This program was inspired by a small Desk Accessory, Finances, written by Ed Neu in 1989 when the Mac OS was at version 6. I found that I consistently used Finances DA over the years, and am impressed that it still works as an application in Classic. Yes, there are a multitude of programs available that can do much of what FinancesOSX does, and a lot more in some instances. But I liked Finances's simple and rather tight interface and have not found any freeware programs that duplicate its functions in a similar compact manner.

FinancesOSX is my attempt to provide the Finances functionality in OS X. It is my initial exercise in using XCode, InterfaceBuilder and Objective-C to program for the Mac. It has been quite a learning experience. The transition from some limited programming, first in Basic and then in Pascal on the Apple II in the 1980's, to Objective Oriented Programming for OS X today, has been an interesting challenge.

Developing the six calculations using Newton's Method was greatly facilitated by the "Nice Sophia Antipolis University" web site <http://wims.unice.fr/wims/wims.cgi?module=tool/analysis/function>, which did much of the differentiation effort. I am grateful I did not need to spend more time reviewing my old differential calculus texts.

I hope you will find FinancesOSX useful.

Charles McCoy, Cincinnati, OH