Ryan McKern

Alex Payne of Twit­ter (the social net­work every­one but me uses) has posted a well struc­tured list of soft­ware he's paid for but no longer users. I am in a sim­i­lar boat thanks to sites like Mac­Zot, where I have licenses for shit I will never, ever use again or for appli­ca­tions whose func­tion­al­ity was replaced by some­thing bet­ter later on.

Through Mac­Zot

• Audio­book Builder
  This came with some sort of bun­dle that I pur­chased, and appar­ently I kept no records of it. I never used it, and I don't know that I'd ever want to, but I did tech­ni­cally pay for it.
• Disco
  Some­how Austin moth­er­fuck­ing Sarner horn-swaggled me again and took $10 of my money to con­tribute towards his inabil­ity to get a fuck­ing hair cut. What was I think­ing? Why did I buy this when Burn does all of this shit for free using the same pub­licly avail­able OS X frame­works and with none of the lame bull­shit UI?
• Hawk­eye, rooSwitch, KIT (now called Together)
  Hawk­eye suf­fers from one a pretty com­mon prob­lem in OS X, in that it wraps open source soft­ware in a cocoa front-end and then charges you money for it. Since I don't give a fuck about DVD mas­ter­ing, it was an unused license. rooSwitch swaps pref­er­ences. Neat trick, but use­less for me. How­ever, in that same bun­dle I got Together (then called K.I.T., or Keep It Together), which has actu­ally been a pretty handy tool for sort­ing and man­ag­ing the sheer vol­ume of inci­den­tal fluff I seem to invari­ably accumulate.
• Data Guardian
  This seemed handy at the time, worked and looked like shit when I paid for it, and now I can­not get the insanely over-complicated license man­ager on the site to rec­og­nize that I ever paid for it. High regret over the money I wasted on this Epic Fail application.
• Direct Mail!
  Came in another bun­dle (maybe the one with Audio­book Builder?) and it's another appli­ca­tion which does some­thing I just don't give a fuck about.

For Work

• Mocha MacX TN5250
  Pur­chased in my for­mer life as an AS400 oper­a­tor, I only regret that I never got my boss to comp back the $25 that I spent on this. It made absolutely every sin­gle night where I had to dial into work while on call so much eas­ier. I haven't needed it for almost 5 years, but I'd still use it again if I had to con­nect to another AS400.

For Myself

• Acqui­si­tion
  God, who pays for file shar­ing? The devel­oper (David Watan­abe) is sort of an ass­hole, my license was con­stantly corrupted/lost/missing when­ever the soft­ware was upgraded, and in ret­ro­spect, pay­ing money to pirate shit is pretty fuck­ing brazen. This was $25 I'd like back.
• Cat­a­log
  And here we come to the first appli­ca­tion which Austin moth­er­fuck­ing Sarner used to bilk me out of my cash. I had a library of about 200 burned DVDs to archive, and this app was the cheap­est at the time. I paid for it, and like, 6 months later the last update was released and that was that. Buggy, fea­ture­less, slow, and unsta­ble, this appli­ca­tion alone is grounds for me to fight every sin­gle mem­ber of The Deli­cious Gen­er­a­tion to the death.
• SKEdit
  Sean Kelly made soft­ware so usable that Apple hired him. While this has been sup­planted by Text­Mate and CSSEdit in my work flow, I have no regrets over this. I used it often and it had the best remote site edit­ing avail­able at the time.
• Xyle­Scope
  This appli­ca­tion is awe­some, but a lot of the func­tion­al­ity I needed has since been repli­cated (and extended) in the equally awe­some CSSEdit, which I already had a license for. I keep it around for the occa­sional use when CSSEdit falls down on the job (maybe twice a year?) but over­all it's just gath­er­ing the dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent of dust (bitrot?).

What's the take away? I guess if you walk away from this know­ing that Austin Sarner is a sack of crap, that Mac­Zot pushes a lot of really mediocre shit with the occa­sional gem mixed in with the turd nuggets, and that some­times even good soft­ware gets replaced by bet­ter soft­ware, then you got the message.