Quicken Community is moving to Single Sign On! Starting 1/22/21, you'll sign in to the community with your Quicken ID. For more information: http://bit.ly/CommunitySSO
Dark Mode in macOS (1 Merged Vote)
Quicken Community
Employee mod
It would be great if support for the new "Dark Mode" in macOS Mojave 10.14 was added to Quicken for Mac. I love how apps that have been updated to support this look, and I find it easier on my eyes, especially at night. Other popular Mac finance apps have been updated to support this (such as [removed]), and it would be great to see Quicken get the same support. Thanks!
Tagged:
36
Comments
Factor 1: None of us can know how much work is involved in enabling dark mode in Quicken. It's a program with a large number of windows and dialog boxes, so it might entail more work than some other applications, but the amount of work it will take depends how much of Quicken's interface is accomplished by standard calls to the operating system, which can natively handle dark mode now, versus custom-coded screen drawing which needs to be re-worked.
Factor 2: Users who have been waiting for features such as expanded reports, enabling transfers in budgeting, QuickMath, batch editing transactions that include splits, complete multi-currency support, and any number of other things might feel these missing features are more important than adding the aesthetic improvement of dark mode support. Obviously, different users have different priorities, and I'm not saying anyone is wrong -- just that the development team must rank which ones should be higher priorities than others.
See all the PF software that supports Dark Mode? And every one of these are way newer to the party than Quicken.
Quicken, like all other Mac software companies, gets development, alpha and beta pre-production versions of macOS Mojave from Apple. This isn't something that just came about when the macOS was released.
Quicken though, is extremely slow in developing anything. That's all on the Mac development team.
No one is asking them to "drop everything" and work on Dark Mode. But heck, they had plenty of notice and other software companies have seized on this. I can name you three offhand that support Dark Mode from Day 1.
[removed - off-topic/violation of community guidelines]
I'd just note that it's likely easier for some of the newer apps to get converted to support dark mode precisely because they're newer code bases and don't have all the features of Quicken. Remember that parts of Quicken Mac were developed for Essentials, which was released back in 2010. There's a mix of development environments and code in Quicken that a newer app likely doesn't have to deal with. And then there's the issue of priorities, where reasonable people will most certainly disagree. (While I understand the appeal of dark mode, to me personally, it's not nearly as important as some other functional things I simply can't do in Quicken today -- but I'm not expecting or asking you or anyone to agree with my priorities. In fact, that's where the voting for specific features on this site, which you apparently don't deem useful, can be useful to the developers in gauging which things to prioritize over others.)
Some users on this site have said they've found my posts with background on the development of Quicken Mac helpful; I don't consider myself a shill or apologist for Quicken, but I'm sorry you see it otherwise. In my reply to your post in another thread, I've explained why I don't think offering information about why some things are (or aren't) the way they are is the same as making excuses for Quicken, so I won't repeat any of that here.
As a matter of fact, software or apps that utilize Dark Mode have NO setting available within their software...it's all controlled at the OS level.
So, if that's the case, please tell us why Quicken Mac doesn't easily have this with their software?
It really can NOT be that difficult to enable... and as mentioned previously, almost all other Mac apps are utilizing this from the get go.
Dark Mode is a brand new feature in macOS, and applications need to be modified to enable it. Different applications have different degrees of difficulty to achieve this. In general, the more an application uses calls to the operating system to draw to screens, the easier it is to enable Dark Mode. Quicken has a lot of screens, panels and dialog boxes, so it's likely not a simple task. And we know that the developers have a long list of functionality feature requests from users, so it's likely a matter of how important the developers perceive this aesthetic feature to be versus many of the others on the feature wishlist.
I read lots of user requests on this forum, and I personally think there are a lot of other more pressing issues for Quicken Mac -- things it actually cannot do currently, versus an aesthetic improvement. But we all use Quicken differently and have different views on what we'd like to see the developers work on next. As I wrote previously, it's not that I don't think they should do the work to enable Dark Mode, it's only a matter of how high a priority it should be. So for those who think this should be addressed more urgently, vote! Votes on this forum do have some influence on the developers' priority list.
On the other hand, I'm happy to see they've been tackling things like more functionality in reports, payee renaming rules, Quickfill rules for categorization -- things Quicken couldn't do before -- as a higher priority than an aesthetic issue of Dark Mode. (And before anyone flames me, I do understand that for some users, Dark Mode would be your top priority.)
The reality is that the program code is complex, the Mac development team isn't that big, and their forward progress is often frustratingly slow. I suspect that converting Quicken to Dark Mode is a pretty involved job because of the large number of windows, panels, panes, and icons that need to be updated. What we can probably all agree on is that it would be nice if they would just tell users what their intentions are, such as "we're going to do this, but it's a roughly 6-month project and probably won't be done until xxx", or "we have someone working on this" or whatever.
Please advise something. I'm begging you as a faithful LONG time user please put this on the to-do and advise of a timeframe. Please...
When Apple first introduced Dark Mode, I was elated. For years, I had converted my most frequent Go-To Excel Spreadsheets to a black background and color type, eliminating the persistent eye fatigue.
Now working from home, I'd applaud Quicken for developing a Q/Mac Dark Mode version and would consider paying a reasonable premium for making it.
Also, I'd be willing to participate as part of a Beta Group if asked. What's everyone's thoughts?
Stu
So the good news is that they're working on it. The bad news is that we don't know how much longer it will take.
The problem is that Quicken Mac has a lot -- lot! -- of windows, panes and panels. These have been developed over time, some dating back a decade to the development of the predecessor Quicken Essentials program (the 1.x version of the code). Over time, Apple changes tools to make it easy for developers to incorporate such new features as dark mode, but many pieces of the program which were developed more than two years ago, before the 2018 debut of Dark Mode, and some developed using different coding environments that date back a decade or more, have to be re-coded, screen by screen, to be Dark Mode capable.
And so it's a big job to retrofit Quicken Mac for Dark Mode. Until recently, there was no word from Quicken about whether or when Dark Mode capability would be added, so I take it as a very good sign for those who have been wanting this functionality that they are working on it and have committed to releasing it. Of course, users who want it want it yesterday, but at least you know it's a work in progress.
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 which 6.0 is a part of and the plan has always been to fix dark mode issues as we upgraded each screen.
This will take time but we can always change the priority.
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. To give you a sense of the work we need to do to be able to reliably turn on dark mode, this is what the Bills & Income screen currently looks like with dark mode turned on.