Am I [this][fickle] fickle? In a word, yes. Not only do I see a lot of these
sort of changes, some of them are almost predictable.
My preferred web browser, for example, changes almost monthly. Camino used to
be in the rotation, but I somehow got myself all worked up about the lack of
accesskey support, and it hasn’t been my top pick since. By the way; rah rah
[Bookit][bookit].
Text editing is another fine example, right now I almost always do that in
Vim 6. [SubEthaEdit][subeth] has been my primary recently, and as my current
second choice, it shows up fairly often. [BBEdit][bbedit] was what brought me
back to the Mac after years away, and while I haven’t checked out BBEdit 8
yet, I will soon.
E-Mail is an example, but not a great one. I switch from Apple Mail to
something else for a while, then back again. Mail has an odd, traumatic
response to one specific mail server I connect to, but only for certain
messages. [Thunderbird][tbird] is as close to a second as I have right now;
it deletes the above problem messages and runs on Linux and Windows machines
against an IMAP server on my PowerBook when I need a serial number or
something. I basically like [Mailsmith][msmith], but it doesn’t talk IMAP and
the snotty dialog it pops up _every time_ it doesn’t exit cleanly telling me
how I forced it to crash and burn by running [WindowShade X][wshade] makes me
want to choke the life out of someone (it’d irritate me less if it actually
had crashed when I saw the dialog, not, say…a device driver panicking the
kernel).
My dock is a small, non-magnifying matter at the left edge of the bottom of my
screen, and contains nothing that isn’t currently running (mark me down on the
_obscenely large number of startup items_ list). [LaunchBar][launch] is my
main launcher. [DragThing][dthing] appears and disappears in my daily life
from time to time (and often for no good reason either way). The collection
of icons at the right edge of my menubar has a higher turnover rate than
cashiers at the corner 7-Eleven. The only other Mac user I see regularly
who I would call a power user has his dock in the default location, and about
as many apps on it as I have on my machine (he desperately wants LaunchBar,
but never believes me when I tell him this).
[fickle]: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5650
[bookit]: http://www.everydaysoftware.net/bookit/
[subeth]: http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/
[bbedit]: http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.shtml
[tbird]: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
[msmith]: http://www.barebones.com/products/mailsmith/index.shtml
[wshade]: http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/wsx
[launch]: http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar
[dthing]: http://www.dragthing.com/