[Hidden-tech] tax prep software for Mac OS X

[David Mertz]

Juliet Jacobson <juliet at crocker.com> wrote:
> does anyone out there do their own taxes on a Mac under OS X? if so,
> what software do you use?

I just ordered TaxCut Premium 2004 for Mac yesterday.  It hasn't
gotten here yet, so I can't speak to any specifics of the quality of
the software.

But in the last couple years, I've kept around an old Win98r2 laptop
that I boot once a year for the sole purpose of running the tax
software.  Aside from being enormously happy to be able to go over a
year without ever running MS software (i.e. Windows, but also not
Office or anything else), I have been quite pleased by TaxCut/Win
(other than the platform).

My guess/hope is that all the underlying logic of TaxCut is common
between the different platforms... and likely the OSX version has a
perfectly usable interface.  Quite possibly there will be minor
interface details that are not 100% compliant with Apple
User-Interface Guidelines; but I doubt it's any farther from them
then, say, Quicktime (blech! :-().

I also considered using one of the online web-based tax preparation
packages.  I've seen some suggestions of TaxAct.  TaxAct is quite
inexpensive, and gets good reviews.  If I ran only Linux/FreeBSD/OS2,
I might go that route (I *do* run those on other machines).  But I
felt I would rather keep local copies of the data files rather than
use a purely web-based application (I'm sure there are ways to
download the entered data, but call me old fashioned).