To everything, turn, turn turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven.
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep (continued)

I guess I’m getting overly sentimental about saying goodbye to my favorite internet applications, but the time has come.

I’ve been using Eudora on the Mac since 1992, when I finally got a dorm room in-wall connection to the Internet at Stanford. I have thousands of folders, gigabytes of email. I have little notes to classmates, friends, family from the last 15 years. I even have some very cute, flirty notes that I had sent in 1997 at Apple to the woman who would later become my girlfriend and then wife.

But Eudora has been so long abandoned by its owner (Qualcomm), so underdeveloped (it still lacks HTML email), and so unmanageable (archaic search functionality) that it is time to say goodbye. I will miss your ability to easily read Unix mailboxes, your simple file structure, and most of all, your ability to execute filters on a manual key-command trigger.

I’m moving to Apple Mail, and I’m also moving the brave new world of “search-based” email management. Instead of thousands of folders, I’ll just have one for “saved email”, and I’ll use “smart folders” to save searches for key people or topics.

I’m less attached to Safari, but I’ve stuck with it because of its tight integration into Mac OS X. I’m just tired of website forms not working properly on Safari 2.x. It seems I have to use Firefox more and more often anyway, just to be compatible with many of the websites I visit. Firefox 2 looks strong enough, and Mac-like enough for me to move over. Maybe I’ll change my mind again with Safari 3.0 in a few months, but for now, I’m making the move.

I found a nice application to move bookmarks from Safari to Firefox, so I’m good to go. I’ll post if there are any problems.

So, goodbye old friends. You will always have a place in my heart.