[thelist] UK online banks for Mac users

[Andy Warwick]

On 2002/09/12 02:24 pm, "Geoff Sheridan" <web2k2 at premonition.co.uk> wrote:

> Has anyone got a current account with decent online service in the UK?
> Most either don't work at all or function very badly when using a Mac.
> Egg online (credit card and savings) works great, but I need a decent
> current account and Woolwich and Natwest (with whom I have current
> accounts) have a service which is irritatingly slow to access.
> (Woolwich being the worst offender with a practically unusable
> service, while Natwest requires I fire up NN4 <shudder>)
>
> Has anyone got any recommendations?
>
> Geoff

Geoff

I use Lloyds TSB for my business account and that works great in OS 10 and
pretty much any browser. It uses HTTPS, and has a fairly clean and fast
interface. They even did a demo in-branch before I opened the account and
confirmed it was Mac compatible with their tech dept. there and then. I
assume their personal accounts use the same interface.

Whatever you do, avoid Co-op and their online service. It doesn't work on
Mac at all, and is a bit flaky on PCs. It uses a badly-written Java applet
that requires you to downgrade your Java 2 versions in OS 9, doesn't work at
all in OS X, and only works in Netscape Navigator when you get the right
Java. And then pretty badly.

They have just updated their site and it is still as bad as ever. I emailed
their tech support and the banking ombudsman about it. Their response was to
put me on a list of Mac OS X users that expressed an interest, with no idea
of timetable when they'll fix it.

Useless.

HTH

Andy W

<tip author="Andy Warwick">
Rather than using

    if ( $foo !== '' ) {
        do stuff ;
    }

to check for empty form elements in PHP, use

    if ( strlen ( trim ( $foo ) ) {
        do stuff ;
    }

This accounts for annoying people that 'fill' in fields with spaces.
</tip>