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Since you quoted Dan Wood, how about Sherlock ?

In my experience Apple Mail is less stable than either PowerMail, or Mailsmith. Its about as stable as Thunderbird and Entourage, but that’s faint praise. The iWork and iLife packages are hard to argue with, but then again, they are not built-in, they are commercial packages. Safari is rock solid, when compare with Firefox, or even Camino and Omniweb.

As you say yourself, there are a lot of exceptions to your generalized case. I’m wondering if perhaps there are so many exceptions, that its not (on the basis of your original points) a valid generalization. Admittedly, the three points you just raised increase its strenght, but only in cases where there is a free, built-in and sufficiently capable and flexible app available. This is a relatively small number of cases.

But I think its time I stepped off the bandwagon. Keep it up, its a good series.

Mark.

You said that ’several “built-in” apps are notoriously unstable.’ This hasn’t been my experience. What are some examples?

Here are some of my experiences:

• Apple Mail is more stable than PowerMail (which had poor SSL support) and ThunderBird (which actually lost messages). MailSmith development is slow.

• Safari is very solid but Firefox had all kinds of ridiculous bugs on OS X for a long time. It seems to be doing better now but still no support for services.

• Terminal.app is faster than iTerm.

• Dashboard is a better implementation than Konfabulator (Relevant information is in the “Look Under the Hood” section. I’ll note that I disagree with Daring’s argument about Dashboard not being a copy of Konfabulator. I believe it is a copy).

Regarding the independent developers that you listed, I agree that all of those companies (and others) make exceptional software. But a very small number of successful developers compete directly with Apple, so their rankings on the above list are largely irrelevant. Steve Jobs to Dan Wood of Karelia Software on the release of Sherlock 3 (which competed with Karelia’s Watson):

“You know those handcars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That’s Karelia. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks.” From “The Story Behind Karlia’s Logo.”

This actually further emphasizes the above order, because it meas paid software that competes with built-in functionality is even less likely to have the resources for continued development (less people need it which means less sales and therefore less resources for development).

The very reason that many independent software developers succeed is that they fill-in missing gaps in the platform.

Finally, here are some additional advantages that I hadn’t listed yet:

1. Increases the reproducibility of your work setup on multiple machines if necessary.

2. Increases the likelihood of inter-application support, such as Quicksilver plugins.

3. Avoids time spent researching software reviews and testing during short software evaluation periods.

The ordering from my post captures all of these advantages nicely in one list, which is why I think it is useful.

But I do agree that there really are a lot of exceptions, which is what I think you are getting at. My post is just guidelines that I believe increase stability, high quality, and continued development of your system.

-Roben