The winners are: Nick C, Jeremy Gaines, and Keith S! If one of those names belongs to you, you will receive your license shortly.

If you didn’t win, don’t worry, you can still download a trial version of iCash from Maxprog (limited to 100 transactions), and the full version is only $39.90.

My first thought was to see if GnuCash had been ported to run natively on OS X, but unfortunately, it still requires X11 to run (apparently there is a way to do it, but it looks like it would probably require a significant investment of time, so that is out). We tried everything we could find, from Piggybank to the online service, Mint. Finally we tried iCash, from Maxprog, and she told me that it would do.

Upon starting the program for the first time, the first thing that I noticed was that it didn’t have the polished interface that I had gotten used to with Quicken. That isn’t to say that it isn’t functional or doesn’t work, but merely that it isn’t as sleek. After that, though, everything went pretty well. The processes of opening and closing accounts, adding and modifying transactions, and importing data are all fairly intuitive.

There are some things in iCash that we don’t like, such as how it handles contacts, but they are relatively minor, feeling more like lack of polish than anything, and I am certain that they will be fixed in future releases. In addition, there are a few quirks, such as grouping transactions instead of splitting them, that take some getting used to.

What iCash lacks in polish, it makes up for in flexibility. You can create an account for just about everything; where Quicken had issues with some of the assets that we were trying to set up, iCash just worked. It doesn’t try to force you to do things in a particular way, so you can organize your finances in whatever way is comfortable for you.

For people who want an alternative to Quicken that doesn’t feel dumbed down or who are looking for a program to track finances for a small business, iCash is a good choice. It has some quirks, but nothing that would cause me to hesitate in recommending it. In addition, there is an active help forum up on Maxprog’s web site, and the developer is very good about addressing questions.

Although iCash 4.3 is shareware and costs $39.90 to register, Maxprog has generously provided us with three licenses to give away to our readers! To enter, simply comment below with a suggestion for a feature that you would most like to see in this program. The winners will be announced next week.

AutoRate is a small program (and I mean small, the download is 104k) that will sift through your iTunes Collection of Shame, and rate each and every single track based on play count and frequency. This may sound like it isn’t a very good way to rate songs, but I have found the opposite to be true. When I first downloaded the program about a year ago I thought, “Neat,” set it up to run automatically (there are instructions as to how in the readme file), and promptly forgot about it. About a week ago, I started up iTunes and just hit play without paying attention. About five songs in, I was thinking that I had created an awesome playlist and then forgotten about it, but when I checked, that was not the case. Instead, my list had simply been sorted by rating and I was playing my 5-star songs.

Granted, rating by statistics is not perfect, but the program is configurable enough to make it work. When you open the Preferences pane for the program, you only have a few different options, but even so it manages to feel robust. For example, you can set whether it biases towards play count or frequency, you can set it to only rate songs that have not yet been rated, and you can choose whether you want the program to only rate songs in certain playlists or in the entire library.

There were two options whose functions were not immediately obvious, but which were explained on the forums. The first is whether the program uses cached data, which basically means whether it will reanalyze all of the songs when you run it. The second, which I think is much more interesting, is labeled “Existing rating memory”, and its function is to determine the weight that will be given to existing ratings. At one end of the slider, you have “None”, which will mean that the program will not take old ratings into account at all. At the other end you have “Full”, which means that the program will base the new ratings almost entirely off of existing ratings (if you don’t want it to modify existing ratings at all, there is an option for that as well). This option has turned out to be one of my favorite, as it allows me to rate music as I import it, and then the program will adjust that rating based on whether or not I actually listen to that music.

In the end, AutoRate does a good job, so long as you understand that it is only meant to do the heavy lifting. You might still have to tweak some of the ratings, for example I have changed a few ratings, but not many. Even if you don’t like the ratings that the program assigns, at the very least your music collection will at least look like it has been rated, enough to trick your friends and maybe get rid of some of that guilt that you’ve been carrying.

AutoRate is freeware, available for download from Tzi Software.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the tank, Microsoft Word, the current industry leader. In addition to being expensive it has a million and one features that are difficult to navigate and makes the program into a serious resource hog. In between those two extremes, you have Nisus Writer Express, from Nisus Software, which is more like a BMW.

It doesn't do everything (if you need to interface your document directly with a database, this isn't the program for you), but what it does do, it does extremely well, and a sleek interface. So, if BMW were to design a word processor, what would it look like?

I imagine that it would look a lot like Nisus Writer. When you open it up, you see a blank page with a toolbar on top and a drawer on the side. On the toolbar, you have access to some basic formatting and document settings. Next to your document, there is a drawer that contains all of the other formatting settings. The various controls are organized into palettes which are in turn organized into groups. In addition, you can break off palettes into floating windows and create custom palette groups, should you need to.

The experience does not end at having an intuitive interface, though. The program easily handles headers and footers, columns, and tables. One of my favorite tools is the included thesaurus, which is integrated into the drawer. After using it for a few days, it becomes second nature to glance over at the thesaurus for a synonym. There are some things that are left out, however, like Indexing and Cross Referencing. Chances are, however, that if you need a feature that isn't there, you can find it in Nisus Writer Express' big brother, Nisus Writer Pro.

One question that inevitably comes up when you are talking about a word processors is “But is it compatible with Microsoft Word? Nisus Writer can save documents as Word documents, which Word opens with only occasional, minor formatting changes. Nisus Writer can also open Word documents, although the formatting sometimes goes through subtle changes. Predictably, if the Word document has an embedded Excel spreadsheet, you will lose that in the translation. In an office where everyone uses MS Office exclusively, you will probably have some issues with compatibility, but other than that, Nisus Writer Express works just fine.

Nisus Writer Express is available as shareware, with a 15-day free trial period. Registration costs $45, with a three license family pack available for $79. Academic discounts are available.

In short, Nisus Writer Express is everything a word processor for Mac should be: a combination of utility and elegance that just works.