Mint

About Mint and features
+ui looks clean
+online
+mobile updates
+has an aspect of helping complete newbies
- navigation issues...links to overview, features, spending trends etc. come below the fold after your are signed in, before sign in the features come right in the top. Once you are signed-in wont allow a peak at how it work without taking ur account info, lot of people would like to look before give important info. I personally reached the features page after a lot of looking around, realized its on the home page to start with but goest to below the fold after sign in.
+ helps u trust, veriSign etc.
- the writing is not very web-user friendly: long sentences
- in the Features page the layout of info is confusing, and it gives a broken view of the ui rather than a neat flow like in ms-mymoney
+comparisons of spending trends to aggregate data
+automatic categorization, fetches data from all your bank accounts
+overall attitude to help in easing out finance management rather than just maintain logs

Links - Usability Resources

Are appended as comments.

Observation and Comments

On this entry I will post any interesting observations or comments, both mine and others.

On MS Money: few good points at first glance

+ easy flow for beginners, teaches one in a step by step process
+ video tutorials
+ reports,spending tracker:good data viz to see trends in spending
+ over emphasis on helping one plan their finances rather than just helping in log and track their expenditures which is a not motivating.
+ wording is non-cryptic
+ inclusion of tutorials that teach finance management to novice users
+ broad categories are good
+ guessing the category(5 budget groups) for transaction, tracks budget well:painlessly
+ homepage has good snapshots to start with( Account info, upcoming bills, budget info)
+ linked to your online accounting information :)

.... will add more as I come across as comments to this same post

Installing KMyMoney

(my personal experience of installing kmymoney)

This is so confusing... there is no one setup file I could just click and it goes... next > next > next...
so me couldnt install it.

More over with Ubuntu to get the KDE environment, I have to install KDE...
Now how does a Windows user's understand these scenarios?
I only vaguely understand KDE and GNU.
Thanks to Chetan for enlightening me on this.

And there are issue like you cant install without some admin rights?
So I need to get to the command line, login as "SUDO", by the way I am no Linux geek.
So Chetan did the holy ritual of running some commands...
I was totally lost midway...
Job still not done... By this I am lost at to what he is trying to do, compile the code directly? I dont know...
Or maybe its all just Chetan's geeky way of doing things.

Went to Adept Manager, searched for Finance softwares...
Found KMyMoney and couple of other finance SWs.
This is cool to not go to internet and get all kinds of mixed results.
This even manages installing it...

But again... some admin rights?
I am logged in as admin right?
He did some more command line talking...
bestowed SUDO powers to Adept Manager, and installed couple of Finance SWs that work for Linux as I need to do a comparative study.
I already installed MS Money and went upto as far as syncing it with my online banking passwd in first go... only issue I installed Free Trail version, so I guess its limited and the call drops.

Wubi - Ubuntu installer for Windows

http://wubi.sourceforge.net/



Trying to install this to create a KDE envi for KMyMoney

Crash and MS money

Messed up my windows while trying to install Ubuntu.
Link to free trail installation of MS Money-> http://www.microsoft.com/money/freetrial_HomeandBusiness.mspx