O'Reilly has released its Snow Leopard guide

Apple’s Snow Leopard OS has been out for community use about six weeks. The drumbeat of praise and promises about it runs high by now. You may be wondering if it’s time to spend $29 and upgrade to get new features and some speed increase.

It depends. Support for your programs is the most important factor to consider when you upgrade, so long as the OS isn’t buggy. Small businesses might have to wait awhile, though, since a key accounting package is dragging a club foot to get ready for Snow Leopard.

Despite the fact that a Missing Manual Book, as well as three Taking Care Of e-books for Snow Leopard are on the market, QuickBooks for Mac 2009 cannot make the leap on the Leopard’s back. Users were never fond of QB Mac 2009, but they use it, mostly because their accountants are often running the program on Windows. QB’s vendor Intuit knows how to take care of QuickBooks Windows users. (That’s the version you see in the Office Depot aisles.) Mac users, not so much.The Intuit developers have fallen so far off the Mac train they didn’t even know Snow Leopard’s changes prevent the program from starting up on the Mac. (Java used to be the bridge to get QuickBooks Mac up and running. The parts of Java QuickBooks uses are “deprecated” on the new Snow Leopard — which is nerd-ese for “rotted away and useless.” The other developers in the Mac world are snickering over Intuit’s ingnorance.)

That’s why a move away from QuickBooks on the Mac might make more sense than waiting on your move to Snow Leopard. It’s not a matter of impatience about upgrading. It’s the worry that if Intuit did QB Mac so badly that it won’t install on Snow Leopard, what else are they getting wrong?

Here at the Bites HQ, we have used QB for Mac since 1999. At times we have squirmed, but it’s still useful under Leopard 10.5.whatever. At least QB Mac 2007 and 09 have a way to share files with an accountant or tax preparer who uses QB Windows.

Another option, QuickBooks Online, just made the leap to capability if you use Apple’s Safari browser. That’s right: Firefox is not supported. Nothing wrong with Safari, which is sometimes a better browser. But Firefox has a big share of the Mac user base. What’s more, if you already use QB for Mac, Intuit needs you to call them so they can lead you through importing your records.

There are other reasons to avoid QB Online, like its $35 a month price — you could buy two copies of QuickBooks in one year for that cost. Payroll has been a separate fee with separate software for Mac QuickBooks users for more than five years. Payroll is included in the Windows versions. For Mac users, it’s an extra $20 monthly, plus the fun of dealing with two companies.

If it weren’t so daunting, with a risk of losing key data, we would already be on another accounting program for our offices. One user at the macintouch.com Web site suggested that Apple should create a small business accounting program, just like it built the largely unused Pages program for word processing. Apple has plenty of cash on hand, a growing customer base and plenty of adoption in the business community. I’d vote for an Apple accounting program to challenge the Intuit stumbling in the Mac market. In the meantime, if you’re like us you’ll be waiting out the Intuit repairs to QuickBooks 2009 before leaping onto Snow Leopard.