With Mac OS X I’ve tried to move away from any reliance on Microsoft products. Not just because in general I don’t like the company, but because I hate being locked in to proprietry formats like those MS likes to spew forth.

For email I’m now having all of my correspondance forward to my @brandeis.edu account, and am using the free Unix utility procmail to filter it all into folders. No more bloated MS Entourage with its filters.

I want to use Address Book, but I’m gonna wait until Jaguar comes out in a few months, the new Mac OS X with a bette address book.

For word processing I use TextEdit and BBEdit, but for essays I still have to use Word…for now, until I take the time to learn the open TeX format.

For web I use OmniWeb and Mozilla, both of which rock in their own ways.

I use Adium for chat. No AOL ads!!!

What is great about all of these apps (with the exception maybe of Mozilla) is that they are very specialized for what they do, concentrating on doing one thing very well instead of doing a million things poorly. This is The Unix Way(tm) and I really like it.

All of these apps are also very customizable so that I am getting exactly the experience I want when I open them.

I guess most non-nerds, ie the majority of my readership doesn’t really care about all of this, but I just love being able to flip open my laptop and have all of my apps sitting there working exactly the way I want them. I don’t need to conform to a Microsoft way of doing things, my apps should conform to how I want to do things.