance my checkbook with Moneydance I'll be happy. I don't need stock quotes or a mortage calculator or anything else other than a checkbook. All the other stuff is a bonus, but not why I bought this application.

First try at importing my Quicken data went awry. A lot of the inter-account transactions (or maybe all of them) ended up in both accounts. It did import all the accounts, including my stock portfolios (though that didn't come through correctly -- right number of stocks but the prices were wrong). It got all the categories that I've created. But the double transactions really threw off my accounts so I just quit the application. On restarting it brought up an empty screen, so I guess it doesn't automatically save data.

Second attempt was to export the Quicken data by account and import the accounts individually. That also didn't work. So I'm back to the usual thing I do when upgrading Quicken, start with no transactions and just a starting balance. At version 3.0, Moneydance still has a lot of bugs (not limitations, actual bugs) that need to be fixed. But for my modest needs I can live with it (and who needs to download stock quotes, though Moneydance does do that, but if there's a firewall it freezes).

I finally got iCab working with a proxy server. If only I had bothered to read the included documentation, especially the doc titled "Proxy under MacOSX PB" which details how to workaround the fact that iCab can't yet read the Internet preferences of Mac OS X. Even though iCab doesn't support Cascading Style Sheets or Java (in the Mac OS X version) or even SSL (again, in Mac OS X), I feel I can throw away OmniWeb and use iCab exclusively.