Dark Mode for Quicken for Windows (6 Merged Votes)

TTSguy

I think the mere fact that a significant number of users are still using Quicken 2017 speaks volumes. They obviously don't see the value in the subscription. That has to be a daunting problem for Quicken. and I foresee it becoming more of a problem. Dark mode is one of many problems that Quicken has. Their ability to come up with a new version to fix a problem and doing nothing more than creating more problems is the biggest issue. Good Quicken is not an IPO or many including the CEO would be reading the help wanted ads, with not much of a portfolio. I hope and pray that they don't release a Dark Mode, as I'm afraid we ain't seen nothin yet with regards to problems if they do!

Supermann

can't seem to be able to vote on it anymore, but no dark mode definitely hurts my eyes at 1:29AM...Please identify the ETA. We must have it by end of September 2022. No more delays!

jacobs

Supermann said:

can't seem to be able to vote on it anymore

Yes, because if you look where the voting box would be on the first page of the thread, you'll see that it is marked as "Planned". There's no voting once an Idea is accepted and the developers have scheduled the work. So it is officially and definitely coming… at some point.

Supermann said:

We must have it by end of September 2022. No more delays!

You're giving them a deadline of 12 days to complete and release the feature? Are you thinking there's someone on the development team reading these comments who will go in Monday morning and suddenly crank this out because you've given them a deadline?? 

Supermann said:

Please identify the ETA. 

They never, ever do this. And they won't now, either. There are too many uncertainties, delays, unexpected issues which crop up, diversions of staff to more urgent projects (for instance: EWC+ conversion problems), on top of not wanting to tip their competitors about what they're working on or leasing next. I'd say to take the "W" for it being marked as Planned, and accept that there's no way to know if it will appear next month or next year.

Chris_QPW

I think the "Planned" status and then years of it not coming out speaks volumes.

To me it means, they really recognize this is something their users would like (the Planned part) and thought it might be possible.  But when they actually looked in detail of what it would take or even started on it, they found that it was going to take a very long time to do, that is the part where the users see no progress in years.

They may or may not be working on this (I doubt they are), but to the users it going to look like they don't care.  They certainly aren't going to announce a date that they end up not being able to make.  All they would end up with is even more angry customers. And BTW this isn't just about other things that might come up.  Imagine if someone came to you and said, estimate how long it will take to change some details about everything you have worked on in that last 30 years.  How good do you think your estimate would be on that?

And a project like Dark mode is at a disadvantage from the start.  Who would accept "half of Quicken has dark mode"?  Its one of those complicated protects that you can't really incrementally built up.  And that means that you would have branch out from the main development for the whole period of time that it would take to get this done.  Which means that you have to either constantly merge in code from the main branch to stay up with its changes or have a major (error prone) merge of the "dark mode changes" back into the main branch when this it is finished.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW I'll respectfully disagree with your parts of assessment…

Chris_QPW said:

I think the "Planned" status and then years of it not coming out speaks volumes.

There are many Idea threads on this forum which were flipped to "Planned" status more than a year, and in many cases more than two years ago. My understanding from hearing from people at Quicken is that they don't mark something as Planned until they (1) agree to the concept, (2) do a pretty detailed estimate of the different development skills (design/UI, database queries, connectivity, etc.) and time needed, and (3) assign that work to a particular development sprint cycle or time period in the future.

The fact that some Ideas take years to go from Planned status to implementation tells us several things. First, Quicken is a more complex program than many users give it credit for; making changes that touch certain areas of the program are complex and time-consuming. They may schedule something for sometime next year and estimate it will take about 6 months of work to implement. Second, there are things which come up which require pulling members of the development team onto other projects. (All the work they've been doing this year for the EWC+ (FDX) migrations, for instance, may not have been on the schedule 18 months ago, or may not have been planned for this specific timeframe until the financial institutions gave them short, hard deadlines to switch over or lose connectivity. There can't be any doubt that the connectivity changes bumped other projects down the timeline.) 

Third, they don't just implement each Idea on a stand-alone basis. They look to see what other enhancement requests may be involved in touching the code in particular areas of the program. Some changes are straightforward changes to the way a feature of the program operates, but some require significant underlying infrastructure changes. Or they won't make a small change in one area of the program because some other planned change will require re-writing the code in that same area; they group those projects together so they're only working on that section of code once. (For instance, some old parts of Quicken Windows which don't work well with modern hi-def screen resolutions might be something they'd choose to modernize while they're making those parts support dark mode.)

And, as you said, they sometime mis-estimate how long a particular project will take. But sometimes, when they mark something Planned, they don't intend to work on it for a year, and then know it will take into the year after that to bring it to fruition. And then s**t happens which pushes the completion date even later. But the passage of years from Planned to Released actually doesn't tell us much about how far things deviated from their original plan. 

Chris_QPW said:

Who would accept "half of Quicken has dark mode"?  Its one of those complicated protects that you can't really incrementally built up.  And that means that you would have branch out from the main development for the whole period of time that it would take to get this done.

On this issue, we have a good case study because Quicken Mac went through this exact same issue of implementing Dark Mode. While Quicken Mac doesn't have code as old as Quicken Windows, parts of the code did date back to the earliest parts of the project to develop a new Quicken Mac 15 years ago. Like Quicken Windows, different parts of Quicken Mac had code developed in different programming environments over that time, so updating every element of the program to support Dark Mode required touching and making changes to all those elements. So while it may not have been as daunting a task as implementing Dark Mode in Quicken Windows, it was a project of similar complexity.

On Quicken Mac, it seems it was developed incrementally. They had to visit every window, pane, panel, button, dialog box, widget and UI element to enable it to toggle between light and dark mode and to use colors which worked in dark mode. Along the way, the product manager shared a few screenshots of the work in progress to illustrate the complexity of the work, and said that it would take them quite awhile to get it ready for release. Eventually, they created a new preference setting for "early access" to features which were mostly-but-not-quite done so users could see the progress and try them out; Dark Mode was the first such "early access" feature, released as nearly-complete in July 2021, even though the final touches on Dark Mode weren't released until April 2022. 

The former Quicken Mac product manager shared some insight into the issues involved as work progressed. It started with the fact that this was originally a lower priority item for them, until user feedback plus analytics about user's computing environments convinced them to move it up:

"When we surveyed customers in the past, dark mode has always ranked pretty low on the priority list against all of the other features people wanted us to work on. I'll conduct another user survey to see where most of our customers rank dark mode. We are also gathering analytic data in 6.0 on dark mode usage which we added to help us prioritize this feature... This will take time, but we can always change the priority."  

He also gave some short explanations of the complexity involved. 

"Turning on dark mode in our code is easy. Making it look decent is hard — and you can't turn on dark mode until the entire app looks OK. We have large portions of the app, that have no concept of dark mode and so those screens look weird when we allow dark mode to be turned on. Many explicitly draw a white or gray background, so to get this working in dark mode, every screen, sheet and dialog box has to be tweaked. We have been working on a more unified and consistent UX design throughout Quicken Mac, which 6.0 is a part of, and the plan has always been to fix dark mode issues as we upgraded each screen." 

Chris_QPW said:

They may or may not be working on this (I doubt they are)

I would expect that there is, and has been, a similar game plan on the Quicken Windows side about modernizing the user interface, and that it's probably a project with many, many parts and a very long time span. But just because we can't see the work in progress doesn't mean that there isn't work in progress. 

Supermann

Many thanks for the context. We can definitely wait beyond the end of September. The subscription won’t end until next summer. I am just saying that it took New York Times iOS app a lot of years to implement dark mode too. What’s EWC+ btw? Any ideas on Unicode support? Thanks

jacobs

EWC+ refers to the conversion some financial institutions have been requiring, to end Direct Connect as a connection method for Quicken, while updating the longstanding Express Web Connect (aggregation) connection method to use a more secure modern technology to manage user authentication (tokens instead of stored login/password credentials). Messages about this conversion of Chase have been all over this forum in the past month, and the transition for Bank of America is starting to roll out. 

Chris_QPW

Supermann said:

Any ideas on Unicode support? Thanks

If anything supporting Unicode is even more difficult than "Dark mode" if the program was setup for it in the first place, and as I see it there is very little incentive to do it.  Quicken Inc has made it very clear that their market is the US and Canadian (English, not French).  Why would they spend any time on a feature for a market they aren't targeting?

@jacobs I think your explanation is right on the mark.  I tend to be pessimistic of what the Quicken Windows developers can do given their history, but it is entirely possible that they are working on it.

billybeau1

Is dark mode idea dead ? It sure would make my Quicken experience much better.

jacobs

billybeau1 said:

Is dark mode idea dead ?

No, on the first page of this thread, it is marked "Planned" by the developers.

We don't know where they stand in their work on it or when it will come out, but they are planning to implement Dark Mode.

It's a complex task, because every screen, dialog box, and widget needs to be update to support Dark Mode, and some of those were created in old development environments they don't use anymore. For a more detailed explanation about the difficulty involved, read my post higher on this page (linked here.)

Snowman

Sadly Quicken itself is almost dead. It is held together by bailing wire and chewing gum and there are still severe bugs in it that will never be fixed. There are those who will say rewriting it will be a disaster just look at what happened to the Mac version. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Writing quality software takes planning, what do you want the software to do, how do you plan to do this and ALL of this HAS TO BE DONE before the first line of code is written. Then you hire the programmers to write the code and make sure that they are managed properly.

TTSguy

Yes I agree. We must be careful what we wish for. A haphazard attempt to improve something near impossible to do, could cause a great deal of pain and suffering with our financial records. Quicken's track record on "new stuff" is abysmal. This software is too old to keep going to improve it, C

Case in point, when mobile and web came out and they started using "Sync" it was a total disaster. There was so many problems with it that now the moderators and super users are telling people to turn Sync off. it affected more people with problems than it did help others with the new mobile version. Quicken spent a " LOT" of money to get mobile off the ground, but I suspect the decision has left them embarrassed because I don't think near as many people are using it as they had projected. That cost them, now we're all paying more for Quicken. Why, because some users convinced Quicken to that it was necessary, just look at the chaos after that!

Since 2017 there has been so many issues, and the brain damage for me has me whittled Quicken down for me to ONLY using it as a checkbook register with reports, not 1 other thing do I use in Quicken, I even use  manual web express as my selected download method. Look at how many new versions have come out the last 3 years when people say it's good and running fine.

There will be more of this until Quicken collapses under the pressures, then everyone will regret the "need" for all the new stuff. oops sorry too late, problems themselves will be bigger then Quicken itself.

Let's forget about Dark mode and let the developers just smooth out and refine the current Quicken  without taking another step forward and two steps back!

ADA-DisabledUser

A Longtime Quicken Windows Home and Business user requesting Dark Mode for medical (ADA) reasons. Please.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

jacobs

kstev99 said:

Quicken developers keep thumbing their noses at their users by ignoring requests for a DARK MODE

@kstev99 Except that's not really correct. This feature is marked on the first page as "Planned". That means the developers not only agree it is a feature which should be implemented, but that they have assigned it time in their development roadmap. While it is true that they have not yet released the Dark Mode feature, that doesn't mean they haven't been working on it. We don't know where they stand or what the timeframe is, because Quicken never pre-announces when features will be released, but as noted throughout this thread above, implementing Dark Mode in Quicken Windows is a major undertaking. Every screen and dialog box has to be touched and updated; some areas of the program were developed with programing tools and environments which haven't been used for many years, so re-opening those parts of the code can entail painstaking patch work or in some cases, completely re-writing code. It took the Quicken Mac team a long time to implement Dark Mode, and Quicken Mac has fewer features and a code base which doesn't stretch back decades. I'm not saying it isn't disappointing they haven't released this feature yet, but I think saying they are "thumbing their noses at their users" because they aren't yet done with this major project isn't a fair characterization.

kstev99 said:

I miss Microsoft Money! At least I didn't have to pay a yearly subscription fee, and whether or not I upgraded was MY decision. 

Those were different times, in the earlier years of the PC era, when a steady stream of new features and functionality drove regular paid updates and an expanding base of users. But as the industry matured, the funding model pivoted, and many software products from many software developers are now sold on a subscription basis. New features are often smaller and more iterative, and modern operating system changes drive software developers to revamp old code just to maintain status quo functionality in a program. None of us like to pay annual subscription fees to maintain a program like Quicken, yet we want Quicken to make overhauls to the code to support new OS features like Dark Mode, and to keep up with frequent protocol and security changes by financial institutions. There's no free lunch, and there's no free team of programmers constantly updating code to keep up; a subscription fee is the necessary price we pay to keep a valuable tool functioning. For any user, if the tool ceases to become valuable, or if someone else creates a better tool, then you stop and move on to something else. 

Chris_QPW

kstev99 said:

and whether or not I upgraded was MY decision.

It is still your decision.  You have decided to pay for the subscription to keep online services.  Even before the new subscription pricing if you didn't upgrade your online service would eventually be cutoff.

kstev99 said:

I miss Microsoft Money! At least I didn't have to pay a yearly subscription fee

And Microsoft made the decision that it wasn't worth it to keep producing Microsoft Money.  That should tell you something about how a business looks at this question.

Isomeme

> @kstev99 said:
> Quicken developers keep thumbing their noses at their users by ignoring requests for a DARK MODE

As a vision-impaired user, I desperately want Quicken for Windows to implement dark mode. At present, I have to use the Windows accessibility feature that inverts the entire screen color palette in order to use Quicken, which is especially inconvenient if I need to move between the app and anything else (e.g., checking my bank account on the web).

As a software developer with 40 years of experience, I understand all too well that apparently simple features can be extremely difficult to implement. Design and implementation decisions made long ago can put serious barriers in your path.

My guess is that various parts of the Windows Quicken app were developed at different times, using different tools and APIs, and using different color selection mechanisms. As long as everything in the app UI displayed in unvarying colors, that didn't seem like an important problem. But it makes implementation of configurable colors an utter nightmare.

People outside the software industry usually have poor intuition about how difficult various tasks will be. As usual, xkcd provides a perfect (and funny) example of this problem: https://xkcd.com/1425/

Chris_QPW

Isomeme said:

My guess is that various parts of the Windows Quicken app were developed at different times, using different tools and APIs, and using different color selection mechanisms. As long as everything in the app UI displayed in unvarying colors, that didn't seem like an important problem. But it makes implementation of configurable colors an utter nightmare.

That is a very good guess, and easily proven to be correct.  The Tax Planner for instance clearly dates back to the late 1990s/early 2000s when the API of choices was "Desktop as a web page".  Parts of the Lifetime Planner are still the same kind of API and I believe the "form" for the Business features are too.

I do believe that over the years they have tried to modernize as much as possible but there are a lot of features (some of which are totally forgotten until removed/changed and someone complains about it).

jandd661

I just started with Quicken Deluxe sub. I spent a half hour looking for dark mode. It never crossed my mind that an app would not have dark mode. It blue screened my brain.

Chris_QPW

jandd661 said:

I just started with Quicken Deluxe sub. I spent a half hour looking for dark mode. It never crossed my mind that an app would not have dark mode. It blue screened my brain.

How long did you look for dark mode on this forum?  

The funny thing is I have been looking for dark mode for something like 30 years, and it is really a very recent thing on Windows.

When I started with computers it was on terminals, and they had white characters and a dark background.  A few years later there were lots of studies on how bad this was on people's eyes, and they switched to amber or green characters.

Then the various "windows" operating systems came in and decided that your documents are "paper" and as such should have a while background with black printing.  Well, there is a HUGE difference between the reflective light of a page and a monitor putting out white.

Note that almost immediately programmer's editors allowed for having a dark background and colored text, but that never seemed to get to the rest of the windowing world.  Now zip ahead to just a few years ago and all of a sudden people are waking up (again) to how terrible it is to have a white background!

Rocket J Squirrel

Chris_QPW said:

Then the various "windows" operating systems came in and decided that your documents are "paper" and as such should have a while background with black printing.

Long before Windows, in 1981, Xerox Star was the first commercial system to show WYSIWYG documents, which of course were black type on white background.

Having said that, I wish people would stop adding to this thread! I can't unsubscribe from it and it's a waste of pixels to add more posts.

TTSguy

I would think the moderators would be able to close this idea easily. I agree with you, if we were to get it, here would be problems like we've never seen before!

jacobs

Idea threads on this site don’t get closed until after they are implemented; otherwise, new threads inevitably pop up asking for the same features. What we really need is the ability to unsubscribe from threads, but the forum software vendor (Vanilla) has not yet implemented such a feature.

Rocket J Squirrel

jacobs said:

What we really need is the ability to unsubscribe from threads, but the forum software vendor (Vanilla) has not yet implemented such a feature.

Preach, brother, preach!

Chris_QPW

Rocket J Squirrel said:

jacobs said:

What we really need is the ability to unsubscribe from threads, but the forum software vendor (Vanilla) has not yet implemented such a feature.

Preach, brother, preach!

That is why I NEVER subscribe to any thread.  In fact, I have learned to start "Discussions" instead of "Questions" because if I start a question there isn't any way for me to no get an email notification for every post on it.

Rocket J Squirrel

Chris_QPW said:

Rocket J Squirrel said:

jacobs said:

What we really need is the ability to unsubscribe from threads, but the forum software vendor (Vanilla) has not yet implemented such a feature.

Preach, brother, preach!

That is why I NEVER subscribe to any thread.

Um, you are subscribed to this thread by virtue of having added a comment.

Chris_QPW

Rocket J Squirrel said:

Chris_QPW said:

Rocket J Squirrel said:

jacobs said:

What we really need is the ability to unsubscribe from threads, but the forum software vendor (Vanilla) has not yet implemented such a feature.

Preach, brother, preach!

That is why I NEVER subscribe to any thread.

Um, you are subscribed to this thread by virtue of having added a comment.

Hmm.  Oh, I just checked my notifications, and it reminded me of something. There isn't any setting for not getting email notifications for subscribing to a thread, but I don't get any of them because of a lucky event.  I don't know if you remember it, but when they first converted all of the accounts from the old forum to the new one, for some reason some people weren't getting the notification emails.  I was one of them.  But unlike the people that complained about it and got their accounts "fixed", I didn't.  

Rocket J Squirrel

Chris_QPW said:

There isn't any setting for not getting email notifications for subscribing to a thread

Yes there is. The first box is for email and the second box is for a temporary popup at the bottom left of the window.

Chris_QPW

Rocket J Squirrel said:

Chris_QPW said:

There isn't any setting for not getting email notifications for subscribing to a thread

Yes there is. The first box is for email and the second box is for a temporary popup at the bottom left of the window.

My mistake!  I didn't see that one.  I have it off.

It means that I have to either bookmark a discussion of scan for changed discussions every time I come in and if people don't put in a mention for me, I do miss some follow ups at times.

dagwoodg

I get dark mode will be difficult, but it's needed. Would having Windows High Contrast settings apply to Quicken be another approach or will the same issues still apply?