For over a decade the Apple Macintosh has been seen as a great home and education computer, but when it came time to do “serious work” it lacked the business-related software to “get the job done”.  Business-related software for the Mac was usually written for another operating system first, then rebuilt for the Mac as an afterthought.  Often the Mac versions were a “bad translation”, failing to take advantage of the different features available on the Mac.  Although the situation has improved over the decades, the Mac is still behind when it comes to desktop business software.

However, there is a new hope for Mac users - the web.  A new generations of web standards allows desktop-quality applications to be delivered over the internet directly to a browser.  Web applications like online accounting software, invoicing software, time tracking software, project collaboration, contact management, email, calendaring, appointment scheduling, simple custom databases, todo lists, and much more are being delivered as web applications.  Most web applications run just as well on Mac OS X as on Windows (you may have to switch to Firefox, however, for some of them).  This is part of what people are calling Web 2.0 - the other part is the “social media” like Facebook and blogging.

Thanks to Web 2.0, new business applications are being developed on the web, and Mac users (Linux users, too) enjoy the same access to that software as everyone else.  Although web applications are still missing features compared to our old desktop favorites like word processors, I’m confident that in the years to come they will close the gap.

This post was inspired by This Week With my Mac, where someone describes his attempt to switch fully to the Mac and running into software compatibity issues.

To learn more about our easy accounting software that works on your Mac, check out our demo.

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Tags: accounting software for mac, invoice software, invoicing software, mac accounting software, mac business software, mac os x, online accounting software, os x accounting software, small business software, web 2.0

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 12:40 pm by Dobes and is filed under Small Business Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.