Anyone run their business on a Mac?

bigred

I've just set up a small company and am a mac user. A new problem arose today, when I got my Bank of Ireland business banking login - yep, the website only works in IE.. I've had to go to the hassle of booting VPC (my machine is a G4) just to run a web browser. I'm using Quickbooks for the accounting - small company, nothing too nasty.

Before I go any further, should I stick with my PowerPC, buy a cheapo Dell for the finances, or stick it out and take the plunge in about a years time and get that Mac Pro with all the bells and whistles?

Hopefully Leopard will allow me to run windows apps natively (e.g. Sage etc.)..

Any thoughts?

Elessar

You could also switch to NIB, which is relatively easy and who have an internet banking system specifically for mac users.

grizzly

Not sure about the accounts software (try looking on the forum of www.creativeireland.com, they use mostly macs and alot of users run own companies)

As for browser try some others use BoI site;

Camino
Opera
OmniWeb
MyIE2/Maxthon
Shiira
Firefox

gallantman

I have accessed BoI internet banking using IE 5.2 for Mac. I have also installed Virtual PC and run Win XP to do my accounts on QuickBooks 2003.

I can share directories between XP and the mac to do backups but have yet setup printing to print from QuickBooks to the printer networked to my mac.

I'm using OS x.

gallantman

Hugh_C

bigred wrote:

Any thoughts?

Isn't there a way to get Safari to emulate the behaviour of IE? Have a look for these on www.versiontracker.com

Safari Enhancer 3.3.1
enhances the functionality of Safari 1.4M Freeware 07/04/2006 11,380
Safari Debugger 2.81
fix errors with online banking & other sites

hc

Ham'nd'egger

Is this the Banking 365 site (www.365online.com) you can't log into, Bigred?

bigred

Hamndegger wrote:

Is this the Banking 365 site (www.365online.com) you can't log into, Bigred?

Nope - it's the Business Banking, https://www.boi-bol.com/newHome.html .
It seems to be firing up some JVM checking applet (Says 'Business On Line Loading... Please wait...') - this just sits there, in focus and cant be killed for me to get focus on the login form. I presume it's trying to find java in my path, but it's a bloody mac, it doesnt have a path, or a registry....

Have tried Safari, Firefox, IE Mac. At this stage, I might as well sit and wait for VPC to boot my XP image and do it from there :mad:

nahgoe

bigred wrote:

Before I go any further, should I stick with my PowerPC, buy a cheapo Dell for the finances, or stick it out and take the plunge in about a years time and get that Mac Pro with all the bells and whistles?

Depends. If you can afford it easily, my personal opinion would be to go with a Dell cheapy box. It's nice to have a backup machine around the place, just in case you ever find yourself without your powerbook, or you want to run something more resource intensive that only works on Windows/Linux.

The other advantage to this path, is that you could buy more hard disks for it relatively cheap ( 2 x 300g SATA disks are about 220 on komplett, probably a lot more from Dell ), couple them with a RAID card, and you've got something to back up all your important documents to.

The other thing to consider, is can you do without having a fully fledged windows box for however long it is until you get your Mac Pro?

Oriel

Why not install Bootcamp and log in to Windows for any financial needs? There is no need to buy a new machine when the machine that you already have is able to run windows.

Oriel

Also, phone them up - they should have some way of supporting macs. Northern Bank in the north here (National Irish with you, I believe) only support macs through some dongle of some description.

bigred

sinecurea wrote:

Why not install Bootcamp and log in to Windows for any financial needs? There is no need to buy a new machine when the machine that you already have is able to run windows.

Cant do that right now - the powerbook runs on a PowerPC chip - not Intel, hence BootCamp wont work. I'm going to struggle on for the next few months jumping into Virtual PC. The Mac Pro will more than make up for the hassle 'when' I get it

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

bigred

daveirl wrote:

This post has been deleted.

It seems smart enough. I've installed the Agent Switcher and tried IE6 and Netscape - no dice. Maybe someone might be able to make sense of what's below;

Homepage of service: https://www.boi-bol.com/newHome.html

Frame that holds the login script: https://www.boi-bol.com/jsp/common/comLogon.html

The login script: https://www.boi-bol.com/js/comLogonJS.js

Oriel

bigred wrote:

the powerbook runs on a PowerPC chip

D'oh! Of course...

formatman

BOI business banking requires a certificate t be installed on the hdd to work , the software is designed to look for this certificate in a windows enviroment under a directory structure ( boi designed) which is c:\mydocument\dc

So unless they actually rewrite the whole package

The boi busines banking is like the internal system they use in the bank I think , it wasn't designed as Internet banking ,

Its very unfriendly to use but works well once you get use to it

Don't forget your digital cert password on a weekend though!

Urban Weigl

Think about switching to AIB? They work fine with all browsers (tested it with Safari and Firefox).

As far as needing to run Windows, the only app here I can think of is Sage. Yeah, you could use MYOB ( www.myob.co.uk) , which is similar, but Sage is more popular in Ireland, so people "know it".

What I would recommend in your situation is pick up an Intel iMac. They're really nice machines and good value. Install Parallels ( www.parallels.com ) on it. That way you can run Windows at the same time, at full native speed, e.g. it's not like VirtualPC which is dog slow.

"Parallels Desktop for Mac is the first solution that gives Apple users the ability to run Windows alongside Mac OS X in a secure, isolated virtual machine. Parallels Desktop works with any Intel-powered Apple, including iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook and MacBook Pro."

SouperComputer

nahgoe wrote:

The other advantage to this path, is that you could buy more hard disks for it relatively cheap ( 2 x 300g SATA disks are about 220 on komplett, probably a lot more from Dell ), couple them with a RAID card, and you've got something to back up all your important documents to.

Word of warning: RAID has never been, is not, and never will be a backup solution. RAID, depending on its type, is for fault tolerance, increased capacity and\or increased performance and should be used ONLY WITH an effective backup solution.

This includes mirroring (RAID 1). If you suffer any kind of software corruption through power failure, system instability malicious code your mirror is useless. If you have a fire or theft or your mirror is useless. Hence the need for a backup solution that is kept offsite or in a fireproof safe, ideally one in each location eg daily incremental\differential onsite, weekly full offsite.

The purpose of RAID 1 is to allow the system to continue to run in the event of HD failure, fault tolerance. Not a backup. Also its good practice to get drives from different batches

@ BigRed: Virtual PC should offer acceptable performance for your BOI business needs. As mentioned earlier, the service requires a windows-specific applet to be installed on the client computer for security reasons.

Of course, if you aren't happy with BOI then now is a good time to switch!

Finance wise, why not get Quickbooks for the Mac? Intel Mac with paralells is a good way to go, the longer you can hold out for the swich the better. Although the general consensus with the people I know who have moved is good. There have been some issues, but they are fortunately in the minority.

bigred

SouperComputer wrote:

Finance wise, why not get Quickbooks for the Mac? Intel Mac with paralells is a good way to go, the longer you can hold out for the swich the better. Although the general consensus with the people I know who have moved is good. There have been some issues, but they are fortunately in the minority.

Already done Souper. I'm quite happy with it.

As for backups, I've come from IT, so know a good backup and DR strategy is critical even for a one man operation.
Daily; Incremental of all company files to .Mac and 2GB key that hangs around my neck all day. Incremental of all photos to photoshelter.com
Weekly; Full separate archives of; Photos, Documents, and entire Mac HD to external storage (locally)
On completion of client job - all relevant files burned to DVD

Will be getting a safe soon to put the DVDs & FW drive away for added protection (and will probably just put the Powerbook in there too).

When I go Intel, parallells (or whatever Leopard has to offer) will sort my XP woes

SouperComputer

When I go Intel, parallells (or whatever Leopard has to offer) will sort my XP woe

We all live in hope