Ben Brooks has published an interesting thought experiment:
if you had to start over, buying all of your apps from scratch, in what order would you buy them (the assumption being you couldn’t afford to re-buy them all at once, but over time you could afford them all).
This is interesting to me because of the recent release of the Mac App Store. I have dabbled with the idea of repurchasing all of my applications from the App Store when I get my new MacBook Air in June. I like the idea of starting from scratch and would really enjoy the benefits of purchasing all of my software from the App Store — the easy software updates and the ability to re-download any application without having to search for my license key.
Mac
Both EyeTV and Turbo.264 HD are pieces of software that must be paired with hardware for them to be useful. EyeTV is an application that allows you to watch television on your Mac with a compatible TV tuner and Turbo.264 HD is a video conversion tool that performs much faster when paired with the Turbo.264 HD hardware accelerator.
I’ve also decided to include all of the iOS applications I use because I find myself working on my iPad and iPhone more often than on my Mac. I’ve purchased hundreds of applications for iOS but I’ve only included the ones that are still installed on my devices and I would consider to be must-haves.
iOS
There were a couple of ways that I could have went about this. I could have listed applications based on how frequently I used them — which is what I did — or I could have made the list assuming that I would use free alternatives to get by and purchase the apps without free alternatives first. This would have pushed Tweetbot, Alfred, and Transmit much further down the list. But, I think the core idea of this experiment is to see in what order we consider applications to be essential to our workflows.
