If you’re waiting around for a “best applications” for 2010, I want to nip that rumor in the bud, right here and now. There will be no such animal posted on this site this year.

The quick and dirty distro recap I put together last week was a special punishment that I incurred when I lambasted someone else’s list, for being trite.

But a list of applications is not forthcoming, so don’t sit at home, alone, in the dark for hours on end, smacking the F5 button. Here’s why:

1. Most of the applications I use date back well before 2010. I’ve got software on this machine that hasn’t been updated in five or six years, and I still rely on it every day. When did it first start? I haven’t checked.
2. I don’t track applications by their development dates. I’m more interested in when I discover them, and sometimes I show up so late for the party that all the fun is already over. It’s almost embarrassing.
3. And even if I did follow inceptions and development, the start and finish dates for many applications are rather fuzzy. Things evolve, fork and fizzle down to nothing in the course of months or years, only to be reanimated at a whim. And then putter away at a whim again. 🙄

If you really really want to know what I would suggest for software, I can point you at this page.

The stuff that’s there is stuff I use daily, whether it’s a simple console clock or a terminal multiplexer or a full-fledged e-mail client.

What year were they made? When did they start? Well … I don’t know if that’s important. They’re important to me in the here-and-now. 🙂