As I was paying for my copy of NetNewsWire, it occurred to me that I've bought quite a lot of Mac software in the last year and a half.

Since buying my Powerbook in December 2001, I have paid for OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, LaunchBar, and of course Jaguar.

I tried, but didn't buy Spring and Tinderbox, because while both looked neat, they failed my ‘am I experiencing a tangible benefit after five minutes?’ test. I sadly no longer have time or inclination to fiddle endlessly with software in the hope that it'll change my life.

This isn't really much. You'll notice a distinct lack of big-ticket items like Office or Photoshop¹ but compared to my software purchases in a decade of using Windows... I think the only thing I bought that wasn't a game was Windows 2000. Everything else was either free, came free with the computer², or was shareware I never felt sufficiently attached to to register³.

And no, I didn't pirate software either. I just didn't use it.

I'm not sure whether this software I've bought for the Mac is a sign that Mac software is inherently more likely to convince me to buy it, whether it's a sign there's less good free stuff available for the Mac, or whether it's just because I earn far more now than when I was a student, and can afford to pay twenty bucks for something that lets me launch programs faster.⁴

¹ I installed the 30 day Photoshop demo twice, once on each computer. I'm trying to work out if that's immoral or not.
² I bought a new PC just after Windows 95 came out. I asked “How much is it without Windows?” and the guy in the shop said “Doesn't matter. It's the same price”, so I ended up with Windows 95.
³ I'm aware that technically I should pay for shareware if I use it, not just if I feel like paying for it. I made an exception for mIRC, though, partly because I was only keeping it around to test compatibility with various IRC server hacks I was playing with, but mostly because I refuse to be responsible for a cent going to the guy who perpetrated horrors like CTCP SOUND, or that fucking trout.
⁴ If you've got Mac OS X, and you don't have LaunchBar yet, run, don't walk to get it. There is no better way to launch applications than this.