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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

PSP was one of those programs (along with Winamp) that are the hallmarks of the golden age of user experience for me. They had a lot of functionality but were very lean, a joy to use and reasonably priced. I miss the days when you didn't need a 100 MB (relatively speaking) package just to show a screen.

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You also had to be an expert in multiple levels of the technology stack to build any program with cross platform support. Yes, packages were smaller, but developers had to do way more work and so applications were released less frequently. It would be very hard back then to make a cross platform program as a weekend project.

That's true. I still don't know why we said "using two screwdrivers for these two kinds of screw is too hard, here's a sledgehammer instead", rather than build tooling to make it easier to build cross-platform programs...

I'm pretty hopeful these days about Qt for Python and this build system: https://build-system.fman.io/

Unfortunately, it costs money even if your app is OSS, in some cases.

I wouldn't mind if PaintShop Pro made less frequent releases. None of the features I care about has changed in a significant way in the last 18 years or so. I used PSP 7 in the early oughts to do some web design work on the side; I still use PSP X8 every now and then to make transparent PNGs. As long as it gets the job done on a platform I have access to, I don't care how many platforms they don't support.

PSP was not cross platform, it was Windows only. I don't know if that's changed recently but I suspect it hasn't.

I think the point was that it was lean (didn't need 100MB to draw a screen) because it /wasn't/ cross-platform - more tools are cross-platform by default now because it's easy (which leads to the abstractions that give you requirements of 100MB to draw a screen).

Modern software has certainly become abstraction-heavy, hasn't it? It's not just the GUI libraries. Paint Shop Pro was lean and mean because it had to be, the targeted hardware just wouldn't support anything bloated. Not to mention that many copies were downloaded by modem.

for offline music collections, winamp is still the best player on windows!

It really kicks the llama’s ass.

whips

I found that XMPlay replaces Winamp perfectly. Tiny footprint (less.than 1MB), support for all modern codecs, active development, API and plugin environment, streaming. Combined with the minimal skin, it's my first install on any new windows machine.

In order to play HVSC[1], I switched from XMPlay to the far more heavyweight Foobar2000 because the former had a habit of crashing on files it disliked, losing playlist position.

[1] https://www.hvsc.c64.org/

If you haven't seen it, check out foobar2000 [1]. It was created by the same dude that made the original Winamp (which is now owned by Yahoo, IIRC).

[1]: https://www.foobar2000.org/

yes foobar goes back almost as far! i prefer winamp's approach to libraries and playlists though. i also found the dev community around foobar not very welcoming (many years ago)

According to WinAmp folklore, he was a contractor for WinAmp 3 skins and not necessarily a full-time dev: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118192

You might be thinking of Justin Frankel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel

The connection is still kind of cool though!

Ah, thanks for the correction. I remember being told they had the same creator; that's what got me interested in foobar2000 in the first place, years ago.

Justin Frankel of NullSoft, WinAmp, WASTE, and now Cockos is a legend. (Also Gnutella IIRC)

He has nothing to do with foobar2000, which BTW has a very poor view of FOSS.

Foobar still can not do proper crossfading on track change!

Yeah, I guess I got the story wrong. Thanks for the correction.

I switched to foobar2000[0] sometime in the early 2000s after Winamp 3 completely changed for the worse. I still use foobar2000 today.

[0]: https://www.foobar2000.org/

I use the latest winamp with Bento_Classified skin - resembles the v2.

MusicBee is much better

I have used the following in addition to WinAmp:

foobar2000

MusicBee

MediaMonkey

Foobar is almost perfect except the lack of crossfading and broken WASAPI exclusive mode output, which every other WinAmp clone seem to have gotten right, e.g. AIMP.

Any DOS program that had a nice GUI blew my mind back then

Most other paint programs all worked based on keyboard shortcuts (which weren't bad, they let you fly through the interface)

Agreed. I still boot up my Windows computer just to use PSP 6 occasionally when I need to do some raster graphics editing!

Seconded. My memories from those days were that software offered more functionality while being leaner. Doubly so when we compare the old software to web versions of today, that are all feature poor and resource heavy.

How old were you when you encountered them? Both are important programs but this sounds a little bit like people's recollections of their favourite games.

Around 16? Why do you think that? As another commenter said, Winamp is still the best player for Windows.

As a counterpoint, I couldn't stand WinAmp. To me, its interface was a mess of tiny inscrutable controls. When I started using SoundJam on the Mac, which was later bought and turned into iTunes, it was a breath of fresh air.

iTunes has obviously turned into something else at the time, but SoundJam was fantastic.

Because most of us have a hard time contextualizing and assessing the universal importance of our personal formative experiences.

FWIW i'll echo StavrosK experience with PSP (which i used since Windows 3.1 up until PSP7 well into my early 20s... although i distinctly remember disliking it after a specific version - probably 7 - because its circle tool wasn't making perfect circles anymore) and to a lesser extent, WinAmp - and i've tried both again recently. Even though i use GIMP for many years, i still consider the MDI interface, dockable toolbars and the use of the right button as a secondary tool much easier to use than GIMP (which after using it for more than a decade i also know very well and have developed an intuition for how to do stuff with it). Note that i also find Photoshop's (and Photoshop inspired, like Krita's) UI to also be inferior to PSP.

I'm not that particular about Winamp's exact interface, but i vastly prefer audio players with a compact layout that is made up by an area displaying the current song, a slider for seeking, play, pause, stop, prev, next buttons and a floating playlist you can change and hide on the fly.

Oh they were both important programs in their time, I just don't think they were grand monuments to some past golden age of UI/experience. Desktop UI in general was too abstruse for many people to master. Today's mobile touch UI's are much more accessible. PSP and Winamp were pretty sweet if you were a young nerd.

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