As everyone probably knows, Intuit decided to disable Quicken2001/2002  and force everyone to pay money for an update. They turned off the web services that were used by the program - so now it's almost completely useless. Since I don't use windows, it takes a bit of pain to run on Wine/Crossover - Money never worked, so I really don't have too many choices but paying the ransom.

There are very few features I actually use or need - to automatically get the info for few accounts and the stock quotes.

I did some research - first tried again gnucash - it's still bad and hard to install, and no updates from banks.

The best surprise was Moneydance. I initially dismissed it, the price ( $30 ) is close to quicken and it feels a bit hackish, with far less display features. However they do provide a 'development kit', and document most of the APIs that are needed to access and modify the database. That got my attention - I am willing to take a bit of pain and less features if I know I'm not hostage and I may get some customizations.

Importing the data from Quicken was reasonable, few errors due in big part to problems in the original data ( which quicken just ignored ). First big event - the connection to ameritrade 'just worked'. That was cool, and got me past the very limited display of the data ( no customizable colums and info, etc ).

Then I installed the development kit and the very few extensions available - jython support is the most notable. The APIs are not bad either, a bit uncomfortable but pretty usable. The problem however is that doing anything in the python extension required a lot of mouse and clicking, and the only UI choice was still swing-based.

So I just copied all the jars in the WEB-INF/lib, start tomcat, and with a small change in their demo plugin I got the reference to the RootAccount object. I'm now playing with few JSPs and I'll try a bit of XUL/HTML - only to get data and do whatever I can think of.

I'm still not sure if how it'll work out, but it feels really good to be in control of your data and not have to give in to dirty vendor tactics.