31 ms·

Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

• savrajsingh 10y ago
  Superpaint
• therealmarv 10y ago
  Total Commander (yes it's still available and still great but I'm not using Windows anymore, now OS X). I even miss Windows Explorer... I will never get in love with Finder on OS X.. most horrible File Manager ever. Finder is like a punishment for everybody switching to OS X (I want copy&paste and folders first everywhere, gosh). Thunar on XFCE was also ok. At least ForkLift nowadays helps me not to be angry at my Mac ;)
  • fit2rule 10y ago
    On Linux and OSX: Midnight Commander! (apt-get install mc) || (brew install mc)
    • xor-xor 10y ago
      ...or ranger [1], if you're into vi-like keybindings. [1] http://ranger.nongnu.org/ http://ranger.nongnu.org/
    • altmind 10y ago
      or konqueror
  • donatj 10y ago
    In my experience most people who hate Finder aren't using it to its full potential. Are you making use of Spring Loaded Folders and have you enabled the path bar?
  • angelofm 10y ago
    I totally agree, I changed all the settings on my mac to try to see if I could get a good experience but I just can't, typing the path with auto complete in Windows Explorer and "F2" to rename a folder name are the features I miss the most. Edit (I was referring to Windows Explorer)
• Finnucane 10y ago
  Kodachrome.
  • leejo 10y ago
    Fuji Neopan 1600. Fuji Fortia. Kodak Aerochrome. Hasselblad V system (OK, they do exist but are discontinued and becoming increasingly more expensive to maintain).
  • ergl 10y ago
    Provia 400x :(
  • kawera 10y ago
    Agfa Scala, a wonderful B&W positive film. I have boxes of 6x6 slides and from time to time we watch then at home and it's just amazing.
• mindcrime 10y ago
  OS/2 (ok, technically it does kinda-sorta still exist, but for all practical purposes it's dead)
  • i336_ 10y ago
    No 'tisn't - https://www.arcanoae.com/ https://www.arcanoae.com/ At the very worst they already have a bunch of drivers for relatively-modern hardware: https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/os2-ecs-drivers-software-package-personal/ https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/os2-ecs-drivers-software-packa... However, if their promises to release a semi-modernized OS/2 actually come to fruition I'll be really happy. :D
    • mindcrime 10y ago
      Yeah, I'd love to see an OS/2 comeback on one level. Although since my old OS/2 days, I've become such an F/OSS ideologue, that I probably wouldn't use a modern OS/2 unless it were F/OSS. At this point, I'd settle for a really good implementation of the WPS on Linux. I don't care that much about the OS/2 API or SOM or any of that stuff. But the UI experience hit a sweet spot for me.
• lsiebert 10y ago
  Springnote was like evernote but automatically categorized things in a smarter way from the browser. I could add a page with an isbn and it would let me add it as a book with all the details looked up, not as a webpage.
  • juanscv92 10y ago
    I also used Springboard, not as an Evernote replacement but I would use to do inventory of my physical belongings, movie and book queue, recipes, and wish list, because it recognized almost any type of product you threw at it. Sadly, haven't found any other app as smart as this.
• TaiFood 10y ago
  Common sense.
  • teknopaul 10y ago
    Google Wave. Only kidding. ;)
    • based2 10y ago
      https://incubator.apache.org/wave/ https://incubator.apache.org/wave/
• tedmiston 10y ago
  Attention span
  • mod 10y ago
    What I'd give for my 19-year-old-self's attention span.
    • purerandomness 10y ago
      Try meditation, it gave me better ability to focus than ever before.
  • kyriakos 10y ago
    and my ability to stay up late at night and work. I pass out no matter what. This is what family and responsibilities do to you. I don't regret having a family but it did impact my ability to work substantially.
• outericky 10y ago
  ReplayTV. I was able to record TV, and easily transfer shows to my networked computer for later consumption. I still have all the Good Eats episodes from 15 years ago.
• rman666 10y ago
  MacProject and HyperCard
  • kerkeslager 10y ago
    I wrote my first program in HyperCard.
    • TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      "HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson following a LSD trip." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard HyperCard somehow managed to be almost as captivating as the web, with barely any resources.
      • DavidSJ 10y ago
        Fun fact: http://apple.com/hypercard http://apple.com/hypercard redirects to that page.
      • kerkeslager 10y ago
        It would surprise me greatly if HyperCard didn't influence the early web. HyperCard Cards and the way that buttons transition to different cards in the stack is not that different at a high level from the way pages work and hyperlinks transition to a new page on the site.
  • AlphaGeekZulu 10y ago
    HyperCard lives on quite nicely in LiveCode [http://livecode.com/ http://livecode.com/]. I loved HyperCard soooo much!
  • nikdaheratik 10y ago
    Hypercard was my first programming tool as well. Unless you count useless BASIC toys I did a couple times in math class.
• leptoniscool 10y ago
  Windows 7 UI
  • viraptor 10y ago
    Have you tried any alternative windows shells yet? (as in full desktop replacements) I remember being quite happy running bluebox around the win2k era, but it seems there's still a few that work with recent versions. Projects like http://litestep.info/ http://litestep.info/ for example (it can be reskinned so it doesn't look like early 2000s unix)
• davidw 10y ago
  Open source guy: pretty much everything I was using in 1996 is still around, but better.
  • wmil 10y ago
    Clearly you weren't a Gnome 2 fan.
    • mod50ack 10y ago
      MATE rocks. Although the original wasn't around in 96
    • JoshTriplett 10y ago
      I used GNOME 1, then GNOME 2, then GNOME 3. I've enjoyed each, and I've enjoyed the improvements over time.
      • gcb0 10y ago
        enjoyed gnome 3? either you waited several months with an outdated distro, or you never had to do basic things like shutdown/restart your computer, change volume, etc, etc... I know I waited months for those luxury. with the added insult of having contributed lots of accessibility code to gnome 2 settings that just got under the rug
    • pmontra 10y ago
      Ubuntu 16.04 with Gnome Flashback Compiz can be made to look almost indistinguishable from Ubuntu Gnome 10.04, desktop cube included. Very few tweaks are needed. The only missing parts are the File, Edit menus on some applications, most notably Nautilus (they're working on it) but I don't really use the Gnome applications, except Nautilus and the menus are not that useful (I setup my preferences in Unity and it remembers them). The Gnome default apps look like the vanilla featureless versions of what one actually needs. Only the general DE is good.
• pavanlimo 10y ago
  Google Reader
  • xeno42 10y ago
    fwiw i switched from Google Reader to https://bazqux.com/ https://bazqux.com/ - The UX is very similar, has no problem dealing with a lot of feeds and is fast enough to keep up with my ~1000 item/day habit.
  • kaizensoze 10y ago
    Digg Reader is decent. https://digg.com/reader https://digg.com/reader
  • fernly 10y ago
    RSS Owl (http://www.rssowl.org/ http://www.rssowl.org/) is a good replacement.
  • viraptor 10y ago
    Another alternative: theoldreader.com - they aim for a very close replica of the original.
  • Bootvis 10y ago
    I like Newsblur
    • p4bl0 10y ago
      I second this. I tried an awefull lot of feed readers when Google announced the end of Reader, and Newsblur is by far the most usable one, and it is actually pretty good. I would stay on Newsblur rather than returning to Google Reader would it come back to life.
  • ivank 10y ago
    https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ - I might be mentioning it too often, but it's a great replacement that mirrors the Google Reader UI closely while adding a lot of enhancements. It also doesn't throw away old cached posts.
• jasim 10y ago
  The xBase family of languages/development environments. They are still around - Harbour (open-source multi-platform Clipper implementation) and Ashton-Tate dBase which changed many hands and is now dBase LLC. They were one of the fastest environments to build business software in till the early 90s. Then Client/Server and Windows happened. Visual Basic and Delphi occupied the niche with support for SQL based databases. xBase tried playing catch-up but by the time they caught up clunkily to GUI programming, the effort was wasted and the Web came around. This is how xBase was loved: This isn't a question or a bug or a complaint. This is just to say that using your prg files from Foxapp, modifying the startup, creating a database, compiling and debugging I created an beautiful working application in 45 minutes today, including the time it took for the client to explain what they wanted in the database. The client was duly impressed, and I marvelled at just how much 2.0 had made programming fun and had increased my potential income. I am now taking on programming jobs that would have been painful in the past, and find that I can afford to do some pro bono work knowing that with Foxpro 2.0 and my distribution package I can whip up a quick database for the church or the school or anybody who just can't afford custom programming. I've been hacking PCs since I bought an Apple at Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto from a couple of kids who were building them in a garage. (In those days they were talking about marketing them as a multilevel, like Amway). I've played with a lot of software, ranging from user-hostile to stuff that curls up on your lap and talks dirty in your ear. But Foxpro 2.0 is something special. What you folks have created is an elegant solution. When you finaly go public, may you all cash out as rich as Bill Gates. Please thank all the Fox folks for me. Charles -- "Letter from a FoxPro admirer". FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software, Kerry Nietz.
  • hyperpallium 10y ago
    I've heard the love for foxpro before. I thought microsoft bought it and killed it?
    • mikestew 10y ago
      If Microsoft killed it, it was a slow death. Microsoft bought it in '92 and released the last version in 2005.
• danieldk 10y ago
  Turbo Pascal It had an awesome IDE, debugger, and help.
  • fernly 10y ago
    Coincidentally Anders Hejlsberg, who wrote TP, is interviewed here[1], HN comments [2]. [1] https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Seth-Juarez/Anders-Hejlsberg-on-Modern-Compiler-Construction https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Seth-Juarez/Anders-Hejlsberg... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11685317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11685317
  • xvilka 10y ago
    There is an awesome FreePascal [1]. Along with TurboPascal-like console IDE called FPIDE, it has Delphi-like GUI IDE - Lazarus. And it very actively developed, cross-platform and supports modern technologies. [1] http://www.freepascal.org/ http://www.freepascal.org/ [2] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/
    • danieldk 10y ago
      I know about FreePascal, I even used it quite a lot in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, the Pascal ship has sailed for me ;). I could've also mentioned Turbo C(++), which was almost equally nice.
• logiczero 10y ago
  del.icio.us
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    pinboard.in replaced that perfectly for me.
    • a3n 10y ago
      Yes, pinboard. I fought the delicious UI but still used it. pinboard is painless.
  • austinjp 10y ago
    The minute Yahoo took it over I switched to diigo.com. No complaints so far.
  • davidp670 10y ago
    I prefer BookmarkOS https://bookmarkos.com https://bookmarkos.com
  • sheraz 10y ago
    For anyone interested, I'm curating a list of bookmark/link managers on my own bookmark manager Curabase[1]. Here is the list of all the alternatives: https://www.curabase.com/a/b86eefdd-5f52-4455-9a1e-25ad0b0e94eb https://www.curabase.com/a/b86eefdd-5f52-4455-9a1e-25ad0b0e9... [1] - https://www.curabase.com https://www.curabase.com
• ScottBurson 10y ago
  The Lisp Machine.
• nekitamo 10y ago
  Softice
  • qhoc 10y ago
    Agree. What is the replacement for this now?
    • xvilka 10y ago
      Syser claimed to be that replacement. But in fact it's too old, unstable and nobody using it. Now everyone is using WinDbg for kernel/drivers debugging. It has terrible command syntax, but with PyKD extension and some customisation it's usable. See those slides[1] on how to do that. Also, there is another way to work with WinDbg protocol - using radare2[2]. Beware this support is in early development and may be unstable. But, unlike original WinDbg, it is cross-platform tool without external dependencies and completely free and open source. [1] https://www.botconf.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-2.1-Workshop-Feedback-on-Windbg-Usage.pdf https://www.botconf.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-2.1-W... [2] https://github.com/radare/radare2/blob/master/doc/windbg https://github.com/radare/radare2/blob/master/doc/windbg
  • rixed 10y ago
    Same here, especially the first version.
  • daeken 10y ago
    I constantly miss SoftICE. Rasta Ring 0 Debugger was looking like a promising replacement for a while, but it just seemed to fizzle out and never got where it should've been. WinDbg isn't awful these days, but that's about the most praise I can give it. I really want to build a decent wrapper around the WinDbg protocol and run it on a Raspberry Pi+display that sits on top of my desktop case. That way I can just grab that and break in any time I need to debug something.
    • xvilka 10y ago
      You can easily do that with radare2 already. As I mentioned already it does have WinDbg protocol support and is very portable by itself. Along with WinDbg it has support for GDB protocol. So you can run r2 on your Raspberry Pi and connect to WinDbg on your desktop and perform debugging from Raspberry Pi.
• logicuce 10y ago
  Microsoft My Phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Phone It would even backup my SMSes and let me search through them in an online interface. But then MS decided to shut it down within few months of me buying a phone because of this particular feature. Well, MS does it often.
  • vichu 10y ago
    If you set up Google Voice on your phone, it satisfies that specific feature that you mention.
• johnx123-up 10y ago
  1. Delphi and its community 2. OptiPerl http://www.xarka.com/optiperl/features.html http://www.xarka.com/optiperl/features.html Though both are still available, not in use.
  • xvilka 10y ago
    As I mentioned already - Lazarus + FreePascal for the 1st one.
  • yoodenvranx 10y ago
    Delphi was awesome for rapid GUI development! It was so easy to get reasonable nice programs in a short amount of time. I really really miss it.
    • ak39 10y ago
      Delphi still exists. Shouldn't be on the list anymore than any new JS framework flavour du jour.
      • saganus 10y ago
        Probably more about its dwindling presence, and even when it's still used in some industries it's nowhere near the spotlight levels it had before I think.
    • lj3 10y ago
      Have you ever used Lazarus? I'm curious how it compares to Delphi specifically for GUI development. From a rapid GUI development standpoint, they seem to be the only game in town aside from VisualBasic.
      • ziotom78 10y ago
        I used it for a small project where I needed a quick way to plot some lab data. I chose Lazarus because these data needed to be displayed on all the computers in our lab, including a few Windows machines. I was amazed when the program I developed on Linux compiled and ran flawlessly on Windows at the first attempt!
• pknerd 10y ago
  Borland's Turbo C and Pascal
  • meritt 10y ago
    Borland Turbo C++ was my first "real" programming language after GW-BASIC. Had some extremely heavy Tandy laptop ('portable computer' might be a better moniker) with a CGA monitor. Those were the days.
  • eb0la 10y ago
    I still remember and miss how fast IDEs can be. Also, if you broke something the runtime error messages were useful, not like the stack trace we have today. There is beauty in having just a single line runtime error.
• johngossman 10y ago
  CygnusEd editor for Amiga. Thanks Bruce
  • anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Great piece of software. Few modern editors are as fast. None have ever done smooth scrolling since.
• asdf4life 10y ago
  BeOS
  • viraptor 10y ago
    Do you know about https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ already? It's actually quite usable.
• starfire 10y ago
  rdio
• jonbaer 10y ago
  Modelworks JPad Pro ... https://archive.org/details/tucows_296665_JPad_Pro https://archive.org/details/tucows_296665_JPad_Pro
• juanscv92 10y ago
  Sunrise. It's the best calendar I've ever used and the only one I tolerate on Windows, and now Microsoft still hasn't given us decent replacement.
  • hurricaneSlider 10y ago
    It's available on Android
• vskarine 10y ago
  Songza
• Glench 10y ago
  Yahoo pipes
  • viraptor 10y ago
    I wish something better than yahoo pipes existed in the first place. I mean, I love the idea, but every time I tried to use it for something more than a toy, I ran into the same issue - I need to unpack one item into several items and switch to processing those. I never found a good solution for that and ended up writing own python/requests/lxml processor instead.
    • Glench 10y ago
      I totally agree. I'm working on something better for my research. But it was amazing, given how bad the UI was, how well it seemed to work for people.
• todd8 10y ago
  Javelin comes to mind, but I used it in the 1980's [1]. There must be some better example; it seems strange to me that I can't think of anything else more recent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software
• hyperpallium 10y ago
  Java before Oracle.
  • fauigerzigerk 10y ago
    How was it different then?
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • hyperpallium 10y ago
      It had a non-rapacious future.
      • fauigerzigerk 10y ago
        But Java is still as free as it was when SUNW was still a ticker symbol. Oracle hasn't done anything to kill OpenJDK and start charging for new versions or anything like that. I feel that this demonization of Oracle and the concomitant sanctification of Google in this fight between two profit driven corporations is somewhat misguided.
        • hyperpallium 10y ago
          A little more nuance: it's not only that Oracle is bad, but that Sun was good. Oracle's business model is about extracting value; whereas Sun was about building platforms (which they did several times). Oracle has a history of squeezing open projects and alienating developers. You're right, they've taken care not to completely chew up the tremendous business value of Java, only test-nibbling at the edges: projects like Hudson (now Jenkins), changes to JCP, cutting evangelists. Many key people left Sun before or soon after the acquisition. Oracle is a different place to work, being sales-focused. It's not entirely due to Oracle though; the game had changed and Sun was no longer leading. It's not specific changes to java, but changes to the philosophy of the java custodian. These determine its future. BTW: I can't speak for the other upvoters, but I think Google was clearly in the wrong. They knew it, Sun knew it - but let them get away with it because a new platform was good for java (NB cf. Sun litigated MS for fragmenting java). In contrast, Oracle is suing Google for revenue, not for any platform. So... although Google is the bad guy, it illustrates the different philosophies of Sun vs Oracle. In this sense the old java - its philosophy and its future - "doesn't exist anymore". :(
• ChrisDutrow 10y ago
  Cool Edit 96
  • purerandomness 10y ago
    Oh my god, yes. It was a fantastic, snappy tool for sound editing. Then Adobe acquired it, rebranded to "Audition", changed all hot keys and UI, killed lots of features, and finally added so much bloat (including a slow-as-hell UI bitmap theme) that it wasn't usable anymore. What does everyone use for sound editing these days?
    • fartface 10y ago
      reaper is popular. it's cheap (or free). i also like tracktion. v4 is free and it's a powerful, simple, single screen daw. there's always audacity too, but it's pretty limited. i've also heard good things about wavosaur (free). dumb name, but simple for quick audio editing.
• techbio 10y ago
  Winamp
  • kyriakos 10y ago
    winamp was all you needed. no bloated UI. just play music.
    • p4bl0 10y ago
      No bloated UI? As I remember it 80% of the hype of WinAmp was the numerous UI themes it had.
      • purerandomness 10y ago
        Ah, not the Winamp that AOL released after they bought Nullsoft. AOL killed it, around the same time as they killed Netscape Navigator.
        • throwanem 10y ago
          No, not that Winamp, the pre-AOL one. It got worse after AOL bought Nullsoft, I grant, but it wasn't anything special before; it might've been the best of a bad lot, but nostalgia aside, that doesn't make it good.
  • enraged_camel 10y ago
    Winamp still exists, I think.
    • jlebar 10y ago
      Windows only. :(
      • teknopaul 10y ago
        I think audacious is based on winamp code. aptitude install audacious
• tomcam 10y ago
  Visual Basic 3.0 Any version of Turbo Pascal or Delphi. dBase II.
  • carsongross 10y ago
    Visual Studio's debugger still smokes anything I've used since. You could literally drag the program counter to the point you wanted, rewrite your code, and start stepping through it again. That, and the ability to double click on a damned button and see what it did... What a golden era.
    • Uptrenda 10y ago
      These were amazing. So much power and flexibility. Todays IDEs are somehow far less powerful and more complicated sadly.
    • sixothree 10y ago
      > drag the program counter to the point you wanted, rewrite your code, and start stepping through it again You can still do that in .Net if you (even temporarily) target x86 instead of x64.
    • frik 10y ago
      Do you mean the Visual Basic IDE (VB 1-6). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic Only the dotNet based VB.Net is available in Visual Studio since 2002, with the Visual Studio .Net which was completely rewritten since the 1998's Visual Studio 6.
• frik 10y ago
  Please read it from a consumer perspective about consumer topics: (of course B2B is very different, where other things matter) * products/software without DRM, always-online, analytics, tracking and spy "features" - bad for consumer personal privacy, and prevents second hand market, products cannot be owned anymore, try buying Windows 10, John Deer tractor, Tesla S without that crap * Cash money: those Davos attendees started a war against consumers - electronic money transfer is useful, yes, but without cash money everything in daily life can be tracked and you can loose everything over night it's just a digital number after all, state wants negative interest rates ... just a matter of a mouse click, a normal consumer would get a kind of a slave, as we learned from cases like "1984" or various real cases like former state East Germany, while wealthy folks have numerous companies in various countries. Some states already started to limit the amount of cash money one is allowed to carry and eliminated entire cash notes like the 500 EURO note. Some probably fall for the propaganda that it's a way to limit criminals - as if those wouldn't use shell companies and electronic money transfer. * Erosion of the idea of ownership: some like renting things and consume services, fine, but others prefer owning things like a house, a car, a computer device. And with ownership I mean also the possibility to sell the stuff to someone else and using it without an artificial time limit.
  • fauigerzigerk 10y ago
    Cash was never a good store of value. You could easily lose everything to fire or theft over night. And governments can create inflation to erode the value of cash pretty quickly if they really want to. There is no erosion of the idea of ownership. As someone who is renting in London I can assure you that quarterly inspections and thick, dirty carpets are an effective reminder of the fact that you are either an owner or something between a child and a criminal.
    • frik 10y ago
      You missed the point. Sure, there is a risk of inflation, but you can act immediately for your own good if there a slight warnings on the horizon. You can't do anything if it's out of reach like in recent history as the banks closed all ATMs like they did in Cyprus and Greece. But I wrote about daily usage of money, and not be limited or tracked in any way, like you are with non-cash money. About ownership, you missed the point, London is a bad example, as it's very expensive own a house there - we know that. But outside of that bubble, a house on the country side is still affordable but new regulations and taxes may get a burden. As well as several products come with licenses and software which limits its usage making it virtually more like renting a service instead of owing the product and being able to do what you want with it - like the mentioned Windows 10 with its tracking/spying/hardware-dongle, John Deer tractors and Tesla S with its user account dongle which prevents third party service, after market and selling your own stuff, etc. Or electric cars where the car manufacturer owns the battery, and you can only rent it. Or autonomous cars that you may only lease and not be able to buy and own yourself in near future, as some CEOs mentioned.
• bby 10y ago
  Unrealscript
• mehrzad 10y ago
  I'm worried that DownThemAll and other major add-ons will be abandoned with Firefox's changes soon.
  • cJ0th 10y ago
    that'd be tragic indeed. :(
  • patates 10y ago
    what do you mean? are they switching their engine? I can't endure another tragedy like opera :(
    • mehrzad 10y ago
      http://www.downthemall.net/the-likely-end-of-downthemall/ http://www.downthemall.net/the-likely-end-of-downthemall/
• psbon 10y ago
  PageMaker, FreeHand & HyperCard!
• reitanqild 10y ago
  The internet when it was all web sites and I just learned about google. Just before everyone and their dog got a "blog" and way before Facebook and Twitter.
  • eksemplar 10y ago
    I actually see blogs as remnants of what the Internet used to be. Especially in an age where click bait headlines, copy-paste and memes seems to be what drives most "media" outside of big dogs like the NYT. Some of the most interesting sites I visit these days are blogs, written by people with a passion for what they do.
    • clydethefrog 10y ago
      I am slowly on that track again, visiting Kottke and Daring Fireball like I used to. Got any recommendations?
  • goshx 10y ago
    There is a way to get that feeling back: http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/ http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/
  • lj3 10y ago
    The way I look at it, that internet still exists. The stuff worth reading is still found on blogs. The rest - twitter, facebook, reddit, et al - is mostly noise. The biggest change is finding the good blogs is even easier these days, thanks to the many many link aggregators. I was surprised how quickly the signal to noise tightened up when I filtered out any link from social networks and "professional" news sites.
• bjelkeman-again 10y ago
  Interleaf, an electronic document application that did (nearly) everything Word does but better. Repaginate a 2000 page document, according to rules that you know will not place graphics hanging halfway off the page? Create a table of contents in seconds across several books? Lisp extension language? It was very good. All before Windows 2, and on UNIX workstations. The current document creation tools just make me want to cry.
• Razengan 10y ago
  Deluxe Paint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint ArtGem was a nice spiritual successor but sadly it's gone too: http://www.rlvision.com/artgem_about.asp http://www.rlvision.com/artgem_about.asp
  • gp2000 10y ago
    I've no direct experience, but I've heard it said that "pro motion" is a successor of sorts to Deluxe Paint: http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php
  • PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    Evilpixie (http://evilpixie.scumways.com/ http://evilpixie.scumways.com/) is supposed to be a sort of modern update of Deluxe Paint. It's a one-man free project, so it probably doesn't have a lot of ultra-modern features, but it might suit you.
  • ZenoArrow 10y ago
    GrafX2 is an open-source paint program inspired by Deluxe Paint: https://code.google.com/archive/p/grafx2/ https://code.google.com/archive/p/grafx2/ It's harder than it should be to find the latest code, I don't know what the main developer is playing at, would seemingly rather comment on clone repositories than fix the project homepage: https://github.com/xyproto/grafx2/issues/561 https://github.com/xyproto/grafx2/issues/561
  • nurbl 10y ago
    I've found http://www.aseprite.org/ http://www.aseprite.org/ to be a reasonable alternative to DPaint. The UI is quite different, but on the other hand it has lots of more "modern" features, like layers. Source code available under GPLv2, but you can also buy binaries.
• thirdreplicator 10y ago
  ICQ
  • m-app 10y ago
    ICQ and all it's features and add-ons made IM'ing so much fun. I remember the feature where you could type and your keypresses (incl. backspace) were immediately transmitted to the other side. You could also talk to random strangers and not be scared of frontal male nudity. Of course my IRL friends (I live in the NL) only discovered IM with MSN Messenger.
  • carlesfe 10y ago
    Funny how ICQ was, what, 20 years early to the IM revolution? Slack nowadays is a mixture of IRC and ICQ. It was wonderful to be able to talk for free (well, paying dialup minutes) with the 3 friends you might had online, plus that guy on the other side of the world who you met through an ICQ number on a website :_)
  • memming 10y ago
    I still remember my 8-digit ICQ# by heart.
  • neverknowsbest 10y ago
    ICQ + the friendly/outgoing/carefree attitude of those times Beseen chat as well, same era. And Palace Chat, though it was horrible even back then the memories make me laugh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)
• zorpner 10y ago
  Albert Yale's (RIP) Telnet Scripting Tool.
  • viraptor 10y ago
    Was it better than expect? (there's a windows port: http://docs.activestate.com/activetcl/8.4/expect4win/ http://docs.activestate.com/activetcl/8.4/expect4win/ )
• crshults 10y ago
  Iguana labs 8051 burner
• iqonik 10y ago
  Grooveshark
  • lucb1e 10y ago
    Fellow Grooveshark refugee here. Spotify doesn't quite come close: small library (only 'real' artists, and sometimes not even those), no way to put custom stuff in there and sync it at least with your own devices, Grooveshark not only had customer support but damn good customer service, and then there are broadcasts with the chat feature and song voting... Yeah, all the good bits are gone. I had a paid subscription and now pay Spotify as the closest thing to it, but I feel as much a customer of Spotify as I feel a customer of Twitter: neither listen to me when something is shitty.
    • deathtrader666 10y ago
      Grooveshark is still functional right? I just registered on it after reading you.. playing stuff right now!
      • IlPeach 10y ago
        What? I get redirected to Score Big...
• fishanz 10y ago
  CodeWarrior
  • kevsim 10y ago
    Didn't expect to see this one here. I worked for Nokia at the time that they bought some of the CodeWarrior assets from Metroworks. Coming from Visual Studio, CodeWarrior felt like a big step down. What do you miss about it?
    • msbarnett 10y ago
      Some of it is nostalgia. Some things it genuinely did better -- CodeWarrior's inline ASM syntax kicked the shit out of the GCC equivalent we're stuck with today. And some of it is highly subjective: there was a simplicity to the old CodeWarrior UI in pre-OS X MacOS. You had a separate project window and a text editor window for every file you were editing. It was clean. It was uncluttered. It wasn't 300 tabs, sidebars, and top bars jammed into one God Window to Rule Them All. It kept out of your way and did its job quietly.
    • paulrpotts 10y ago
      I wrote a lot of code with CodeWarrior. One of the things I miss most is the PowerPlant framework. Such a nice "forest" design with mix-ins. (Yes, you can download it, but it isn't the same). I learned a lot about designing usable class libraries by reading PowerPlant. I learned a lot about designing usable class libraries by reading Microsoft Foundation Class libraries, too, but in the sense of "whatever you do, don't design !@#$% like this..."
• fishanz 10y ago
  CodeWarrior
• elvicherrera 10y ago
  If you consider kazaa a tool, then kazaa. It was like limewire but a little older. This was one of the best programs ive ever used. It allowed for p2p transfers also. RIP Kazaa
  • anexprogrammer 10y ago
    I did more friends and family free PC support because of Kazaa crapware than any other cause. Ended up as "if Kazaa is installed, you're on your own, no matter what happens".
• cperciva 10y ago
  Chrome, the fast, stable, and lightweight alternative to Firefox. I don't know quite where it went off the rails...
  • yarou 10y ago
    When they decided to favor revenue over their users' privacy.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • AdamJacobMuller 10y ago
    It is still quite stable for me, I can run a single chrome session for months on my desktop. But, thank god that desktop has 32GB ram and a fast, QC i7 because damn is it bloated and slow! I remember switching to chrome years ago because it was so much faster than Safari, and, yes, while I'm 100% sure Chrome is just a bloated slow mess now, I can't really pinpoint any time when it happened.
    • umanwizard 10y ago
      Are you sure you're not just browsing more complex sites? Modern rich web applications can use a surprisingly high amount of cpu, gpu and ram
      • Razengan 10y ago
        Running those same web apps feels a lot less sluggish and less taxing on Safari these days, even with a lot more tabs open.
  • avar 10y ago
    Chrome's still fast, but other browsers caught up, and more importantly web developers took advantage of the increase in performance and started getting away with writing more bloated websites, resulting in much of the speed gains being nullified. Just try to use Chrome or Firefox to browse relatively lightweight websites (e.g. GNU.org), they're amazingly fast compared to what browsers used to be like before Chrome came out.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• brandonmenc 10y ago
  DESQview
• YuriNiyazov 10y ago
  Borland C++
• antaviana 10y ago
  The iPad 1. It was great for web browsing but nowadays it dies when opening most web pages with advertising.
  • danieltillett 10y ago
    And it was built like a tank. My kids must have dropped mine a hundred times - it is covered in dings and scratches and still it works.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • robin_reala 10y ago
    Fixed a bug in my project yesterday that broke it for iPad1 users. There’s still quite a few of you out there.
• fabiobruna 10y ago
  Amarok 1.4
  • krylon 10y ago
    I use Clementine, which comes close, but on OS X it freezes on me relatively often. (https://www.clementine-player.org/ https://www.clementine-player.org/ - it's a fork of Amarok 1.4, just in case you did not know about it)
  • pvdebbe 10y ago
    Yep. Amarok 2.0 forced me to learn MPD. :)
  • altmind 10y ago
    i also miss amarok1. last time i used clementine it wasnt as feature rich
• anaxag0ras 10y ago
  Truecrypt
  • krylon 10y ago
    There is VeraCrypt, a fork of TrueCrypt 7.1a. It still works at least on Windows and OS X (I didn't check GNU/Linux). https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/ https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/
    • fao_ 10y ago
      Tails uses CryptSetup to replace TrueCrypt[0]. Although I find it easier just to do sudo cryptsetup open --type tcrypt <file> crypdisk sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/mapper/crypdisk <location> [0]: https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/replace_truecrypt/ https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/replace_truecrypt/
• ivank 10y ago
  New laptops with a column of [Home] [PgUp] [PgDn] [End] keys on the right side of the keyboard, instead of nothing (or a numpad).
  • pherq 10y ago
    My fairly current ASUS notebook has that keyboard design, and I think it's fairly standard for their current 13" keyboards, at least.
• hudell 10y ago
  Windows Live Writer
  • crazysim 10y ago
    Wasn't this open sourced?
    • captn3m0 10y ago
      Yup, http://openlivewriter.org/ http://openlivewriter.org/
• roflchoppa 10y ago
  limewire
• hoof_marks 10y ago
  Windows XP and its search feature- Win7 above does not have it. Yahoo Geocities- simply miss it. and also Yahoo in general. My current yahoo mail is chock a block with spam mails. plus their ads. Xerox Ventura desktop publishing software- that was cool when book publishing was required. Motorola T90/91 basic mobile phone. superb and handiest phone used. Current Moto is smart but not unbeatable. Most importantly old BSNL (India) Landline tariffs- you could talk for hours and still the billing would come per call-wise. Simple unbeatable !! Non- Microsoft Keyboards- here they are out of market. THe MS keyboards go out of tune/get stuck over time. Softwares that would never needed to update- These days it is a harassment to see every software on my PC requiring to update. Now its gone to mobile phones. God knows what is it that they do in updates. Tap water- 2 decades ago we would drink water straight from the tap or just plain filtered. Its impossible now. The water is too contaminated and needs added filtration devices at home/work. or bottled water. Paper bags at the grocery shop. They've vanished giving place to cheap plastic bags. And many products are now using plastic wrappings that would come with paper ones. A more silent neighbourhood- these days its high intensity horn blaring.
  • an_account_name 10y ago
    Per-call billing sounds crazy - there should never have been a time in circuit switched or packet switched networks when that would have correctly captured costs.
    • Turing_Machine 10y ago
      I don't know about the OP's situation, but at one time most phone calls were completed by a human operator looking up circuit numbers and physically connecting the two customers using a patch cord. I suspect that under that model, the operator's time was the dominant cost involved in placing the call.
      • Turing_Machine 10y ago
        IIRC, the pricing model was something like this: 1) The customer paid a fixed monthly charge for having phone service at all. This covered the capital costs of the wiring to the customer's premises. 2) On top of that, the customer paid a per-call fee. This covered the cost of having a woman (usually) ask what number you wanted, locate the proper jack, and physically plug your circuit in to the circuit of the person you wanted to reach. It's probably no coincidence that the local service operator was one of the first parts of the phone system to be automated away (nor is it surprising that phone companies continued the per-call charge long after its justification went away :-)).
• techdragon 10y ago
  Yahoo Pipes
• catwell 10y ago
  Greplin (YC W10). It pivoted to Cue then shut down. I haven't found anything else to answer "I know I have read about that, but where?" as well.
  • tdurden 10y ago
    > It pivoted to Cue then shut down http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/cue-acquired-for-over-40m-likely-by-apple-to-compete-with-google-now/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/cue-acquired-for-over-40m-l...
• austinjp 10y ago
  Audiogalaxy.
  • angvp 10y ago
    IKR!, I liked to share any song (specially from local bands) with friends, and groups to discover new bands, etc
• austinjp 10y ago
  Freshmeat.
• Moto7451 10y ago
  Ta-da Lists as a stand alone product. Now it's part of Basecamp.
• yegle 10y ago
  Cedega It allowed me to play War3 with my friends in a LAN with decent frame rate.
• yegle 10y ago
  Cedega It allowed me to play War3 with my friends in a LAN with decent frame rate.
• anonymoushn 10y ago
  I used to use a multi-protocol IM client with a nice history search feature. The history search was like Google Instant but actually instant.
• AdamJacobMuller 10y ago
  RedEye IR controller. Made by a company called ThinkFlood that unfortunately has since gone out of business, it was a rack mount box (I had/have the pro) that operates as a centralized, multi-room, IR+Serial+Relay controller. Really simple to get started with, but, amazingly powerful with a built-in Lua scripting engine and an API to remotely control things. Apps on iOS/Android and a fully-featured web interface. It has been about 2 years and I've still not found anything that I like more than this box to automate my home theatre (I'm still using it).
• ge0rg 10y ago
  Turbo Vision. It was the most sophisticated text mode UI ever created, with a stunning love to the little details (at least in Turbo Pascal 7). Today it would still make sense for server applications, but the C++ port was rather horrible and nobody is still using Pascal :(
  • lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Every now and then I have to use a curses-based UI (the Linux kernel configurator, and Debian's package management stuff pops up dialogs, for example) and it always reminds me of how much better TurboVision was.
  • jgilm 10y ago
    > nobody is still using Pascal While certainly Pascal is not a cool language anymore, I beg to differ about nobody using pascal. I use it to maintain a 1MM LoC for several medical devices. Some state agencies still use it for their software.
• davidp670 10y ago
  iGoogle
• avar 10y ago
  A few things: Everything not being 4:3 screens. I found it better for programming than everything being cinematic screens. Back when monitor manufacturers were racing to make better / higher resolution monitors, instead of just leaving it at 1080p / 4k / whatever the current standard good enough for movies is. The GMail interface before it started auto-converting the textarea to HTML when edited externally. Console gaming when it Just Worked. Nowadays when I pop in a game it's update this and update that, long loading times etc. E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war.
  • kome 10y ago
    > E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war. I am still fighting, and the war is not over.
    • guyzmo 10y ago
      So am I... at some point for colleagues that were telling me that my mail looked bad because text (and they weren't using fixed width font), I was sending them text converted to html by a script, so it is contained in a <pre></pre> :->
      • function_seven 10y ago
        Haha, imposing your plain text will on the HTMLers. I love it.
    • qw 10y ago
      The main problem In the business world is Outlook. For some reason they decided to ignore line breaks in plain text by default, which makes plain text a broken mess
      • Teckla 10y ago
        The main problem In the business world is Outlook. For some reason they decided to ignore line breaks in plain text by default, which makes plain text a broken mess There's an option in Outlook to turn that "feature" off, but of course, nobody does. It's a horrible, terrible default feature of Outlook.
• kriro 10y ago
  Borland stuff. Some websites (author died, they faded away/are not the bleeding edge any more etc.). A good example would be the old Searchlores website (http://search.lores.eu/indexo.htm http://search.lores.eu/indexo.htm)...apparently the original domain is now owned by some marketing company. Yikes.
  • dtamhk 10y ago
    SideKick!
  • ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
    TurboC and tasm ftw :)
  • RantyDave 10y ago
    Turbo Pascal was "boom" fast on a 286. Presumably on modern hardware it would finish compiling before the key came all the way back up.
• rosstex 10y ago
  Lazarus Form Recovery. I suppose it still "exists" in that you can download it from the Chrome store, but all traces of its development have been wiped and it'll eventually die away.
  • homero 10y ago
    I use it on Firefox and I hope it doesn't break
• uola 10y ago
  Nokia N9. The "more linuxy" Nokia Android competitor that was released late and dead on arrival (in terms of ecosystem), but was still years ahead of Android in many ways and fundamentally better in others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3rgAV1a2kg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3rgAV1a2kg http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review
  • digi_owl 10y ago
    And seeded the crap fest that is making its way through the larger Linux ecosystem right now. I had a N800, and i loved it. But come the N900 Nokia had done too many "pivots" too fast, fatally fragmenting the community the 770 to N810 lineage had built up. And once Elop came in and torched the platform, things were sinking fast.
    • uola 10y ago
      I paid attention at the time, but has since repressed most of it. While torching the platform made me bitter about the tech industry, it was also that very few people even cared. It even gave the iPhone a match [0]. The industrial design was great, had sleek UI and clever UX. And that's not even the more technical features. Yet people mostly went on about how great Android was. When Ubuntu then went on to argue over desktop icons (or whatever) while there was a huge hole left by the mac pro, I pretty much gave up on user facing Linux (in the broader sense). Switched all my desktop os and development to windows and haven't looked back since. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP-SSg_zZ1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP-SSg_zZ1M
  • edeion 10y ago
    I still use my Nokia E6 despite its huge software flaws. Small form factor, hardware keyboard, nice specs : it was bound to be good. Alas, Nokia fucked up the software part and the Nokia Belle update made things even worse. And I can see no alternative on the market today. Phones OS's should be free as well :)
• pbreit 10y ago
  Google Reader
  • pbreit 10y ago
    I've moved to Digg Reader which has been a good replacement. I'm sure by Google standards that reader usage was tiny but I'm guessing the value of the usage was pretty high. I check reader first thing, last thing and several times in between.
• simonw 10y ago
  DabbleDB was a truly unique take on a refactorable, easy-to-use webapp database. It was aqui-hired by Twitter and shut down a few years ago. I feel like AirTable is a worthy spiritual successor today.
  • agsamek 10y ago
    Take a look at instadb.com
    • AstroJetson 10y ago
      Interesting, but there are no docs in English, but Google translate does a good job if you go to the native site. Sadly it appears hosting with them is the only option, and no inkling of the price. I don't want to waste their time if it's thousands a month.
      • agsamek 10y ago
        It's $150 per 50 users per month. You can use our hosting or get it installed on your server (Debian) for the same price. We have around a hundred paying customers in Poland of various size, one in USA. The biggest implementation is 10k users every day, around 200 tables. So it scales well. If interested drop me a line, agsamek at Gmail. And BTW - the system works in English and has some documantation inlined in Schema Editor. We will also do English docs. In the meantime we will provide you with good human support :)
• Sanddancer 10y ago
  Crossties. It was a relational desktop for Windows 3.1 which could replace progman and allow you to set up associations with projects, contacts, etc -- for example, opening up someone's contact info would pull up the documents you were working on for them, etc. 20 years later, we still really don't have anything that can provide that sort of context on the desktop, or even worse, we don't have those kinds of relationships available for our phones.
  • MortenK 10y ago
    Extremely interesting application. I googled it and found a PC Mag review from 1994 with a funny passage: "We did a direct import of a 1000 record database from both ACT! And Organizer, and the operation took only a minute on a 486 system" :-)
  • fzn 10y ago
    That spiked my curiosity. If anybody has more on this, I believe it should be shared somewhere. Besides a PC Mag excerpts and a listing on some russian utilities compilation CD page, the interwebs look devoid. https://books.google.com/books?id=LYp7r6OrMdIC&pg=RA1-PA172&lpg=RA1-PA172&dq=%22Cross+Ties+Software%22&source=bl&ots=YXh7kvJdcV&sig=H8ISzPG0el7k_42n8_Kiulew_yI&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Cross%20Ties%20Software%22&f=X https://books.google.com/books?id=LYp7r6OrMdIC&pg=RA1-PA172&...
    • j_s 10y ago
      Not sure this would focus much on the OP's favorite features but this sounds like the same software (starts around 11:20): https://archive.org/details/VirtualM https://archive.org/details/VirtualM This program looks at several early examples of virtul meeting technology. Demonstrations include Cross Ties for Workgroups Much better luck searching for the software company: https://www.google.com/#q=crossties+software+corp https://www.google.com/#q=crossties+software+corp Buy Crossties today for $55: http://www.amzn.com/dp/B000LUXSH6 http://www.amzn.com/dp/B000LUXSH6 An expired patent, cited 26 times: http://www.patentbuddy.com/Patent/5787440 http://www.patentbuddy.com/Patent/5787440
• clumsysmurf 10y ago
  NCD - Norton Change Directory. Using OSX now.
• bkmn 10y ago
  The BeBox
• tszming 10y ago
  Google Reader, Google Notebook, Google My Track, Delicious
  • kevsim 10y ago
    Big +1 on Delicious. I use Pocket now, but I find myself saving things and never ever going back to them.
• SFJulie 10y ago
  norton commander & pctools
  • PeterisP 10y ago
    FAR manager is norton commander-style tool for modern windows, it's quite useful in some use cases.
    • SFJulie 10y ago
      Okay I kind of miss DRDOS 6.0 and doing my autoexec.bat by hand trying to break the 640kb limits that Bill decided would be more than enough for any use. That's when I installed Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swap (EMACS) to prove the superiority of Linux
• frik 10y ago
  * IBM ThinkPad T41p/60. Lenovo T410/X210 where still somewhat fine. But these newer ultrabooks nowadays have less powerful specs than 5 year old notebooks. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon isn't bad, but a far cry given it's ultrabook less powerful specs than an 5 year old high end notebook. And these shitty keyboard nowadays, give me back the old keyboard layout like grouped F1-F12 key, better placed Home/PgUp/PgDn/End keys, etc. And an 9 cell battery that stand out on the back side - I want back my 15 hour battery life. Please please produce the retro Thinkpad, as shown on the Lenovo blog - I want to buy one with high end specs, if it is available in 4:3 even better: http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-machine/ http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-machine/ * HP EliteBook 2560p. Those newer EliteBook 820 have cheap plastic and a very crappy hinge with such a small angle. And the very thick edge around the display looks like the designer has gone completely mad. And the specs are lower than a 5 year old notebook. Bring back the older quality in a smaller form factor, or just offer the older device with up-to-date high end hardware. * Microsoft IntelliMouse and Comfort Mouse 6000 Very good computer mice. (yes I am aware the later had a hardware bug with the middle mouse click but who cares). Their newer keyboard and mouses are all wireless and all with crappy design - designer gone mad. Very sad story. It get's harder and harder to find a suitable good traditional standard quality mouse and keyboard these days, that were so common 15 years ago (and cheap as well). Not everyone needs a gaming device (expensive and last only like 2 years) nor would like to use ultra cheaply made crap for small hands only. The normal products aren't available anymore as it seems. I hope it doesn't sound too negative, sadly some devices aren't available in a quality we used to have available in mainstream. On the other side, a lot of other things I haven't mentioned got a lot better than what was available some years ago - but it isn't the topic in this discussion.
  • anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Lenovo destroyed the Thinkpad legacy. I gave up on them a few years ago when they dropped the 7 row keyboard. The 7 row keyboard was leagues ahead of any other laptop keyboard, ever. The replacement keyboard is awful. I hate the loss of web forward/back keys too. I hate chicklet keys. I hate pgup/dn placed as though I'll almost never use them. I still prefer the trackpoint over any touchpad. I'd buy a retro Thinkpad, like you link, in a second. I'd Hackintosh or Linux it. Barring miracles, my next laptop will be a Mac. A friend has a W540. It's horrible. Worst sound output of any machine I came across, horrible chicklet keyboard, and cracks in the keyboard surround that's design fault but Lenovo won't fix. All the once handy TP utilities are Adobe Air bloatware that take 5s+ to even open. After 20 years he says it's his last TP.
• homero 10y ago
  Xp and thinkpad
• p0nce 10y ago
  Turbo Pascal
• tezza 10y ago
  SmartDraw 6 - I have a VMWare Fusion image just to run it. Later versions were disastrous Microsoft X6 Keyboard - Fantastic keyboard with removable number pad. Not made any more
• Grue3 10y ago
  Google Reader. There are no replacements that a) update fast enough, and b) allow search for free. I know, I tried all of them. Firefox had an amazing plugin called "Ubiquity", which was basically like command line for your browser and you could write custom scripts for it. It was seriously better than anything that exists today. They stopped developing it for some reason. Tab Groups is another feature that's now abandoned, despite being superior to everything else that exists. Forte Agent (free version) - great text Usenet reader, now abandonware.
  • amorphid 10y ago
    Have you tried Digg's RSS reader? I've been using it a bit lately, and like it well enough. http://digg.com/reader http://digg.com/reader.
    • geowwy 10y ago
      I don't think Digg Reader does search. Digg is good though, it's what I use.
    • dpark 10y ago
      Digg reader randomly losses state and shows me days of stuff as unread again. I also frequently have to use "mark all read" to clear out the bolded feed name, even if there are no items shown. I've also seen it stop updating a feed for days and then suddenly showing a half dozen items. I use Digg reader because it seems better than most alternatives, but it's not as reliable and consistent as Google Reader.
  • rajeshmr 10y ago
    +1 for Google reader. Never found anything like it.
    • chmars 10y ago
      I am very happy with Feedbin but I know what you mean – and Feedbin of course cannot be free. I am nevertheless glad that alternatives sprang up, the first weeks after the end of Google Reader were difficult.
• shade23 10y ago
  This[1].It was one of the best chrome store extensions which would directly take you to the relevant text while using Google Search.But it was shut down because of the drain in advertising revenue. Thank you Google! [1]:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-scroll/gkcfkcppngohfcppeaankeoomkpipglf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-scroll/gkcfk...
  • i336_ 10y ago
    This extension now makes no mention of the old functionality you're referring to. How did it work, in detail, for anybody who might want to reimplement the behavior?
    • shade23 10y ago
      I'm sorry,the nuances in the name seemed to have resulted in a wrong link.There you go: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-quick-scroll/okanipcmceoeemlbjnmnbdibhgpbllgc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-quick-scrol.... If you do reimplement the behaviour,i'd love to know how how!.
      • i336_ 10y ago
        Oh, thanks! What a fascinating concept. Thankfully, the image carousel preserved enough info that I can understand exactly what this did. And because the image hosting framework the Chrome Web Store uses is exceptionally user-friendly, it was very easy to grab a full-res screenshot of the most important image: http://imgur.com/L7oWUXH http://imgur.com/L7oWUXH Thanks for mentioning that this once existed. I'm not sure if my tragic dev skills will be up to figuring out how to reimplement tit, but I'll certainly let you know if I make any progress!
• chx 10y ago
  Reveal Codes from WordPerfect. I am just typing text now, thanks god, but if I needed to format it, just a few years ago I needed to, I am so, so lost.
  • bsandert 10y ago
    Yes. This is one of the main reasons I like to do most of my writing (which, admittedly, is not a whole lot) with Markdown.
• laxatives 10y ago
  Waze before the acquisition.
• aslushnikov 10y ago
  IMO.im Back in the days, when the service unified different messengers in a single web interface, also providing a handy history search.
  • captn3m0 10y ago
    Once google shut down federated XMPP for gmail accounts and started pushing Hangouts, that was pretty much the end of the service for me.
• skrebbel 10y ago
  Jasc Paint Shop Pro. This tool had the useful half of Illustrator's features and the useful half of Photoshop's, it was blazing fast, and it combined them in a single program so you could mix vector and raster layers. This made it absolutely perfect for web-targeted graphics work. It was the first software I legally bought because it was so good and still affordable (a fraction of the price of Adobe's stuff - something like $200 if i recall correctly). Corel bought it and turned it into a bloated mess of a photo management tool. IMO they should've just killed Draw and rebranded Paint Shop Pro as the new Draw, it was that much better.
  • captn3m0 10y ago
    I remember using it for hand-editing mpeg files. (Using probably Animation Shop Pro), but it was a really wonderful tool.
  • sarreph 10y ago
    It sounds to me like you're describing Affinity Designer - you might want to check it out if you haven't already. It's relatively very cheap and one of the few pieces of software that I use daily that I am very happy paying the list price for! I vaguely remember having Jasc installed as a kid and it was indeed great!
    • dgallagher 10y ago
      Affinity Designer is really great for vector graphics, and exporting to raster. Super fast. Super easy to learn. Their developers are very active. They have a beta available to owners. I've encountered a few minor bugs in their App Store version, downloaded the beta, and noticed it was fixed.
      • joshmarinacci 10y ago
        link (also in the Mac app store) https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/
  • willemojnr 10y ago
• hackbinary 10y ago
  list, a DOS text file browser by Vernon D. Buerg. Anyone know where I can get a copy?
  • i336_ 10y ago
    ...Yay, that was fun! This has the last version of LIST that was released, 9.6y1: http://web.archive.org/web/20080704121935/http://www.buerg.com/download.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20080704121935/http://www.buerg.c... The earliest cached copy has 9.6x: http://web.archive.org/web/20030104124009/http://buerg.com/download.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20030104124009/http://buerg.com/d... You have to poke around to find earlier versions. And I found 6.2a from 1987! http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/dos/RbbsInABoxVol1No2_640/files/011Z/VBUERG_1.ZIP-contents/ http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/dos/RbbsInABoxVol1No2_640... According to this poor version the file I tried to view in DOSBox was created in the year ";6". (The 9.x versions show "04/15/2016".) Also, here's what was indexed as "ASM for early V Buerg LIST file viewer", but it's very rudimentary, at only ~1000 SLOC of ASM. No compiled copy provided so I can't test it, looks like MASM syntax: http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/msdos/coast/textutil/lst60asm.zip http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/msdos/coast/textutil/lst60asm.zip
• atrn 10y ago
  Sabre C aka Centerline C and later Centreline ObjectCenter (C++). Best C debugging environment I've ever used. I ported the X11R3 server to some custom h/w using it.
• anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Logitech Mouseman+ (http://2a.zol-img.com.cn/product/117_500x2000/44/cepKXmRt1Cso.jpg http://2a.zol-img.com.cn/product/117_500x2000/44/cepKXmRt1Cs...) Best ergonomic mouse ever made. Fitted my hand perfectly. The extreme slant looks terrible but works far better than every handed mouse I've used in the 20 years since. There was a matching trackball if you preferred that. Unlike every modern Logitech mouse made it did not break after a short life. It was thrown away because it was old school marble instead of laser. Lasted years in great condition. Use that design with modern sensor, sell me one for £150, I'd buy it.
  • starquake 10y ago
    Have you tried the Logitech M500? https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6qYHapP52IA/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6qYHapP52IA/maxresdefault.jpg
    • anexprogrammer 10y ago
      I haven't. That looks quite close, but still fairly flat. The mouseman had the left mouse button perhaps an inch higher than the right. Net effect is your hand, wrist and forearm settled at a 30-45 degree angle, pretty close to the natural rest position. That;s the bit I miss - it was really comfortable for long use.
    • random778 10y ago
      I use the MX500. Had it for 12 years. Took it apart two years ago and washed the plastic parts in dishwashing liquid, still good as new - only the black background of the logo is worn.
  • zamalek 10y ago
    My best mouse has to be the Microsoft Explorer. Smooth as ice. Sadly, the quality of optical sensors seems to be regressing. I've recently been using the Razer Naga - the optical sensor comes close and it fits perfectly in my hand - I barely notice that it's there. It's worth a try if ergonomics is important to you. YMMV, my ergonometrics aren't the same as yours.
  • 10y ago
• 5555624 10y ago
  Lotus Magellan
• rcarmo 10y ago
  The Psion Series 3 handhelds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3 A (tiny, but) usable, physical keyboard on a device that lasted _ages_, fit into a suit pocket and was eminently practical. The age of the PDA is long gone (heck, I'm typing this on an iPad mini), but we still haven't caught up with some of its best bits.
  • jl6 10y ago
    I saw someone using a 5mx on a train a month ago. It was still fully functional and he was perfectly happy with his 96MB CompactFlash card.
    • rcarmo 10y ago
      I never owned a 5, much to my regret. I switched from a 3a to a PalmPilot (which by itself deserves another entry in this list), but often wished I'd stuck with Psion.
    • i336_ 10y ago
      That's amazing.
  • anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Oh heck, you remind me of my psion 5. It was brilliant, and the tiny keyboard was good enough to touch type on. Battery life in weeks. Someone bung a modern screen on that form-factor please.
    • ZenoArrow 10y ago
      > "Someone bung a modern screen on that form-factor please." You may be interested in following this project: http://hackaday.com/2016/05/01/upgrading-a-20-year-old-pda/ http://hackaday.com/2016/05/01/upgrading-a-20-year-old-pda/
      • anexprogrammer 10y ago
• freetonik 10y ago
  Picasa and Google Notes
• paralelogram 10y ago
  RSS, Usenet newsgroups, netbooks, 4:3 CRT monitors, GNOME 2.x, non-BitTorrent file sharing networks.
  • Cyph0n 10y ago
    Regarding that last one, there's still Usenet, eMule, and DC++ to consider. Many anime fansubbing groups use XDCC to distribute releases.
    • ZenoArrow 10y ago
      There's also Soulseek for music sharing, but let's not promote it too heavily, I don't want a repeat of what happened to Napster.
  • marczellm 10y ago
    I still use RSS much.
• rcarmo 10y ago
  PageMaker: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker I used it to typeset nearly all of my academic work until I was forced to switch to Word by peer pressure. Adobe made a complete hash of it, and none of those files are readable anymore.
  • robk 10y ago
    InDesign should read them I believe
  • ValentineC 10y ago
    I used PageMaker before, and QuarkXPress after that. InDesign's fairly good these days. I don't know why Adobe couldn't have retained the PageMaker name for their layout program though.
  • SixSigma 10y ago
    I loved Pagemaker. Much better than Quark.
• mrlyc 10y ago
  PC Outline. It's a DOS-based outliner. In 1986, my manager said "Here, you're organised. You'll like this" and he was right - I did. So much so that I bought my own copy. I still use it every day in a DOSBox DOS emulator on Windows 7 and Linux. I use it for passwords, todo and done lists, keeping track of work done for clients, functional decomposition, shopping lists and the steps for configuring and compiling the Linux kernel.
  • akavel 10y ago
    From quick googling, there's some discussion where people are suggesting alternatives: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2200/5 http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2200/5 Personally, I haven't ever used PC Outline, so I don't know its features, but from many free outliners I tried I liked the Noteliner. Unfortunately I couldn't find a replacement on Linux (and I don't have time to learn Emacs + org-mode)
    • sparkie 10y ago
      Give Leo (http://leoeditor.com/ http://leoeditor.com/) a try on Linux. Also, there's not much learning to do for just emacs + org mode. By default there are context menus to help which also inform you what keyboard shortcuts are available. You might need to get used to some "odd" keyboard shortcuts, or turn on cua-mode to make it behave like you're used to, but otherwise, you don't need any advanced knowledge to get started.
  • sjm 10y ago
    Have you tried http://orgmode.org http://orgmode.org? There are plenty of tutorials online and videos from conferences introducing it and showcasing its abilities.
• MindTwister 10y ago
  Logitech Cordless Optical TrackMan I have no idea why they made it wireless, it ate batteries like crazy, but its still the best trackball I've ever owned. Having the ball at your middle and ring finger gave better control than the thumb driven ones. You can still get it on places like amazon, but at a ridiculous price, 10-20 times what it originally retailed for.
• 4ad 10y ago
  Film cameras, they certainly still exist, but very few people use them anymore. And the ones still manufactured are either marketed as jewellery, or are crazy expensive. My 100-50 year old family photos are sharper and better than pictures taken today with phones and cheap cameras. And expensive cameras are expensive and heavy. At first I was very happy when the so called mirrorless camera appeared, but I was just too optimistic; the good ones are more expensive than an average DSLR, and lenses are still too big. Not to mention that they are full of bullshit software that will stop working in the future and batteries last a day or less. My DSLR battery lasts weeks/months and my film cameras (the ones that need a battery, most don't) last for many years. Laptops with 4:3 (or 5:4) screens. For large screens (over 27''), I don't care as much about the aspect ratio, but for small screens is matters a lot. I'm looking forward to the ThinkPad Retro, but it will probably be a non-interesting heavy brick. We'll see.
• rcarmo 10y ago
  Graffiti on Palm handhelds. I owned the original PalmPilot and a couple of other models up to the Vx, and can still write Graffiti faster than I can type on a touch screen. Discounting the Newton (which I tested but didn't own), there still isn't anything else that even came close in terms of practical "handwriting", and even though there's an Android keyboard that does Graffiti, ACCESS is sitting on the IP and has done nothing with it. I'd forego a non-critical bit of my anatomy to have Graffiti on iOS with a decent stylus. Not even the MyScript keyboards come close.
  • digi_owl 10y ago
    While over at Android there already is. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_company.graffiti_pro https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_com...
    • rcarmo 10y ago
      Yeah, I did point that out on my post. They let it languish for a good while and recently started updating it.
      • digi_owl 10y ago
        Gah, my bad.
    • david-given 10y ago
      Oh, wow --- thanks so much! I thought Graffiti got lawyered to death...
  • Razengan 10y ago
    The smaller iPad Pro + the Apple Pencil should fit the bill. You could try it out at a store, it's surprisingly good. YouTube demos will give you an idea but they can't do it enough justice.
• skaragianis 10y ago
  XTree Gold anyone???
  • rsi_oww 10y ago
    Check out the wonderful ZTreeWin - http://www.ztree.com/ http://www.ztree.com/
    • basicplus2 10y ago
      does not have all the features surrounding file manipulation Xtree Gold had
• skaragianis 10y ago
  XTree Gold anyone?
• ishanr 10y ago
  Web pages without javascript. Even now I try to use the web without it as much as I can. So smooth and nice everything is.
  • tard 10y ago
    +1 i tried turning off scripts a while back i could refresh any page and it would near-instantly return me to the same scroll position without jumping around as scripts load i didn't have to feel so cautious about sites abusing my browser to show me popups, subscription forms or ads it felt really empowering for some reason
    • peteretep 10y ago
      So why did you turn it back on? NoScript allows you to have it off by default and turn it back on on sites it's actually needed on.
  • Figs 10y ago
    I use the JS Switch plugin in Firefox so that I can turn it on and off easily, and browse with it off by default until I need Javascript. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/js-switch/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/js-switch/)
• Alcarinquo 10y ago
  Good old PalmOS handhelds, such as Palm Treo 650 or Palm Centro. I still use Centro these days, but there is nothing on the market to replace it with.
  • cyberferret 10y ago
    I loved my old Treo. We were one of the first companies in this country to set up ActiveSync to get 'real time' emails on those devices. We would get all smug showing off to our clients how 'Dick Tracy' we were, getting and responding to emails while out and about! :) I was intrigued back then to see in the PalmPilot ActiveSync settings, that you could specify what times of the day and week you wanted to 'go quiet' and disable real time syncing. I snorted in derision as I questioned why anyone would want to stop this glorious flow of emails at any time. Nowadays, I am staggered that most modern devices do not allow you to turn off the deluge. I know that there is now a movement among some web service companies to allow users to specify 'no work time', and I really really hope that trend catches on and it becomes ubiquitous in all internet connected devices.
  • AstroJetson 10y ago
    I still use my Treo 650. I have a stack of them waiting in the wings. Best phone ever.
  • rlonstein 10y ago
    Similarly, the Vizor Handspring. I always popped Pimlico's Datebook onto it for better calendaring. My modern android smartphone is more capable and more fun to tinker with but is a worse phone than my old Nokia soapbar and a worse PDA than the Palm and Handspring.
• ProxCoques 10y ago
  File servers. Everywhere I've worked for the past 5 years makes you use a cloud "solution" like DropBox or Google Drive. Those things are find for individual use, but a nightmare to work with in a team. "I'll share that doc with you." "I can't access it - can you give me permissions?" "OK what's your email address..." etc. I sure do miss the days when a) there was a common root directory that everyone could see and b) the issue of permissions wasn't crowd sourced to people who don't understand permissions systems.
• hollander 10y ago
  Writing, with a pen. I never do it anymore, but it worked great until I got a PC, a Psion 5, and especially after my first Macbook. Since then I barely write with a pen, and if I do it's cramped.
  • curiousgal 10y ago
    College student here. I wish I could relate. My CS course exams in which you must write code..with a pen..on paper made me hate writing even more.
    • bbody 10y ago
      A good skill to have come whiteboard interview time.
      • curiousgal 10y ago
        Algorithms, maybe. Maple 9.05 syntax, Definitely not.
    • exDM69 10y ago
      Pretty much all CS programs have exams where you must write code with pen and paper. It's a bit of a challenge to try and come up with an alternative way of having individual assessment of coding skill (with no help from the Internet or ways to cheat). Lots of people complain about it but I never had an issue with it. Two reasons why: 1) typically the amount of code is really small and the exercises are very easy anyway 2) I've been writing (pseudo) code on pen and paper since I was a kid (and I still do!) and I find that to be a valuable tool. Ditto for whiteboard coding in interviews, as long as we're talking about small toy problems, I have no problems doing it on the board.
  • kowdermeister 10y ago
    I use it for productivity :) On a blank A4 page there are no notifications, popups, battery issues, constraints of input fields. I find it really useful to have the project outline beside my monitor. It's joy to physically cross out todo items :)
• Zolomon 10y ago
  I miss Google Talk with the lightweight client for Windows. It was snappy and it just worked.
• kschua 10y ago
  Norton Utilities 8.0 and Norton Commander. I loved the DiskEditor which enabled me to recover lost files by manipulating the FAT table, hack byte codes to bypass copy protection in the days when copy protection was done by reading in bad sectors in floppy disks. Norton Commander for the ease of use to navigate file system in DOS days. I use TotalCommander now which is the best $40 I ever spent.
  • agsamek 10y ago
    Far manager is great replacement for Norton commander and is free. Works in console, so ctrl+o works fine. Ctrl+f is also handy.
    • patates 10y ago
      exactly. also, it is perfectly integrated with conemu, which also is a strong recommendation.
• neelkadia 10y ago
  orkut.com
• yeukhon 10y ago
  Turntable.fm... all those college late nights.
• based2 10y ago
  Fujaba (without eclipse) - From UML to Java and Back Again KPT Bryce (Kai Krause) Apple Newton handwriting recognition Apple ResEdit ICQ Usenet
  • gcb0 10y ago
    heh. none of those things ever got close to working. the question was about things you used and now you miss, not things you wish :)
• samwillis 10y ago
  Macrimedia (Adobe) Fireworks Perfect mix of a bitmap and vector editor for ui and web design. Nothing since comes close, scetch is trying but isn't there yet...
• rcarmo 10y ago
  XMPP. Yeah, I know technically it still exists, but having 8 different chat clients installed on my phone is ridiculous.
  • damian2000 10y ago
    By chat clients you mean like WhatsApp for example? https://www.quora.com/What-is-WhatsApps-server-architecture https://www.quora.com/What-is-WhatsApps-server-architecture
    • wlesieutre 10y ago
      SMS+Messages or SMS+Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, WeChat, Viber, LINE, BBM, Telegram, Signal, Sicher, and I'm sure I'm missing some. Used to just install a multi-protocol chat client and be done with it, but now everything's a fancy service with special clients to sync state across devices and whatever else they do.
      • krick 10y ago
        > and I'm sure I'm missing some Skype?
        • wlesieutre 10y ago
          Do people use it for messaging? I know it has it, but it's always seemed secondary to the voice/video.
• raverbashing 10y ago
  A tiny DOS era tool called list.com It was similar to less, but could show hex data, etc It would eat any file for breakfast and display/page it without a hitch
  • hugodahl 10y ago
    Wow, I had completely forgotten about list.com,but as soon as you mentioned it, I was overcome by a wave of nostalgia. It was an absolutely versatile and powerful utility without equal in its day.
• mhw 10y ago
  Computer Concepts Impression Publisher. Basically a desktop publishing application comparable to FrameMaker, in handwritten ARM assembly language and running in 4Mb of RAM. Word still doesn't approach it's ease of use.
  • new299 10y ago
    Artworks was also pretty wonderful. This post has reminded me of so many awesome RiscOS applications. There were so many neat little applications. Most things seemed quite solid too. I guess in part because if they crashed the whole system would go down, so applications were written not to crash. :)
• exDM69 10y ago
  For something completely different... a brace and bit hand drill for woodworking. It's almost impossible to find new drill bits that would fit the two jaw chuck, which doesn't have enough force to clamp on to a round bit with friction only. A cordless drill is nice but not very accurate, useful for holes and screws, not for removing waste in joinery.
  • 8ig8 10y ago
    Jennings Pattern auger bits for braces... https://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/store/dept/TD/item/MS-JB.XX https://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/store/dept/TD/item/MS-JB...
    • exDM69 10y ago
      Whoa, thanks! The only ones I've found have been new old stock. Although these are rather expensive and in inch sizes only (I can't get inch-sized dowels without making them myself). I need to consider obtaining a few of these.
• spriggan3 10y ago
  Google Reader Fireworks ( a image editor for web designers ) Livemesh ( which was way better than one drive, it could sync your entire computer in the cloud ).
  • andy_ppp 10y ago
    Fireworks was awesome. Such a strange decision to get rid of it, I've never managed to replace it really... Any ideas of an alternative.
    • markdown 10y ago
      https://gravit.io/ https://gravit.io/ http://www.sketchapp.com/ http://www.sketchapp.com/
• herval 10y ago
  Eudora! Never got used to any other desktop email client after it. Also: Google Reader and Google Buzz, the proto-Facebook for me
  • kps 10y ago
    > Eudora! +1 for Eudora. How is it that no other email client can get folders right? I don't know what I'm going to do when my Snow Leopard box dies… maybe run SheepShaver.
• marczellm 10y ago
  Google Desktop. For the single feature of 'hit Ctrl Ctrl and google search'. So I kept the installer and I still have it running on my Windows 8 and 10 boxes.
• baidoct 10y ago
  Internet Explorer
• covercash 10y ago
  VisualHub - super simple video converter Songza - they had some great curation and introduced me to a lot of new music Starsiege: TRIBES - while not a tool, the amount of enjoyment I got from this game is rivaled only by Goldeneye and MarioKart with friends on n64
• mattbee 10y ago
  Zap, the text editor for RISC OS - http://zap.tartarus.org/ http://zap.tartarus.org/ (not that it's not still available, just that I can't justify working on a RISC OS system for the last ... 16 years :) ).
  • mattbee 10y ago
    Also on RISC OS "The Hacker" was one _the_ best ARM disassembler / OS inspection / debugging tools. It was sold as a game cheating tool, but was particularly great for pulling apart copy protection :) Learned so much with it. Again, still available, for an irrelevant OS.
  • new299 10y ago
    Oh my goodness yes. So much to love about !Zap. My first ARM assembly programs were written using the Zap disassembler/assembler extension. I also really miss the way it displayed search results, not seen another editor that does it quite like that.
    • spdegabrielle 10y ago
      How did it display search results?
• basicplus2 10y ago
  Xtree Gold
• Artoemius 10y ago
  Pre-iOS 7 Notes and the old iOS UI look in general.
• exabrial 10y ago
  Ethernet port on my god damn macbook 'pro'!!!!!
  • throwanem 10y ago
    The Thunderbolt adapter is $30. USB adapters are even cheaper. Given how rarely I find myself actually using Ethernet on my MBP, I'm perfectly happy to trade off the need for a dongle for a laptop half as thick as it would have to be to fit an internal Ethernet port.
    • exabrial 10y ago
      So what's the distinction between a "Pro" model and the normal model then? I thought that was the point of having a "pro" lineup, was so serious work could be done and normal consumers would be steered towards the Air or MacBook line....
      • ChrisLTD 10y ago
        A lot of folks can do serious work without a built in Ethernet port.
        • exabrial 10y ago
          Right, at home on a 30mpbs/5uo internet connection? Or in an office with a business class symmetric fiber at 150mbps with no busting or shaping? There isn't enough wireless spectrum available in USA for more than 5-10 people in a 50yd radius to get full bandwidth. And the backhaul to wireless APs is 1gig, so not only are you splitting airtime, you're splitting wiretime.
      • throwanem 10y ago
        The Pro line offers considerably beefier processors and graphics chipsets, and more memory, than the Air or just-plain-MacBook lines do. I don't know what kind of very serious work you're talking about that can't be done at all with less than 150Mbps symmetric, not even for a minute - but in a decade and a half in this industry, I have yet to meet anyone who does it. So I'm willing to surmise that it's a very serious niche specialty, whatever it is. You'll probably have to sink considerable money into whatever laptop you want to do this kind of very serious work on, but you'll be happy to know that Thunderbolt 2 can handily support 10Gbps, and such interfaces are readily available. Of course, they come at a premium price, but you're getting paid well enough for your very serious work that that doesn't pose you a major problem, I'm sure.
• Artoemius 10y ago
  MS-DOS 6.x
• AlphaGeekZulu 10y ago
  All-purpose disc calculator. Used it during my time as a typesetter to mass-calculate values based on a scaling factor. Soo much faster than an electronic calculator! Disc calculators have not completely vanished, they are still being made for specific purposes like aviation. But all-purpose disc calculators need to have a huge diameter and smooth mechanics to work nicely and I only seem to find them as antiquities on ebay.
• singularity2001 10y ago
  Action Replay You could freeze the whole system (e.g. game) with the push of a button, increase your lives and resume ... http://ar.c64.org/wiki/Action_Replay http://ar.c64.org/wiki/Action_Replay
  • singularity2001 10y ago
    was even better than SoftIce
    • maremmano 10y ago
      thank you! both was removed from my memory. good old days
  • waddabadoo 10y ago
    Hah that was awesome
• qw 10y ago
  YUI library. It was a very nice CSS and Javascript framework that was much easier to use for complex UIs than the competition. It had lots of good UI components with an integrated event and data source system. One example is the data table. I haven't found anything better since, and most are not even comparable
  • vladimir-y 10y ago
    I also had a good experience with YUI v2/v3.
• smcguirk 10y ago
  Ready Set Go loved this desk top program on Mac and MacDraft
• smcguirk 10y ago
  Ready Set Go and MacDraft both were essential tools in the day.
• realo 10y ago
  RPN HP calculators: HP29C (my first one) and HP41C (did university with it). A long time ago, some demon soul from hell decided to kill them product lines. The world never was the same, afterwards.
  • madengr 10y ago
    They still make a 35S which is what I use. I have four 32sii still sealed in the clamshell.
  • eitally 10y ago
    They're dead? I just gave away my HP48 whilst cleaning house. :(
    • realo 10y ago
      HP48GX on eBay : 365$. Now you may weep...
      • msbarnett 10y ago
        Huh. I have a G and a GX sitting in my closet...
        • chx 10y ago
          I have a 128kbyte HP 48G in my closet and I will never part with it. It's a fine bit of hardware hackery from ages long, long gone by: four RAM ICs stacked on top of each other and a friend of mine did the wizardry soldering where most of the legs are just kinda ran together like so many tiny waterfalls and the control legs are soldered separately.
  • ctkrohn 10y ago
    HP still makes RPN financial calculators. I recently switched to using an HP 12C at work, after holding out for a long time. It's amazing how quick it is once you get used to RPN, and I love the solid feel of the hardware. You can pick one up for around $50.
• jeffeld 10y ago
  Microsoft Quick-Help Circa 1990, a DOS TSR (remember those?) that when you pressed Alt+H (I think) popped up help for the API call at the cursor (usually OS/2 or Win16).
  • jzcoder 10y ago
    Norton Guides. A similar TSR that also included a compiler for building your own guides. I remember one popular one was the Ralph Brown Interrupt List. I think about this tool a lot, but I think IDE's with auto completion and showing parameters has largely replaced the need. But using NG, still seems faster than having to launch an IDE help system or doing a google search. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Guides
• damian2000 10y ago
  fuckedcompany.com
  • bsenftner 10y ago
    Loved reading about my bosses and friends bosses being all fucking stupid and degenerate during the dotcom boom.
    • fuck_google 10y ago
      I just read blogs by Google. ;)
• snarfy 10y ago
  SoftICE.
  • memming 10y ago
    that was some powerful tool...
• mirimir 10y ago
  Lotus Agenda
• Arwill 10y ago
  Sygate Personal Firewall. It had a simple interface, nothing flashy. It was possible to simply define custom firewall rules. It was a Windows program, yet it felt like it had so much control as what a Linux firewall would. It just worked and was quick. Then it got bought up by Symantec and was killed off.
• sgtnasty 10y ago
  A/UX Commando "A/UX includes a utility called Commando (similar to a tool of the same name included with Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) to assist users with entering Unix commands. Opening a Unix executable file from the Finder opens a dialog box that allows the user to choose command-line options for the program using standard controls such as radio buttons and check boxes, and display the resulting command line argument for the user before executing the command or program."
  • Someone 10y ago
    That description doesn't do it justice. You didn't have to open an executable from the Finder; you could call it from the command line, as in >commando ls That popped up a dialog box with checkboxes for -l, -R, etc., with a text field for file names, a button that allowed you to pick files, etc. There were two ways to exit the dialog. One executed the command, the other entered it in your shell for further editing, copy-pasting in a script (in MPW shell, that copy-pasting wasn't even needed, as every shell window was a file), etc. And even better: the shell (at least in MPW) knew about commando, so typing >ls… or just typing ls and hitting command-option-return (or some other magic incantation) opened the dialog, too. I may misremembered it, but IIRC, commando even parsed partial inputs to populate the dialog box when you opened it. Thinking of MPW and the early Mac, I also miss the consistent distinction between return (the key to the right of the letter 'l' that starts a new line) and command-return or enter (on the numeric keypad, starts a command) that made it possible to enter multi-line text in input dialogs without living in the constant fear of dismissing the dialog early.
    • hobs 10y ago
      Your comment reminds me of the show-command verb in powershell, which automatically infers all the options available and maps them to a gui, and then has a run or copy option(though it does need a paste.) Its really nice when you are exploring new stuff or just forgot which flag it was again and dont feel like reading the get-help. eg http://i.imgur.com/xOrLdYS.png http://i.imgur.com/xOrLdYS.png
      • 10y ago
• a_imho 10y ago
  Browsers without bloat.
  • RP_Joe 10y ago
    Take a look at palemoon, Vivaldi, kmelon and more.
• DonHopkins 10y ago
  Woz's 6502 disassembler built into the Apple ][ monitor ROM. http://www.applefritter.com/files/Apple1WozDrDobbsDisasm.pdf http://www.applefritter.com/files/Apple1WozDrDobbsDisasm.pdf This early Apple ][ ad actually mentions it: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L3axV02_CrE/UijSowMHAfI/AAAAAAAAV5g/0-GWleyWmOw/s1600/pg.+2.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L3axV02_CrE/UijSowMHAfI/AAAAAAAAV5... Check out pretty APPLE COMPUTER CO logo designed by Ronald Wayne, on this APPLE-I OPERATION MANUAL: http://simonowen.com/sam/apple1emu/a1man.pdf http://simonowen.com/sam/apple1emu/a1man.pdf I think I'll print that out and stick it on the back of my MacBook Pro! Newton --- "A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought --- Alone." http://www.perfectlyintune.com/page34/page35/page35.html http://www.perfectlyintune.com/page34/page35/page35.html
• ILoveMonads 10y ago
  1. Metrowerks. 2. Turbo Pascal for Windows (which I guess became Delphi) 3. C-Terp
  • msbarnett 10y ago
    God I miss Metrowerks, for so many reasons.
• bitwize 10y ago
  Autodesk Animator. That program was the tits back in the day; and I used it to re-create scenes from Ren & Stimpy as well as make my own animations. Yes, I know there was an open-source release. I couldn't get it to work.
  • tremendo 10y ago
    https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro Direct descendant (by Jim Kent) of Cyber-Paint on the AtariST. Also Tom Hudson of CAD-3D went on to AutoDesk with 3D Studio.
• clarry 10y ago
  I miss my 19" 4:3 CRT monitor that did 1600x1200 @ 85Hz. I want to play doom with it again. No matter what you do, upscaling a low resolution game to high resolution flat display just doesn't look good. Whereas a CRT, even a high end one, could switch to a low resolution mode and look crisp without turning the pixels into huge squares. I see that "crt shaders" are popular today, but to me they all look like they're trying to replicate the look of a NES hooked up to a shitty old television. It's completely different from a high resolution computer display.
  • bitwize 10y ago
    A lot of people think that CRTs all worked like the flickery, jittery displays from Fallout games. Compare also the default settings on cool-retro-term, and then track down a working-order VT220; odds are the picture on the actual terminal will still be rock-steady and razor-sharp.
  • rangibaby 10y ago
    Every time I miss big CRTs I remember how fat their asses were and how much fun they were to lug up stairs. No thanks. Having said that, I rescued my wife's grandfather's early 80s Toshiba TV when we were cleaning up his house after he died. It is awesome for playing games, and TV works on it (TV > balun > digital tuner > antenna). Too bad there's nothing to watch.
• purerandomness 10y ago
  Lopster, a GTK+ file sharing client using the OpenNap protocol (which was built after the original Napster (which has nothing to do with today's Napster) protocol) You could download songs in 320kbps mp3 quality, you actually owned the tracks. You could discover home-made remixes of completely unknown artists, which could happen to be truly amazing, and which then got lost forever after the downfall of the OpenNap servers. You had an insta-search feature where you typed something in a search box, and the track list actually filtered immediately. I miss all of this and I would pay so much money (even monthly) if something like that came up again. Yes, it was illegal, and you have streaming services like Deezer and Spotify today, but try searching for Adele. There's no point if you have to have 2-3 sources to listen to your favourite music. The movie industry is repeating the same fragmentation faults of the music industry. There's still no legal way to stream or download your favourite music and movies. You have music communities like Soundcloud, but artists need to pay money to make their work public (laughably unaffordable if you're, say, in Romania) and the sheer amount of work went forever extinct, just like what happened to Grooveshark. You could search your library, and the library would filter your results instantly by the letter you've just typed. This is impossible with today's SPA platforms. Not a single competitor does sub strig filtering, and by the time your AJAX request hits the server, you're already 20ms over the time the results would have been shown in Lopster. There was a golden time when those Napszter clones were alive, anyone remembering WinMX? I'm delighted Soulseek survived until today, i'll see what's left from the legacy.
• cholze 10y ago
  I really miss Bump, the app to share contacts/files/photos with a gesture to a person next to you. I have never found a similar experience again (Apple has Airdrop, NFC on Android, etc.) but nothing works platform independent.
• Joeri 10y ago
  Ecco Pro outliner. Technically it still runs on w10, but the various glitches forced me to onenote. I also really miss my nt4 system: office 95, delphi 3, coreldraw 5, photoshop 5, netscape 4. Despite having only a 233 mhz cpu and 128 megs of RAM that system seemed more responsive and easier to use than my current pc's, and it did everything i needed it to.
  • cJ0th 10y ago
    re: Ecco Pro outliner Maybe Treeline[0] (a favorite of mine) or BasKet[1] (not sure if a windows version exists) suit your needs. They're both open source and more responsive than onenote. [0] http://treeline.bellz.org/ http://treeline.bellz.org/ [1] http://basket.kde.org/ http://basket.kde.org/
• matt_morgan 10y ago
  Going way back, the easy answer for me is the Paradox desktop database from Borland. I used it in DOS in 1990; Windows kind of killed it. It was amazingly easy to build apps in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_%28database%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_%28database%29 Although reading that page I see that it still exists!? So maybe it doesn't qualify for this question. [Edit: I see the dBase/FoxPro family mentioned down below. Same idea, roughly. Also great.]
• gaius 10y ago
  VAX/VMS. A joy both to program on and to administer.
• cheez 10y ago
  Norton commander
• typon 10y ago
  My favourite video transcoder which was also GPU accelerated: Badaboom
• microbie 10y ago
  Norton Commander
  • ekr 10y ago
    How about Far Manager?
• RobertKerans 10y ago
  Macromedia Freehand, in particular deleting bezier points but keeping the shape intact (ie simplifying). Illustrator still hasn't quite caught up. For any illustration, it's useful to have as few control points as possible. This is particularly useful when making SVGs for the web; it renders faster, and an ability to hand edit the SVG is useful for animation etc. Every font design package has this feature; Illustrator, even now, has nothing that does anything close to the same degree of accuracy. Occasionally they'll roll out an improvement in 'simplify', but I find it staggering that they can't just implement what is a fairly simple feature.
  • owenversteeg 10y ago
    Have you tried Inkscape? I find it does a good job of this.
    • RobertKerans 10y ago
      I've played around with it; problem is, I've used Adobe products for ~18 years, and use almost every piece of Creative Suite. I don't think the context shifting is worth it, unfortunately. I'm using SVG on every new project now, so that might change
  • IlPeach 10y ago
    I'm still upset with Adobe for killing it the way they did. I'm now using Inkscape and only that, but it's not even close to the quality and precision of freehand. Such a shame.
  • sergioschuler 10y ago
    Yeah, I loved Freehand. Damn you Adobe!
• bitdiddle 10y ago
  Symbolics workstation
• a3n 10y ago
  The mail environment in which you could practically run MH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System The tool is still around, but I long ago knuckled under to rich email, and I really like imap, at home and at my provider. But I so loved the MH environment of separate commands that ran in the terminal, and that you could easily use all the existing unix utilities because your messages were just text files.
• inanutshellus 10y ago
  Firebug, before FireFox 30. Developer Tools (and the skin-of-developer-tools that is Firebug 2) are markedly inferior. From breakpoint- and file-management to the functional limitations and missing features around dom management... I miss the Firebug that died in FireFox 29. ... Here's what I'd like DevTools to do: * Make a breakpoints view, not one embedded into a massive list of unsorted (or sorted-by-load-date I guess?!) files that changes over time. If that can't be done (or is against the design philosophy of DevTools), letting me choose the sort order would be nice (e.g. recently-viewed files first, or files with breakpoints, etc ..... and uh, remembering those files and/or settings through refreshes would be fantastic... I miss it from Firebug 2). It's nice because after/during refreshes the breakpoint view lets you pull up the file the second it's loaded, instead of scrolling around in the file list until you find it. * Make it a LOT more obvious when DevTools is stopped at a breakpoint. * DevTools doesn't handle initial focus the way Firebug does. As in, when you pull up Firebug via the selection icon--oh, DevTools needs that selection icon for the toolbar--it goes straight to the dom node you selected. * Make DevTools stop crashing. It stops working. Constantly. The console will just stop printing output, and the DOM view just stops displaying HTML, requiring a browser restart. (When this happens, if you, say, pull up the console and type "1" and hit enter, usually the console echos "1" back to you. When you're in this state, it's not echoed back, though, oddly, some script messages still pop in.) * Make "debugger" start working again. There are some places where--for who knows what reason--both Firebug and DevTools have ignored breakpoints I've put in, and I've been able to get around it in Firebug by explicitly putting in "debugger;" into my code. You definitely know you're in deep kimchi when you need "debugger;". Also, for one of my websites, it can't load the source. It just shows "eval" as the filenames over and over with nothing in them. Firebug 2 loads it just fine. If I use the browser too long, the Inspector and Console tabs go blank. Oh, and DevTools often doesn't honor my breakpoints. They "slide" down to the next line DevTools thinks it can actually stop on. Sometimes, once I restart my browser they'll work again. For another, as a time-saver I put breakpoints on lines that /will/ be valid when I refresh (saves me from having to refresh the file twice), so it'd be grand if it simply honored the line i clicked rather than "sliding" down to the next valid one.
  • frik 10y ago
    True, the v1 used internal API directly. They ported it to a newer API that is also used by Developer Tools. Though even today, I prefer Firebug as I really like the good UI and it has several features that are nowhere to be found in neither Developer Tools in Firefox nor DevTools in Chrome nor F12 in IE11. E.g. the "DOM" tab that let's one to view the DOM state - it's like working with Smalltalk/Squeak and its object browser window.
• haroldweber23 10y ago
  Writely. Worked very well to write together. Then Google bought and integrated into its ecology and changed its name to Google Docs. If you do not like the Google monopoly, like me, and do not like their collaboration with the NSA and the US foreign policy, Google Docs is no option. Writely should have stayed independent. Shame on their founders and the VCs.
  • fuck_google 10y ago
    Google even managed to move Google Docs development backwards by reimplementing the whole thing badly. The UI is much slower now and it's nowhere near feature complete (even compared to Writely) to this day, almost a decade after acquiring Writely. For instance there is no support for numbered headings and table editing sucks. Did I mention that its extremely slow and bloated now? Google doesn't seem to have any product management (or they really suck at it) and/or they just don't care about Google Docs (and users) at all. Writely/Upstartle had only four employees when acquired by Google, but they still mananaged to create a better and more functional product than Google has managed to do in a decade with practically unlimited resources.
• DiThi 10y ago
  KDE 3.5
• mkoryak 10y ago
  Newzbin + sabnzbd Piracy has never been so easy
• 0x4a42 10y ago
  Nothing Real Shake, which was bought (and killed) by Apple. It was the best video compositing app on the market at that time.
  • bsenftner 10y ago
    I loved Shake, and know the author. Apple paid him well, but screwed him professionally.
• wotwot42 10y ago
  borland turbo pascal/c IDE that does most everything one needs for programming in one SIMPLE AND SMALL application. dbaseIV and the possibility to create a db application + its menus/gui in short time without having to import 100+ kitchen sinks.
• kawera 10y ago
  Powermarks, a brilliantly simple bookmarks manager for Windows, kind of "Notational Velocity for bookmarks" - both share basically the same UI/UX.
• _jomo 10y ago
  HTML5 music streaming websites such as Grooveshark or rdio
  • 8note 10y ago
    Google music does it nicely
    • mikegedelman 10y ago
      My "HTML5 Audio" option under settings has been grayed out fo some time...
• dcuthbertson 10y ago
  I prefer a trackball to a mouse, and the one I liked best was the Microsoft Trackball Explorer. I liked that I could control the trackball with my fingers and use my thumb for the wheel and buttons. Pointing is much more precise that way.
  • mondoshawan 10y ago
    This. I use a Kensington trackball nowadays as a replacement and hope to never go back to a mouse again. Putting the ball under the least accurate fingers was so weird.
    • rlonstein 10y ago
      +1 for the Kensington Expert Mouse, I have 3. The quality of the scroll ring is up for debate but the device overall is much better than anything else I've used. I also miss the Logitech Trackman Wheel optical. It was cheap, light, and worked very well. I still have one for occasional use.
      • kps 10y ago
        Kensington Slimblade. Scrolls by turning the ball around the Z axis; it sounds strange and error-prone but actually works perfectly. I now keep a spare in a box on a shelf beside my spare Kinesis keyboard.
• ak39 10y ago
  Microsoft: 1. PhotoDraw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PhotoDraw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PhotoDraw 2. FoxPro: http://www.foxprohistory.org/foxprotimeline.htm http://www.foxprohistory.org/foxprotimeline.htm 3. Full Tilt! Space Cadet Pinball: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball
• wycx 10y ago
  4DOS. Tab complete in DOS! Wikipedia says its now open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS
  • to3m 10y ago
    4NT is still going: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Command_Console https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Command_Console I don't know what the newer versions are like, since I still use 4NT 8.something. It's got some missing or inconvenient functionality, such as no equivalent to `...`, and I've had its DEL commands delete too many files a couple of times (!!!). But I still rate it above any of the POSIX-style ones for interactive use, on account of its popups for browsing command history, working folder history and selecting files. I am careful to only delete files with `rm' these days though...
  • jaachan 10y ago
    I've got Clink for tab completion and other cmd fancies. https://mridgers.github.io/clink/ https://mridgers.github.io/clink/
• therealmarv 10y ago
  ACDsee (a fast picture viewer) without any DB or clunky UI attached.
  • RantyDave 10y ago
    If you're on a mac, try Sequential. Really, really fast. http://sequentialx.com/ http://sequentialx.com/
• lettercarrier 10y ago
  The Telephone with Dial Tone and associated Busy Signal. A busy signal meant nobody could contact me; Also, by either not answering the phone or by simply taking the receiver off the hook I controlled interruptions. And, nobody became concerned if they did not hear from me in an hour, 1/2 day, day or even week. And I had no concern if I did not hear from others either in that timeframe. So the "tool" to maintain privacy was very controllable by me and nobody would think otherwise. Any Norton product dBase III
  • rhizome31 10y ago
    Maybe it's just me but I feel that it was also much easier to get to actually speak to someone on the phone back then. We usually knew when we could reach someone and call during those timeframes. If we didn't get a reply we knew they were out and call the next day. Nowadays it's much more rare to get an answer when calling a mobile phone. Either the person has left it in the next room or it's out of battery, it's in silent mode and the person doesn't hear it, etc. So people usually tend to resort to text messages, which is a highly ineffective way to communicate in many situations. Also old telephones never took the initiative to call someone from their owner's pocket ;)
    • vitd 10y ago
      I know for me I stopped answering the phone altogether about a year or two before the do not call list went into effect. About literally 1/10th of the calls I receive to this day are legit calls I want to take.
    • samstave 10y ago
      I recall being reprimanded by my grandmother for attempting to call a friend after 8pm. "You never call anyone after 8pm, they are on private time"
  • icebraining 10y ago
    I simply turn off my phone, though Airplane mode works too. In my experience, if you do it regularly people get used to it and stop fretting.
• jhallenworld 10y ago
  Old DOS OrCAD- it's a full screen schematic capture program with best mouse usage. To scroll large schematics you just move past the screen edge. Also the macro system was excellent. I've not found a more productive capture program.
• angry_octet 10y ago
  Cricket Graph. The best graphing programming I've ever used. http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/cricket-graph-iii http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/cricket-graph-iii
• smoyer 10y ago
  ARRL Radio Designer ... it was great for designing complex wideband and narrowband filters. And it would run Monte-Carlo simulations that let you estimate yields based on the component tolerances.
• zevv 10y ago
  A phone with a proper SSH client and a real keyboard; I have owned and loved (in this order) the Nokia E71 and N900, HTC Desire Z, Motorola Droid 4 and Photon Q. But now I am out of options, as there are no worthy successors to any of these devices. Modern phones and tablets are not about production, but only about consuming. A lot of thought goes into the output devices, but the only input device - the touchscreen - is not enough to get real work done. I still find typing on a touchscreen cumbersome, especially entry of special characters is a hassle. This makes managing remote systems or programming very hard to do.
  • ge0rg 10y ago
    Oh yes, I absolutely loved the Desire Z (the other ones didn't quite make it to the European market). Haptic feedback is really important, and the little bonus features like the OK button/trackpad/notification LED were a great design.
  • dsr_ 10y ago
    Android devices with bluetooth can connect to hardware keyboards ranging from tiny things to full-size desktop keyboards. They aren't good for use on the bus or while walking, but if you can take the time to sit down and pull out your keyboard, it can work quite well.
    • Piskvorrr 10y ago
      Which defeats the whole point: I'd still use my Xperia Pro with a built-in slide-out keyboard, except app bloat makes it useless (Google Play now clocks in at 190 MB? And this is representative of the other apps.) It was perfect for touch-typing "on the bus", as you say: if you have to fiddle with accessories and perhaps get a coffee table to put them on, you might as well lug a desktop computer with you ;)
  • InclinedPlane 10y ago
    I use JuiceSSH which works pretty well, but there's definitely no getting around not having a physical keyboard.
  • 10y ago
• tech2 10y ago
  Directory Opus (prior to DOpus 5 when it all got a bit "special"). Two panes, amazing file recognition, I've missed it ever since.
  • TomDavey 10y ago
    I must have adopted Directory Opus after version 5, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing. DO is at version 11 now, and I absolutely adore it. It's the first thing I put on a new Windows system.
    • tech2 10y ago
      I keep meaning to buy it to give it another go, I lost touch after 5 but kept revisiting their website for some reason. Like going back to an ex's facebook page to see what they've been up to. Windows explorer, the Finder, Gnome/KDE/etc. are all appalling. Maybe I'm gonna go back and look at that website again... sigh
• lisper 10y ago
  OS X Snow Leopard.
  • zumu 10y ago
    I'm still using it on my mac. I don't really do any work it anymore because of software requiring >10.9, but it's still amazing for day to day computing.
  • paulrpotts 10y ago
    So much this! I use a lot of audio programs, and this was the single most stable and solid version of MacOS X for my purposes. I should have just stayed there. Now I'm contemplating whether I want to migrate my 8-year-old Mac Pro to El Capitan and wondering if it will break Aperture completely.
• RP_Joe 10y ago
  Opera browser before Chromium.
• rlonstein 10y ago
  Hypercard.
• Geekette 10y ago
  Yahoo Pipes. Meticulously remixed, filtered, etc RSS feeds rendered useless with no viable alternative to date. Curses to Yahoo, especially whoever made the decision to kill it.
  • glaberficken 10y ago
    +1 wish they would opensource it.
• sly010 10y ago
  Microsoft Excel 200x on Windows. Everything else (Google Spsheet, Numbers, etc.) is slower with less features, more bugs, and no keyboard bindings.
  • pvdebbe 10y ago
    Yeah, Office 2000 hit the sweet spot on lightweightness and features.
• rsoto 10y ago
  I'm gonna echo on Winamp. Now a Linux user, I really miss a real good mp3 player. Winamp was light, aesthetic and very good on its design. One feature I still miss is the global hotkeys, you could map Ctrl+Shift+Z to go back one song, on any window you were (hence the 'global'). I used to map the Z-X-C-V-B (the default bindings for Previous/Play/Pause/Stop/Next) to the CTRL+Shift+$key binding, and I felt like a wizard. Then there was a search function, with J, that you could also remap to a global hotkey. Winamp was so good we should have paid for it to prevent a sale to AOL.
  • copperx 10y ago
    On the same note, Foobar2000. I haven't found a suitable replacement in Linux land.
  • krick 10y ago
    Deadbeef? It has global hotkeys. It's pretty simple. Not so different from early versions of winamp, really (but better at actually playing music w/o gaps, supporting replay gain and such). I use it ever since I was tired of organizing music collection locally on whatever PC I use (I often attach an external HDD instead, so mpd and Clementine are of no use to me lately). But I always thought winamp was somewhat a hype, honestly. It might have been great in 1997, but when almost 10 years later, when plenty good music players for Windows were around (AIMP and LightAlloy come to mind) and everybody still "loved" Winamp — it seemed a bit odd to me. It was nothing special anymore at the time of Windows XP and later. But now all that winamp nostalgy?.. I mean, seriously, pretty much any music player — of which we have hundreds now, from as simple as it gets to all these media library organizers — can all that winamp could.
  • qb45 10y ago
    Audacious has optional WinAmp-style GUI (with skins being WinAmp 2.x compatible AFAIK) and supports global hotkeys, including a "search and jump to file" popup.
  • sparkie 10y ago
    I'd recommend taking the full unix dive and ditch your GUI centred apps for MPD. You can any of dozens of GUI clients to interact with the daemon (http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients). Keyboard shortcuts can be done via your DE, by shelling out to 'mpc play', and such. My concern for music is less playing it (that's easy), but more about organizing it, for which MusicBrainz Picard wins.
• milesf 10y ago
  I miss my Amiga.
• colllectorof 10y ago
  PDAs. - ASUS MyPal (which I have and it still works) had much better battery life than any of the smartphones I ever owned. - It had a consistent interface that wasn't a confusing clusterfuck of random shapes and expectations. - The hardware was durable and extensible through compact flash slot. - I could install software on it without going to a centralize store or going through some elaborate jailbreak. And while there wasn't a million free apps for it, there were good free apps, and finding them was actually easier than finding something on Google Play.
• mangeletti 10y ago
  Adobe Fireworks. Technically, it still exists. But, it's been abandoned for years, so it no longer "exists" than any more than the bytes of any other defunct program. Sketch is far superior to Fireworks, so it no longer matters, but the abandonment of Fireworks actually caused me to completely stop designing websites, for years. It was too painful to use anything else, so I just gave up on it and started using Bootstrap to "design" sites.
  • imaginology 10y ago
    I still use Fireworks (CS6 on Windows). It does the job.
• codezero 10y ago
  I quite miss webOS and my Palm Pre. The swipe area off screen was a great way to interact with the UI without reaching up to the touchscreen. There was a lot to like about webOS in general too. It's too bad they came to market so late and sold to HP.
  • shiftb 10y ago
    I loved my Pre. Wireless charging. WebOS. Swipe gestures. Optional hardware keyboard. Their notification system is still unsurpassed by iOS/Android today. Shame that it died.
• dpweb 10y ago
  VB6, Microsoft Money.
• febed 10y ago
  SnadBoy's Revelation
• gearoidoc 10y ago
  DragonDrop - miss it on a daily basis :( http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/42610/dragondrop http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/42610/dragondrop
  • wlesieutre 10y ago
    Not an exact replacement, but have you looked at Unclutter? http://unclutterapp.com http://unclutterapp.com
    • gearoidoc 10y ago
      Thank you - purchased!
      • wlesieutre 10y ago
        Quicksilver also has a "shelf" area that acts as a temporary holding place for files. It's not as simple and friendly as Unclutter, but there's a pretty open-ended shortcut system with a mouse-gestures plugin available.
• programmarchy 10y ago
  Apportable. Amazing tool that compiled Obj-C to Android targets, and had stubs to bridge iOS frameworks to Android. Sounds impossible but it actually worked, really well. They had limited support for UIKit, and it worked flawlessly with Cocos2d so was great for porting games. They were starting to integrate with SpriteBuilder, a nice open source scene editor for Cocos2d but once Apportable pulled their support that community disappeared overnight. Pretty sure they got acquired by Google, who are taking engineering in a new direction with a new project named Flutter that uses Dart as the source language, which is totally useless for porting over existing Obj-C code bases. Too bad, so sad.
• oferzelig 10y ago
  HP Deskjet 690c Printer - I think the last ink jet printer of the "old" age, before printers started to be manufactured using really cheap materials in order to make the real profit from ink.
• figushki 10y ago
  Free time. I used to use it to sleep, read books, listen to music, watch movies, play video games, do laundry, exercise, talk to my family, and cook my own food. I can do some of those things on the commute to and from work with apps, but it's not the same as when I had free time. I think google or facebook bought it and quietly obsoleted it in 2006. I'm still looking for a replacement. Someone suggested Activity Blocks or HabitRPG, but they don't work the same.
  • figushki 10y ago
    Someone else suggested Timely and Toggl, but you have to buy a subscription to really get the most out of them. One of the best things about free time was that it was free for the full version.
    • adyus 10y ago
      Time is never free, even when it's free :) There's opportunity costs.
      • oliv__ 10y ago
        Jesus
  • hammock 10y ago
    What is it/what does it do? (One of those names where a Google search doesn't exactly get you what you want)
    • projectramo 10y ago
      Just to be clear: we all know this is humor and he literally means free time, right?
      • hammock 10y ago
        Haha I completely missed that. Saw the time tracking apps follow up comment and didn't think twice.
• rch 10y ago
  "Rpad is an interactive, web-based analysis program. Rpad pages are interactive workbook-type sheets based on R" ~2009 https://web.archive.org/web/20090524155658/http://www.rpad.org/Rpad https://web.archive.org/web/20090524155658/http://www.rpad.o...
• john-foley 10y ago
  Kedit. The 'all' command is unbeatable for looking at large log files and quickly moving around a file. Many editors have a similar feature but none do it better or nearly as fast as Kedit.
• bsenftner 10y ago
  I miss MacDraw, and don't see it here. Visio or Gliffy.com is the closest I know of. Just an object level graphics tool, where items placed on the page are forever re-editable, groupable, and very easy to make flow charts, and application diagrams.
• whatnotests 10y ago
  Flash. No, really. JavaScript hasn't quite caught up to what was possible ten years ago. I'm tire of waiting for browsers to agree on video formats and protocols. Sometimes a benevolent dictator really is better.
  • rogual 10y ago
    Seconded. Flash's vector engine was also superior to the Canvas 2D API. You can export to HTML/JS from Flash these days but you get artifacts and gaps at the edges because Canvas simply doesn't support things like shapes sharing an edge. Flash was "killed" before there was a viable replacement and Flash devs are still feeling the pain.
  • IlPeach 10y ago
    From an animation perspective, totally agree. But there were too many downsides with it when it combined coding and it was a constant battle, so overall I'm actually very much OK since I've stopped developing with it since 2007. It's just another reason with I don't like Adobe and I'll do my best to avoid paying for their products.
• MaysonL 10y ago
  Head-per-track discs, although SSDs are a reasonable approximation.
• sjclemmy 10y ago
  The younger, more attractive me.
• bufordsharkley 10y ago
  I loved GOOG411 before it was sunsetted (and revealed to be mostly a data-gathering venture). For when it worked, it was just magic--
• LeicaLatte 10y ago
  Mechanical apple keyboard. The new flat ones don't help with RSI at all.
• copperx 10y ago
  The 68hc11 microcontroller for teaching/learning assembly language. It was such a simple architecture and instruction set. The MSP430 is OK but the instruction set isn't as simple.
• joshmarinacci 10y ago
  iTunes. It's become a mess. In the old days it was so simple to manage an MP3 archive. It would even properly export ID3 tags. These days what I want is an MP3 archive in the cloud. Hold my mp3s, not your pre-licensed copies with different metadata. Stream my mp3s to any app, with an API. I don't want your mp3 store. I don't want your crappy Spotify clone. I just want my mp3s in the cloud. I'd pay for this. Anyone else?
  • joonap 10y ago
    I think Loop for VOX has this, check http://coppertino.com/loop-for-vox http://coppertino.com/loop-for-vox
• intrasight 10y ago
  My teak wood dish drainer. It broke last week after 24 years of use.
• nik61 10y ago
  PC Outline (PCO) was very good in its day. I was using it under DOS in 1985 and some people are still using it today in a Windows DOS box. It gave me the opportunity to move over from a long-form prose approach to 'writing things down' to something far more concise and well-structured. Nowadays the Outliner functionality space is very full of product but it seems that PCO itself led nowhere.
• lewisjoe 10y ago
  Gtalk. Did the job well. Worked amazingly fast with slow internet. Very reliable. Then Google Hangouts happened.
• coreymaass 10y ago
  There was a music "tracker" called Jeskola Buzz tracker. I used it to write music for 8 years. It was the perfect mix between DAW and experimental tool. It technically still exists, but the source had been lost for ages before I even started using it. It was buggy, and PC-only.
  • neotokyo 10y ago
    It has been picked up again, from the latest salvaged source code. Has been for a number of years - http://jeskola.net/buzz/ http://jeskola.net/buzz/
• fiatmoney 10y ago
  WinAmp - still around, but basically abandonware. Still haven't found anything on the Linux side that comes close to it for managing huge media libraries.
• samstave 10y ago
  Pathminder for DOS 1988 Finder is a joke compared to this tool
  • chrisfinne 10y ago
    Agreed, but Finder is joke compared to everything.
    • samstave 10y ago
      What should I use instead?
• sharjeel 10y ago
  MS Paint: I've yet to find a photo tool that'll load instantly and let me crop or resize with the most minimal clicks.
  • Razengan 10y ago
    Preview.app, the default image editor on Mac OS X, is just as convenient. I think it has fewer clicks; the selection tool is always the default, so you just drag and Cmd+K. Save-on-quit is the default as well so you just close the window.
  • hammock 10y ago
    Photos app on your phone
  • animeweedlord 10y ago
    Really saddened that this was the lowest ranked comment, as I have an affection for classic MS Paint.
• krick 10y ago
  Internet free from government officials and old people. And all other bad things (like facebook) that did happen to it later. From more recent times — there was some nice hardware 5-10 years ago. All netbooks and such. Nokia N900. Simple portable music players, with sole purpose of playing music stored locally on it.
• RGamma 10y ago
  The GoogleCL command line tools I used to upload large YT videos from my RPi overnight. With a change in Google's authentication mechanism they stopped working and were abandoned. Now that I look for them, apparently there exists a fork. Might test that out.
• nirav72 10y ago
  I miss all those old school RTS games like Total Annihilation, Command and Conquer series, Age of Empires etc. No one really makes decent RTS games now. Also miss all the pre-bittorrent P2P clients.
  • j_s 10y ago
    There are several so-called 'spiritual successors' on Steam; just spend some time reading the reviews of the official successors to find the negative reviews suggesting alternatives. One potential qualifier: http://store.steampowered.com/app/335940 http://store.steampowered.com/app/335940
    • a_bonobo 10y ago
      I've received Grey Goo with a recent Humble Bundle, it feels very much like an old school RTS with three different factions (Starcraft-like) with a focus on base-building and resources
• ChikkaChiChi 10y ago
  Palm Pre. IMO in was the best mobile tool form factor and the best OS out of the bunch.
  • loeg 10y ago
    I had one of these. Everything using HTML/JS was a poor idea on hardware of the time (six+ years ago?) and probably still a bad idea today. The hardware keyboard was pretty crummy. Maybe better than a touchscreen keyboard.
• ghubbard 10y ago
  IWantSandy - An email-based automated personal assistant.
  • cyberferret 10y ago
    Oh yes - I really miss IWantSandy - Worked via Twitter as well as email. The precursor to Siri and a lot of other modern clunky virtual PAs. I loved its elegant simplicity. Sad when Twitter hired Rael (the developer) and then killed the project.
• Ankaios 10y ago
  The Logitech Trackman Marble FX trackball. I still use it every day, but I won't be able to replace it when it breaks.
• hartator 10y ago
  I think Macromedia Fireworks is one of most underated software. Since Adobe bought them, they let the software slowly died.
• babo 10y ago
  SGI Workstations like Indigo2 or Indy. They were heavy and noisy beasts but for me it was a flawless experience to work with.
• gerbilly 10y ago
  IMB Model M keyboard [1] [1] http://clickykeyboards.com/ http://clickykeyboards.com/
  • qb45 10y ago
    Unicomp.
• tegeek 10y ago
  I loved the Macromedia Fireworks.
• acrophiliac 10y ago
  WordPerfect. A wordprocessor that used the user interface metaphor of a typewriter, and therefore behaved consistent with what people expect when they perform text formatting operations. Unlike modern word processors that use some strange object metaphor that never formats things the way I expect.
• CodeWriter23 10y ago
  HP 16c
• mbfg 10y ago
  TMON - Terminal Monitor for early Macintoshes. It was like you were touching the hardware of the machine. I'm probably one of the few that wrote a set of plugins for TMON for doing all kinds of crazy stuff to make debugging awesome. Loved it so much, named my dog after it.
• CapTVK 10y ago
  Turbo/fastloaders for the Commodore C64 Datassette. https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Datassette https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Datassette And just be glad you don't have to use these anymore. Loading programs from cassette was a pain. A game from tape could take 15-30 mins! Fast-loaders that could speed up loading by a factor of 10 were a godsend in those days.
• gggggggg 10y ago
  The touchpad and webos. Both dead on arrival, bit still a mile better that ios, android and win phone in terms of base ui, ux and os.
• fidz 10y ago
  IcoFX. It got its function done right: creating icon. It was free. Now it isn't.
• ianwalter 10y ago
  AOLPress - The best WYSIWYG editor of its time.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• alok-g 10y ago
  Old Google Maps.
• mkhpalm 10y ago
  Federated XMPP
• sprior 10y ago
  There used to be a disk cloning tool called Ghost which was written by an independent developer (I think named Ghostsoft) and amazingly useful in the late 90's. They were bought by Symantec who turned it into more of a backup tool - useful, but not the same thing.
• waddabadoo 10y ago
  MultiEdit, dos version
• prawn 10y ago
  CFStudio (big brother of HomeSite). Probably used it for 10+ years without an update until switching to OS X and having to find an alternative. Eventually settled on Sublime.
  • mnmlme 10y ago
    This! HomeSite's ability to to multi-line find & replace across multiple files (all open files or all files in specific folder) was a really helpful feature for many tasks. I have yet to find something that can repliciate that. Can Sublime?
  • mnmlme 10y ago
    This! HomeSite's ability to to multi-line find & replace across multiple files (all open files or all files in specific folder) was a really helpful feature for many tasks. I have yet to find something that can repliciate that. Can Sublime?
• ungzd 10y ago
  Livejournal. Now completely unusable, servers being down for days, political propaganda ads covering half of screen, and almost no real people using it (only spammers and political scam).
• tkjef 10y ago
  Glad to see so many others liked Adobe Fireworks as much as me. It was my go to for web image editing. As well as prototyping with clickable pdfs.
• cauthonLuck 10y ago
  pentadactyl add-on for firefox. Allows you to browse like you were using vim and allows you to script anything you do on the web. Vimperator isn't nearly as powerful and all the chrome options aren't even worth mentioning.
• spacemanmatt 10y ago
  Telix. It was modem/terminal emulation software that Just Worked. It also had a built-in C-like scripting language. I loved it.
• vram22 10y ago
  >Turbo Pascal (mentioned by many in this thread). I'll third or fourth or n'th Turbo Pascal and Turbo C (and a few other Borland products over time). (I know about their corporate issues and pivots, yes.) TP 3.x: Under 40 KB .COM size (not MB, not .EXE). Blazingly fast WordStar compatible editor and true compiler (created .COM files) in that size. Had a lot of fun working on it, and created one of my first freelance projects using it (started, somewhat unusually, as a freelancer, and then went on to jobs).
• shen 10y ago
  Apple Aperture.
• lanestp 10y ago
  Q-BASIC. Just basic programming without any bloat or garbage. I feel sorry for kids now. Foisted on to Python or Java right away even the modern basics are bloated.
• fillskills 10y ago
  Google Hello
• Atwood 10y ago
  Netbus. Full transparency, I did not check nested to see if someone already said this.
• known 10y ago
  Kernel is my new home
• gadders 10y ago
  Google Picasa - not fully gone yet, but abandoned. It's not fancy, but for importing and storing your photos locally it did a great job. VB 6 or earlier, before it got .net-ed. I was never a user myself, but surprised someone hasn't mentioned Lotus Agenda...
• t482 10y ago
  Nokia N900 FoxPro/Lotus Approach/Delphi X24 Thinkpad NeXTcube AmiPro Lotus Notes 3.x
• m0rdecai 10y ago
  Bing Travel - specifically the price predictor tool.
• altmind 10y ago
  i'm missing kde3.5 and dcop. kde3.5 was so fast and snappy and apps there were so feature rich. and dbus is no match to dcop - you can discover dcop features straight in console and use right away. but you cant do use dbus without reading a ton of scattered docs.
• cabalamat 10y ago
  Google Search. Sure, Google still do a search engine, but it is nowhere near as good as it used to be.
• GBond 10y ago
  Stand-alone consumer desktop photo collection apps that aren't a gateway to a cloud service.
• id122015 10y ago
  - parted - used to have a feature to resize partitions, now I only know about Gparted Live - Google Bookmarks (Toolbar for Firefox) - "maps" app for OSX that could use offline Google Maps - Opera Mini - I used to have a super lightweight and fast opera mini on Symbian, then something changed
• tonteldoos 10y ago
  For anyone who ever used BBSs (which is something else I miss), Terminate would ring a bell. That was one spectacularly awesome terminal program. Oh, and requiring 3 HD floppies to install it :p
• thirdusername 10y ago
  Aardvark, you could send it a query on messenger and it would find random internet strangers to answer. Got bought by Google and killed. Trunkly, it was indexing all my social media links and made them searchable. Bought by delicious and killed.
  • dimenox 10y ago
    re: "indexing all my social media links" Try ascilos (http://www.acilos.com/ http://www.acilos.com/) sounds like it might be similar to Trunkly
• drelevinge 10y ago
  The recently deceased https://www.hashtagtodo.com/ https://www.hashtagtodo.com/ :(
• supermanro 10y ago
  Google reader