i bought CheckBook Pro on the strength of the versiontracker reviews, but the more i use it the more small but nagging design flaws i'm uncovering, mostly in the form of the app not behaving like a Macintosh app is supposed to. for example:

- on the Mac, you deselect highlighted items in a list either selectively by command-clicking them, or all at once by clicking in an area of the list that contains no items. neither of these operations works as expected in a CheckBook Pro transaction list. further, it appears that at least one transaction must always be highlighted in a CheckBook Pro transaction list. if there's a way to "deselect all," i can't find it.

- the above complaint is made a bigger deal by the fact that, while CheckBook Pro can display credits to your account in green text and debits against your account in red text (or whatever color coding you choose to use), the text of highlighted transactions simply appears white, and the highlighting blue. thus, since you can't deselect all transactions, there is always at least one transaction in every CheckBook Pro transaction list that you can't identify as being either a credit or a debit by simply looking at the color. i don't know if it's true of everybody, but my brain processes colors much faster than it finds the "amount" column and determines whether there's a minus sign in front of the amount of the transaction. as such, this absence of identifying color for highlighted transactions is a stumbling block and a considerable annoyance for me.

- after entering text into the Category field of the transaction entry sheet, pressing the down-arrow key on the keyboard should highlight the first item in the Category pop-down menu that matches the text entered by the user. instead, pressing the down-arrow simply highlights the first item in the menu, so that whether i've typed in Recreation or Utilities, pressing the down-arrow highlights Auto (or any alphabetically earlier category i may have created). pressing the up-arrow works as it should: it highlights the bottommost entry that matches the text entered by the user. but pressing the down-arrow highlights the first item in the whole menu regardless of the text entered by the user. this too is a design flaw that needs to be addressed for the app to work the way a Macintosh app is supposed to.

- selecting multiple items in a list and performing an action on one of them - such as checking the "resolved" checkbox - is supposed to perform that action on all the selected items. in CheckBook Pro, it doesn't.

i also don't see a way to display both available and ledger balances. that would be nice.

these are just the problems i've found so far, in very light use of the app. if i continue to use it - which is in some question - i expect i'll find other such inconsistencies with the Macintosh user interface guidelines.

these issues don't appear to be issues to everyone, but they are to me, so i suggest checking them out in the demo and seeing if you can live with them before plunking down your cash on the app.