I was a happy Disco user. A lot of the Mac apps from that era were fun and made me want to find excuses to use them, rather than look for excuses to avoid what might otherwise feel like work. In the case of Delicious Library that would be the unpleasantness that would most likely be using a spreadsheet to track similar data and a lot of manual data entry.
Going the opposite way with discs, to rip my DVD collection at the time, I used RitIt. While the UI was seemingly unnecessary, it is initially what led me to find the concept of ripping all my DVDs more tolerable. After the novelty wore off, it had a feature to automatically start ripping on a disc being inserted, and would auto-eject at the end. This let me keep a stack of DVDs next to the computer and simply feed in the next disc when I saw one sticking out. After a few days I was done. I probably would have put this off for years (or forever) with more utilitarian software. The same can be said for AppZapper. Is it silly to make a ray gun sound when uninstalling an app, sure, but it makes it fun to delete unused apps, which is something a lot of people never do.
Where I think some of this software really got a bad name was so much of it becoming abandonware. TheHitList todo app was really hyped, and I got it in a software bundle (MacHeist or something), which was popular at the time. However, it seemed like once the dev had their money, they disappeared. Once burned me a couple times, I became wary of investing in any app that looked too nice…
I do miss a lot of those apps, and the hardware, of that era. It has so much charm. Great third party software devs who seemed to really have passion for what they were building, were one of the big reasons I enjoyed using OS X so much in that era, and a big reason to pay the Apple tax. I still use Transmit from Panic from time to time, and find it much more enjoyable than something like FileZilla (which was what seemed to be the standard last time I looked at other FTP apps years ago).
Going the opposite way with discs, to rip my DVD collection at the time, I used RitIt. While the UI was seemingly unnecessary, it is initially what led me to find the concept of ripping all my DVDs more tolerable. After the novelty wore off, it had a feature to automatically start ripping on a disc being inserted, and would auto-eject at the end. This let me keep a stack of DVDs next to the computer and simply feed in the next disc when I saw one sticking out. After a few days I was done. I probably would have put this off for years (or forever) with more utilitarian software. The same can be said for AppZapper. Is it silly to make a ray gun sound when uninstalling an app, sure, but it makes it fun to delete unused apps, which is something a lot of people never do.
Where I think some of this software really got a bad name was so much of it becoming abandonware. TheHitList todo app was really hyped, and I got it in a software bundle (MacHeist or something), which was popular at the time. However, it seemed like once the dev had their money, they disappeared. Once burned me a couple times, I became wary of investing in any app that looked too nice…
I do miss a lot of those apps, and the hardware, of that era. It has so much charm. Great third party software devs who seemed to really have passion for what they were building, were one of the big reasons I enjoyed using OS X so much in that era, and a big reason to pay the Apple tax. I still use Transmit from Panic from time to time, and find it much more enjoyable than something like FileZilla (which was what seemed to be the standard last time I looked at other FTP apps years ago).