Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

393 pointscellml1,052 comments

The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect.

Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I can't seem to figure out how to install PHP 7.2 correctly to work on Laravel, nor get my GPG and SSH keys for Github working.

The bright side is if I move to Windows I wouldn't have to give up very many programs, or they have some rough but useable equivalents (Spectacle, Sequel Pro, Gifox, Bear).

I was tempted to go with Elementary on the Razer Blade Stealth, but I still want 32gb of RAM, and Propellerheads Reason doesn't work on Linux.

WSL is terrible. It's basically a tech demo (look up what happens if you `cp` a file from `C:\...` to `/home/user` versus `copy` or going the other direction.

It's alright to boot up a linux "VM" using docker, but then you have to pay extra for windows pro or whatever so you can unlock hypervisor privileges.

I recently bought an extra SSD to put into the windows desktop I bought and am happily running linux, don't miss windows since I put it on there (even some steam games are quite nice and convenient).

Anyway, just look into WSL before you bet the farm on it.

Interesting... I haven’t had any issues using WSL recently (since they fixed the networking stack).

I tried WSL briefly and discovered that the overhead of forking processes is annoyingly high, just like when I'd used cygwin in the past. (Maybe I should have expected that, but...) Try doing something like:

  time for i in $(seq 1 100); do /bin/pwd; done | wc

Compare on Linux (or even Mac OS) vs WSL. I was disappointed.

Did you report this as an issue? They seem to be fairly responsive to feedback. Would be interesting to see what their take is.

I believe Windows Defender is responsible for a lot of the IO overhead within WSL. You can get around that by marking your development directory as "don't scan" within Defender.

I don't see the issue with this, they clearly warn you not to modify the WSL filesystem from Windows because you'll break it: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/11/17/do-n...

They advertise it as being useful for development work, and it perfectly fulfills that purpose for me

I use it daily with zero issues. I don't know why people keep perpetuating this, but it works great, as if it were native.

Same. I've found it to be really great overall. The default colors are basically unusable (looking at you, blue), but the functionality leaves little to be desired.

The Command Line team recently updated the default colors (especially a less terrible blue), but unfortunately it doesn't auto-apply to existing profiles for backwards compatibility concern reasons. Highly recommend grabbing the ColorTool and updating to the new colors if you get a chance.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/08/02/upda...

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/08/11/intr...

huh. I tried to run our rails app in WSL, and it was so slow that it was unusable

I too use it daily on multiple machines (albeit Windows Pro with Hyper-V) and it's changed my day to day dev work dramatically.

Combined with Docker there is no reason for me to even look at MacOS or running Linux natively (which I have done before for years.)

For me it's the best thing to come out of Microsoft in a long time.

> For me it's the best thing to come out of Microsoft in a long time.

Agreed, I think it's an amazing feature. Have been a full time linux user for 20 years, my new laptop is BIOS locked ( ugh ) so I _cant_ install linux ( didnt know that before buying it ) , but it's actually not an issue because of WSL, it's exactly what I always wanted in Windows.

What laptop is it? Was it part of an OEM sort of purchase through an employer, or something consumer off-the-shelf?

Please name and shame the brand, so we can avoid it. A BIOS that prevents you from installing Linux should be illegal IMO.

When my Windows laptops get too old and slow for the latest Windows plus patches, I get another 3 to 5 years of life out of them by installing Linux. I still have a little Dell laptop that I first put into service in 2004 as a Windows box, converted it to Linux in 2009, and it still runs.

I moved my development side to WSL on the PC after giving up hope that Apple is ever going to replace my 2008 MacPro tower. The experience has essentially been flawless, and I'd consider it basically magic on how well it works. Best of both worlds. Any future Apple is just going to be whatever is cheapest as a daily driver, while the PC is going to handle heavy lifting from now on (Gaming, Development, Editing).

I'm a grad student and I'm using WSL for working on coding assignments. The only gripe I have is that it doesn't support launching IDEs (or any GUI applications for that matter) yet. You can jump through hoops by using an Xserver to connect to WSL but I haven't tried that out.

This is not accurate. I used WSL professionally for 2 years until recently switching back to Linux for unrelated reasons¹. The only issue I have had with WSL is filesystem performance. However, that is largely a result of the real-time virus protection in Windows Defender. Real-time protection is practically useless and slows down the rest of your computer as well, so disabling it is a pretty easy fix.

WSL is actually a fantastic piece of software. I can't believe how easy it is to install literal Arch Linux onto my Windows machine. It's also fairly simple these days to integrate VS Code with it.

¹ I've gradually lost enough vision in both eyes that I frequently lose track of the mouse cursor, so I switched to Linux for i3wm and better keyboard controls. Otherwise I would likely still be using Windows + WSL.

Completely agree. Just started at a company about a month ago and was given a 2017 MacBook Pro. After 2 weeks of hating the entire experience (keyboard and touchbar) I asked for an older 2015 machine. Got it, much better now.

I just opted for an Ubuntu notebook in exchange for a MBP. At my new gig they let you choose between a MBP and a Thinkpad 470 (with two monitors each), and I think Ubuntu is WAY better for development. Saying this as someone who used Macs from 2003-2015 almost exclusively.

I hear ya. I just payed $600 to get the top case replaced on my mid-2014 mbp. With any luck that'll buy me another year or two of good use out of this thing because there's very little compelling about the new models. I wouldn't mind 32gb of faster ram and a slight CPU boost, but not at the cost of a worse, more error-prone keyboard with no hardware escape button and an awkwardly large trackpad.

I'm sure I could get used to all of those things eventually, but ideally there are more things in a new laptop that I want than things I have to get used to.

Apple has ditched so many cool things in the MacBook line.

1) MagSafe. I know they really want to go all in on USB-C, but the original MagSafe connector was awesome. Even the weaker 2.0 version was nice. There were two instances where that connector saved my laptop.

2) The laser-drilled power indicator. That was so cool. It looked like the light magically appeared through the aluminum. Now there's no indication whatsoever if your laptop is on or asleep or off.

3) The 2007-2011 keyboards. The ones with the real travel. Even the 2012 version with slightly reduced travel was okay. But my 2007 MacBook had the best laptop keyboard I'd ever used.

4) HDMI and SD Card slot. These are the kinds of things that you happen to need when you least expect it. When you're least likely to have that dongle with you. They're also thin ports that will fit nicely without bulking up the chassis.

5) Of course, function keys and an ESC key.

I'm going to keep my 2012 MBP going as long as I can. But when it dies or is no longer supported, I'm pretty sure ThinkPad is where I'm headed.

I forgot to list magsafe as one of those awesome things that was lost. I could take or leave the power indicator but it was kind of cool. It's such a no brainer that I'm surprised it's not been copied. Apple must have patented it too well.

My understanding was that they purchased the company that specialized in the laser perforation and all of the proprietary equipment required to make the metal thin enough for the light to shine through, which is a big part of the reason we haven't seen it elsewhere. And yeah, probably IP too.

Bang & Olufsen have the same thing on some of their products, as does Koenigsegg for the center console in their cars.

There were several articles around that...

It was a very special manufacturing procedure, something that is hard to copy without the special hardware.

And Apple bought all that supply. You couldn't get the production line to do it...

(IIRC, bit my memory may fail me on that. Please Google it, I would be interested in rereading it!)

Microsoft's Surface connector is Magsafe-ish, with USB and DP lines running through it as well. When I get to the office I put my laptop vaguely near the connector and it snaps into place, giving me two extra monitors, an external keyboard, and gigabit Ethernet.

It's been copied. My Dell XPS has it :)

I'd like a power and / or activity indicator, especially my previous mac (2013 or 14 Retina) had Issues in that it just wouldn't start up with no indication whatsoever that it was on, starting up, or there was a problem.

I mean just show an error on the screen. It's not the end of the world.

While I also love MagSafe and its features, wouldn't having a more standard port is much better?

iPhones are constantly bashed by a group of users because of not having USB-C connectors. Having four USB-C ports with identical capabilities on a MacBook pro is a more pragmatic and flexible solution to have, when compared to MagSafe.

On the power level and power button issue, Apple changes its features to shape customer behavior and expectation from its devices. Apple removed battery meter from Macs since it's standby is too long (30 days) and robust (auto-hibernation), so you're unlikely to run out of juice.

They also believe in the stability of MacOS such that it's not important whether the machine is off or in standby. Because it boots in ~10 seconds and wakes up in ~2. They want to remove these distinctions from their computers and try to lower your cognitive load. Actually this is one of the finest features of the Macs IMHO. They don't make you think to use it.

Open the lid, and if the screen doesn't come on, press the power button, done.

>>While I also love MagSafe and its features, wouldn't having a more standard port is much better?

I don't understand why it can't have both. Have a magsafe port, ship with a magsafe charger. But if you happen to connect a USB-C charger to one of the USB-C ports, charge through that too. No issue. Playstation portable was like this - you could charge it through proprietary playstation charger, or if you connected a mini-usb cable it would charge through it. No issue.

It's also possible and a sound idea, however I think that idea is filtered by Johnny Ive's "remove everything which is not strictly necessary" rule, and his love for clean designs and symmetry (which is an evolution of Sony design philosophy BTW).

Well Johnny has gone way too far. My needs include more than the bare minimum. I get wanting to standardize in USB-C. Maybe move the magnet up a bit on the cable?

What I don’t appreciate is the over-emphasis on useless symmetry or minimalism. Good design is more than looks and polish. Functionality is the reason I buy the thing. Design is why I choose the brand. If the functionality isn’t there, I don’t care how pretty it is.

IMHO, Macs are much more functional than they look, but they need a different way of thinking and some adjustment. Apple likes to move in front of the curve in terms of connectivity and its utilization. It's their way of design, and they like to show it as a part of the brand.

However, I'm not implying that everyone should be comfortable with the operation principles of new MacBooks or their devices in general. I love the challenge and the different perspectives they bring, but it's sometimes limiting and slowing down until finding the best way to utilize them.

This is why we have different brands and designs, because one design indeed doesn't fit all.

To continue my Rams quotes from above: "[Good design] makes a product understandable". If having to find out how to best use your tool is a challenge (especially when the new iteration seems to be such an apparent step backwards compared to the old), maybe it simply isn't good design.

>> If having to find out how to best use your tool is a challenge (especially when the new iteration seems to be such an apparent step backwards compared to the old), maybe it simply isn't good design.

Cough, cough......USB-C. Looking at the plug there is no way to tell whether the cable will support fast charging, video, or even 3.0 or just 2.0 USB. All of those cables share the same socket but provide different functions.

Well, this is where Apple gets it right - every USB-C socket supports everything. (Ok, mostly. Looking at you, MacBook 12!)

Socket - yes. But you can walk into an official Apple store, buy a brand new MacBook Pro + an "apple approved" LG USB-C display, and guess what - the USB-C cable that is bundled with your MacBook Pro cannot be used with the display that you just bought. What's worse, MacOS won't tell you why it doesn't work - it just won't. It's the worst and most user-hostile design in computers I have seen in years.

Ah, of course, I misread - the cables. No disagreement from me here. :)

You're right.

I also like Rams and aware some of his work. Also I see traces of his work through Mac/iOS calculators (which nods to Braun's ones), and apple's software (low level) design philosophy.

That adjustment, at least in my case, doesn't come from the tool itself. I'm also a heavy Linux desktop user, so making two systems work nice (for my standards) took some time when I introduced Macs into my workflow ~10 years ago. Currently I have no friction. I think if I was solely a Mac user, that initial friction should be non-existent.

OTOH, the newest Mac I have is a Mid-2014 MBP. I don't know how the new ones compare.

Honestly, I'm way too flexible and adaptable when it comes to new designs and paradigms. I think I don't have the complaint circuitry in my brain. I like to just accept and adapt. I see it as a way to counteract the tendency of being fixed on things I like, but are outdated. I also love to bring good ideas and features from new things to the old, to refine my old habits and increase productivity.

But, as I always say, that's just me.

Well, Ive's a huge (self-proclaimed) Rams/Bauhaus fan, that's where the philosophy primarily stems from. It just seems that he seems to emphasize Rule 2 ("[good design] makes a product useful") less and less.

And one could argue they're not following that rule; I don't think the touch bar is particularly attractive, and on the iphone it has (had?) a bulge for the camera and an indentation in the screen, both of which aren't "good design" IMO. They're compromises to support certain features (face ID / front facing camera array AND a big screen, good camera)

Symmetry, huh?

Please explain the protruding camera from the back of the phones.

I doubt Ive is driving these design regressions. (Unless he’s always been a rubbish designer from day one.) It seems the khakis are running the show at Apple since Jobs passed.

Magnetic usb-c cables do exist for those who are unaware. My only problem with them is many of them only support power or usb 2.

I've had to replace my Macbook Pro USB-C charger twice in a year, and I'm fairly certain my magnetic USB-C adapter are to blame. The first problem appeared some time after I got the adapter, but at some point I just stopped using it, because the magnet are too weak, and because it have to be oriented a certain way. A few weeks ago I used it again, forget the laptop in the charger overnight, and it was dead the next morning.

I think the adapter was from the brand Baseus.

Seems you are not the only one https://www.amazon.co.uk/Looyat-Baseus-Magnetic-Cable-Macboo...

Surface Book does that. It can be charged via either a USB-C port or a Surface Connect port (which also happens to be similar to MagSafe i.e. magnetically attached).

Ah but then you'd have TWO different kinds of ports on your laptop. We should be thankful already that Johnny Ive let us keep the headphone jack on the 2017 MBP, although I don't expect it to last much.

Given how things are trending, I predict the MBP of the future will have no ports, no keyboard, and the screen will be just a static image of the apple logo, although at 4 times retina resolution.

you mean an ipad? i guess that's the joke.

Re the now removed power light, it’s a real pain point for me as I now cannot trust my laptop is truly asleep when I close the lid. Previously I’d just wait for the light to start “breathing” and I know it’s sleeping.

I’ve been caught out several times now on the new units where I closed the lid and came back hours later only to find the laptop still on and very warm.

Mostly seems down to VMs or backups running that don’t seem to want to suspend. So now I always suspend my VMs and stop backups. Which slows down my workflow greatly since it takes a minute each to suspend and resume the VM itself. I also find myself holding the laptop undercarriage right up against my ear listening for the whirring of the fans and if they stop. I look like a right idiot doing it, but there’s no other way to tell.

Fun fact: While the later (PSP3000) models could, early models (PSP1000) couldn't charge via mini USB. Not too relevant but it's a common misconception.

I might love my iPhone even more with a MagSafe lightning port connector. Especially with a light to tell me if it’s charging or won’t take power because I forgot to unlock the phone.

I will say I understand the benefits of standardization, but the MagSafe has saved me so many times. I wish all companies would have adopted that. I have kids and a dog, and many times my power outlets are not in the most convenient of places meaning I need to connect to them using an extension cord, etc. That thing has been pulled out of my machine more times than I can count, and I fear even thinking about how many times my laptop would have been pulled on the floor, port broken etc. without it. It is absolutely one of my favorite features.

nope. i've had my usb-c mbp for 1.5 years and the usb ports are already wearing out. the power cable slips out of 2 of the ports just from gravity.

my last magsafe macbook air lasted 5 years as a daily driver. i doubt this piece of shit will last another year. i've already had to send it in once for a logic board replacement once.

the keyboard on this one is starting to go as of this week (one key not registering), so i think i'm gonna have to send it in again.

not to mention the pain in the ass of carrying dongles everywhere

I honestly consider buying a 2015 mbp and selling my newer one at least once a month. That was the last good laptop apple made.

>While I also love MagSafe and its features, wouldn't having a more standard port is much better?

And to piggyback off of this, I imagine the future will be wireless charging in this realm, so in theory you wouldn't need to worry about charger cables plugged into your laptop at all.

> iPhones are constantly bashed by a group of users because of not having USB-C connectors. [...]

I found that most (if not all) people who rave about a USB-C-only future do not actually use more than 1 or 2 peripherals. Or they want it for power connection only.

Anybody who a) has a significant number of USB-A peripherals (in my case, I'd say the number is above 30 distinct devices), b) understands that the USB-C label doesn't mean that it will work when you plug it in, has a more sensible approach: USB-C is fine, but don't remove our USB-A (or lightning) ports just yet.

> Having four USB-C ports with identical capabilities on a MacBook pro is a more pragmatic and flexible solution to have, when compared to MagSafe.

A more pragmatic solution to what? Everything I plug into these ports is via some ugly after-market adapter. There is not a single natively USB-C peripheral or cable that I have ever needed to attach (other than the power cable, of course). Even the iPhone itself is incompatible.

Luckily it's only a work machine and I get to use my older personal MBP at home...

> Having four USB-C ports with identical capabilities on a MacBook pro is a more pragmatic and flexible solution to have, when compared to MagSafe.

Four ports costs extra. The base model, which is ostensibly also a "pro" computer, only has two ports. That's one for power and one for everything else. If all of the pro machines came with four ports, then complaints about the USB-C transition wouldn't be so great.

I'd suggest looking into remapping caps lock to esc if you miss it. This is something I do even on my Dell XPS.

But then you can’t use caps lock for control...

You can do both! I always remap my caps lock to act as escape when tapped and control when held. I wrote a blog post on how to do it: https://www.dannyguo.com/blog/remap-caps-lock-to-escape-and-...

There are hacks for the magsafe desire...

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/7/12/15960594/m...

I just switched to a new 2018 macbook pro. The missing esc key isn't so bad. Thought I would hate it, but like everything else, including new FB redesigns, you get used to it and move on.

If I wanted to bother with hacks I wouldn't have Apple products.

No esc key? They just crippled vi/vim users. For a piece of hardware that was the preferred laptop for Linux admins, that's stupid.

Hitting an escape key in the far upper left is more likely to cripple you than almost anything else.

I use press-and-release on the alt key to send 0x1b, as DEC intended.

I am really excited about crostini on Chromebooks. I think a year from now a lot of us 2012 MBP users will find a new home in the Chromebook world.

ChromeOS + Android Emulation covers a lot of ground for UI needs in the developer workflow. For everything else, you have Linux via Crostini.

They have a much better security model than even OS X + little snitch + little flocker, too. I have both nvme pixelbook and touchbar rmbp and find myself using both a lot.

I could have written this ^^^ comment myself; I've been very disappointed with my 2017 MacBook Pro. They keyboard keys feel unpleasant, and now my H key has become unreliable (about 50% of the time it works, about 25% of the time it fails to register, and 25% of the time it types 2 characters). Dealing with dongles is not worth the headache. The touchbar is a step back in UI. The new trackpad is so large I bump it all the time. MagSafe was beloved for a reason.

Yesterday the last straw landed and I started setting up my 2012 MacBook again, at least for my writing, where I need a reliable built-in keyboard. I know Apple has a repair program for the 2017 MacBook keyboard[1], but it's my work machine, it's really hard to part with it for 1-3 days of repairs.

Edit to add: Moments after posting I run across this link: https://theoutline.com/post/6409/the-new-and-improved-macboo...

[1] https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...

I have had my keyboard repaired twice on my 2017, and the last time I went in (last week) they told me 10 days for the repair, which probably makes sense (as they are getting lots of repair orders) but seems totally unacceptable to me as a developer who is only lucky enough to be able to afford a 2nd machine.

For all the same reasons, I upgraded from a 2012 MacBook Pro to a 2018 model and returned it right away. I bought a lightly-used 2015 model on eBay instead. 2015 was the last model with a real keyboard. It feels just like my 2012 but with a small bump in all the specs.

My 2008 MBP has a cool feature I miss: regardless of whether the laptop was o switched on or off, lid open or shut, you could press a little button on the left side and a number of LEDs would light up to indicate how much battery you had left.

Just to clarify, that's #2 in op's list. I did not know this was discontinued. I'm gonna go home and hug my 2012 MBP extra hard.

I was referring to the power light on the front of the early aluminum MBPs.

But this battery level indicator should be #6 on my list. I forgot about that. It was cool, too.

> 2007 MacBook had the best laptop keyboard I'd ever used.

You mean 2007 Macbook Pro right ? One of the best tactile responses I'd ever experienced on a keyboard. Thinkpad T520 was another I really enjoyed typing on.

In my case it was the white plastic MacBook (non pro).

I thought I'd miss MagSafe. After nearly two years without it, it turns out: I don't, because USB-C cables will disconnect in a lot of situations where MagSafe would've disconnected as well and USB-C has the advantage of allowing me to choose the side to plug the charging cable in, which is pretty convenient.

Same here.

The funny thing is, some people have a hard time losing features no matter what. There are alternatives to MagSafe, such as the Griffin BreakAway, but they don't buy these.

My current Macbook Pro is probably the first bit of Apple hardware in two decades that's made me actively consider alternatives. It's been the one laptop - premium at that - from Apple which I've had continual frustrations with compared to its predecessor, for all the reasons listed above.

I love USB-C, but not for power. Already, two of my ports are loose. I've never had that on any previous Apple power connector. MagSafe was a brilliant solution to real problems, and just dropping it without a superior alternative is not at all what I expect from Apple.

I also like the universality of USB-C, but it's not like Apple didn't opt to keep one legacy port for usability reasons - that little headphone port. SD and HDMI would have been enough.

And yes, the keyboard is terrible. For a machine I spend all day on, designed for pros, its a disappointment. Like most people here, it always takes me a little time to adapt to a new keyboard; unlike in the past, after more than a year I still loathe this one.

Perhaps the only thing that doesn't bring out my inner rage is the Touchbar. I'm largely ambivalent about it - the lack of esc/f-keys was annoying for a few days but I adapted. Obviously, others disagree, but on this list its the one choice I could have found a way to rationalize.

> I'm going to keep my 2012 MBP going as long as I can. But when it dies or is no longer supported, I'm pretty sure ThinkPad is where I'm headed.

ThinkPads have garbage quality control. My last three: two T450s that had bad backlight bleed. Then a X1 Carbon 6th Gen that doesn't have backlight bleed, but LTE that just stops working randomly. (At least once a day, usually when waking up from sleep--so bad I've just disabled it.) Also, the X1C6 has the best trackpad on the ThinkPad line, or so I'm told, but it still sucks compared to a MacBook Pro. My next machine is going to be a Surface Laptop, I think.

Ugh, the touchpad. You’re right about that, and I’ve forgotten about it because my current work-issued ThinkPad spends almost 100% of its time on a dock.

Maybe the Surface is my next machine. Who knows what will be out there when I finally have to let this laptop go.

My absolute favorite feature from older Macbooks was the access panel on the bottom for swapping the battery and hard drive. I'm not sure what models have them; I have a standard Macbook from ~2008 that has it. You just press a lever and the panel comes right off, exposing the user-serviceable parts. You could swap the battery using no tools in about 10 seconds. Or you could swap the hard drive using a screwdriver in a few minutes.

MagSafe wires insulation always breaks at both ends and the connector is too wide to fix that with a heat-shrinked tube easily.

SD Card slot is an essential thing, I can't believe they've removed it.

Lack of HDMI is not a problem IMHO, I've bought a great Thunderbolt-HDMI converter for about $10 on AliExpress, out it on my HDMI cable and forgotten about the problem.

Lack of some keys has always been a pain, removing even function keys and an ESC key looks like they really hate people that use terminal.

Removing classic USB ports was too ahead-of-time, they should have waited at least some years before doing this (BTW I actually am not sure USB-C is going to become the standard, there are a lot of problems with it).

> SD Card slot is an essential thing, I can't believe they've removed it.

Is this sarcasm? I don't remember the last time I used an SD Card on a laptop.

You probably don't have a DLCR camera and are comfortable with the built-in SSD capacity. Not having an SD slot while having a cam is like not having a car in LA, many Macbook users also rely on SD cards for "hard drive expansion", there even are SD cards designed right for this (e.g. https://gizmodo.com/this-leave-in-sd-card-merges-with-your-m...).

All these talks about SD Cards, it would have been fine if Apple were actively pushing an Energy Efficient Super High Speed Wireless Direct Transfer from Camera ( Do you mean DSLR? ) to Mac.

Then getting rid of SD card is more about moving towards the future, and not the past. The problem is not only does such standard not exist, Apple isn't working on any, the industry couldn't care less.

This is very different to all previous Apple's removal, where there is a clear better alternative, that might not be as good now but it is in their Spring as Steve Jobs would likes to put it.

> DSLR

Sure. I was very tired and couldn't remember the correct abbreviation, excuse me (believe it or not it's the first time in my life I actually typed it :-)).

> Then getting rid of SD card is more about moving towards the future, and not the past. The problem is not only does such standard not exist, Apple isn't working on any, the industry couldn't care less.

Makes sense but in fact I'm glad nobody is inventing a replacement. There are things that just work great, are simple and don't have to be replaced. Like headphone jacks. And SD cards are among of these things.

> nor get my GPG and SSH keys for Github working.

This definitely works, I've used it back in the day (needs "enable-ssh" in config).

Good to know. I was following instructions for Windows on Github and just felt ultra dense as it kept not working.

I always just installed git for Windows and put keys in my user\.ssh folder and that's worked for me for as long as I can remember. What issues is everyone having? Am I just missing something?

They are using GPG Authentication subkeys for SSH.

I have them on a smartcard and it works really well (you can also connect Yubikey 4C to Android via OpenKeychain and login to servers using Termbot on the go using hardware stored keys - secure and convenient!).

Ah so I'm just much more cavalier with my ssh keys. The 4C looks interesting though, thanks for the recommendation!

Nowadays it's probably 5C, or 5 if you need USB-A connector.

An added benefit of Yubikey backed keys is touch to use so that you need to physically touch the token to use the key. A critical matter when using ForwardAgent!

[0]: https://developers.yubico.com/PGP/Card_edit.html

Oh I think I used ssh pageant [0] once and Putty support in GnuPG, I think it was more reliable (I don't remember clearly, sorry for that!)

[0]: https://github.com/cuviper/ssh-pageant

I'll just add: 17" MBP...

A lighter version with a retina screen, updated internals, and 2015 MBP style keyboard? Yes, please!

For Laravel development on Windows, use https://laragon.org/

Thanks for this. I'll check it out.

The design is terrible. I never use the touchpad for anything regular keys wouldn't do better. The keyboard on my 2017 MBP13 failed three times in the year I've owned it. The first time, the Apple Store person "cleaned" the keyboard, fixed things for a while. A couple of weeks later, the problem came back. I insisted on a better solution, and they replaced the keyboard.

Five months later, a different key failed, and the Apple Store people sent it to Memphis. This time, it came back with one of the "new and improved" keyboards. They also replaced the screen because of 'delamination' which I hadn't noticed. The total amount they spent to repair this computer is approaching the cost of the machine at this point! So far, the new keyboard hasn't failed yet but I'm not holding my breath…

I personally find function keys useless (I’m mostly in Vim and map things to leader + mnemonic key sequences), so the Touch Bar tends to offer more value for things like media control. It really boils down to personal use, rather than a fundamentally flawed design.

Yeah, I’ve been interested in the touchbar as a way to get emacs-mode-specific shortcut keys.

I had a similar experience with a top spec late 2016 MBP, which I switched to from a PC for web development. It was my first and last Apple product.

After opening the lid one day there was a loud crackling noise and the speakers were both blown. To repair it, the Apple store had to replace the entire top case (top half of the chassis including keyboard, trackpad, speakers) and also replaced the battery, which would have cost ~£500.

I got it back two weeks later after dealing with a smug 'Genius' who treated me like an idiot. He also claimed that the software diagnostics were clean, so there was nothing wrong with the laptop. I had to drive 1 1/2 hours each way to the store for a second time during business hours just to argue in person with them, because the speakers were clearly broken.

The exact same problem happened twice more over the next year, taking two weeks to fix each time. The final time was outside of the 1yr AppleCare warranty, and they wanted to replace the top case, battery and logic board for ~£800.

Coupled with the useless touch bar, 16GM RAM cap, awful display scaling issues/confusion when external monitors were attached, sluggish performance for video editing and OS updates that broke the machine, it convinced me to avoid Apple products completely.

I got a full £3100 refund after 18 months under EU consumer law and build a powerful desktop PC (16 core ThreadRipper, 32GB RAM, 1080ti) with £1500 left over.

Are the touchbar Macbook Pros still experiencing widespread screen delamination? I thought that was specific to the previous generation.

would love to see a parts list for the ThreadRipper build.

It's something like this: https://i.imgur.com/0cXRPGB.png

My CPU is actually the 12 core / 24 thread version, which I got for £340 on a flash deal during a meet-up event. My case is also better than listed, but was the same price as part of a weekly deal.

Note that it's pre-VAT price (£1499), because it's a business computer. The Macbook was ~£3100 pre-VAT, and this thing shreds through video exports maybe 4-6x faster than the laptop. I do miss the MacOS terminal for web development though.

You should give Ubuntu an experimental try. I have only ever used Windows most my life, but for hobby projects I use Ubuntu/PopOS!.

If you are doing Web development I highly recommend that over Windows. Just last night I tried to setup a Phoenix project on a fresh install of windows and after 5 hours I was still installing C++ build tools, setting up path variables etc etc. It honestly is a world of pain.

I remember setting up the same project on Ubuntu in five minutes. Not to mention it is infinitely more responsive.

I'm trying to eventually move to just a laptop with an eGPU as both my work and game machine. I'd love to ditch Windows for Linux now that Valve's Proton is a thing. However I've spent too much money on Propellerhead's Reason and its Rack Extensions to easily give it up. Bitwig and Ardour are of course 1st class choices for a digital audio workstation on Linux, but I just found out that VSTs are OS specific as well.

No matter what I end up doing, I'll miss texting from my computer through iMessage.

That is exactly what I am doing. I just got an Aero 15 with a 1060gb, which I honestly think will suffice for most games I play.

But if I ever get into more graphically demanding games I can hook up an eGPU and throw in a 1080Ti or something.

That might be true, but on the flip side I have had things go horribly wrong with ubuntu where it either took me more then half a day hacking away at it, or worse case I just reinstalled ubuntu all together. Bad upgrades that break dependencies, video card drivers failing in strange ways, a bad boot that just drops me in grub, and etc. I even jump ship on distos when they annoyed me so much I wanted them dead. I mainly run lubuntu for my desktop needs and every now and then I think gentoo wouldn't do this to me gentoo might take 3 days for a upgrade to complete, but it wouldn't fail me like lubuntu is right now. Plus systemd makes me scream at night.

I just built me a new pc. First one in 15 years. I used to tinker with Linux a lot at that time.

Ubuntu 18.4: Hangouts screen share doesn't work, WiFi dies after resuming from sleep, and other minor things.

It has been 15 years and it still feels clumsy ... I was not impressed.

I had a similar experience with Ubuntu ten years ago. But now I have been using PopOS!_os https://system76.com/pop which is an Ubuntu distro, which has been the totally opposite experience. After the install I kept expecting everything to go wrong, and wifi not to work etc, but honestly "everything just works" seems to be the fitting description.

I still predominantly use Windows 10 due to gaming and doing a lot of .Net development, but I am changing jobs soon and I might just run Linux for a while. See what happens. Honestly my experience in Windows these days is one of pain and confusion. The file system is even annoying me quite a bit. Anyway, I probably just hit the hardware configuration sweet spot that mean't my Pop!_os installation wasn't riddled with driver issues.

WSL gives you an Ubuntu shell in Windows without virtualization. It's really the best.

Good joke.

Glad to see saying Windows users should experiment with Linux is still so controversial ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not controversial. Ubuntu specifically makes me unhappy.

WSL is very, very slow. Be warned.

It's really not slow, I use it for everyday work in webdev and I basically have very few complaints

With anything involving virtual hardware and such it is hit and miss across the board. Even if both your machines have 16GB doesn't mean your ram functions perfectly. I have a linux box that has a failing hard drive in it that causes the folder program to crash when it fails to read from it. If I didn't understand it was a failing hard drive issue I would either blame linux disto or the folder program.

There is no virtual anything with WSL. It’s Linux userspace running on Windows kernel.

WSL involves no virtualization.

I use it every day. It really is perfectly fine!

Yes, it felt quite slow in certain situations (the last time I’ve tried). Because the WSL works by emulating syscalls from Linux, anything related to I/O can be quite slow...

It's not quite the same as emulation, and the overhead is less. It natively supports these syscalls, and in some cases the syscalls trigger the same code as their windows counterparts

In others, like fork, entirely new and unique code is ran.

I also use it every day and have very few issues ( one problem where it became corrupted and I had to reinstall ).

It's not a production machine no one is using it that way, its perfectly fine for development.

WSL is slow at creating processes, and pretty quick at everything else (in my experience).

This can mean some git commands (for instance) run slowly due to all the processes launched in the associated bash scripts.

I posted this above, could be helpful: I believe Windows Defender is responsible for a lot of the IO overhead within WSL. You can get around that by marking your development directory as "don't scan" within Defender.

The only time that it’s painfully slow in my experience compared to native Linux is installing packages with apt.

I really like my Dell Precision 5520. They keyboard is a little inferior to Mac or ThinkPad, but in most other aspects there is good attention to detail, and it has good Linux drivers.

You may have heard it before, but I would recommend using Docker over faffing about trying to install PHP etc on the host. For Laravel look into https://laradock.io/ . Very simple to get a full environment setup.

Looking into how Docker works properly takes some time, so there is some overhead with that, but being able to switch environments between projects, test upgrading libs etc and instantly being able to switch back has been a game changer for me.

> Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder)

Hyper's got a few critical bugs, and Cmd is just ConEmu). If you want iTerm2 like functionality on Windows, Terminus destroys Hyper, ConEmu, Alaciritty and everything else.

https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile

My recommendation would be a ThinkPad with Fedora.

I have 32GB of RAM in mine and they are easy to open, service and upgrade :).

I use both and the last year has been the single best year I've had with Linux in terms of 'it just works', before that I used Ubuntu and while it was generally fine I prefer Fedora.

The cinnamon spin is superb and it makes windows 10 feel clunky by comparison on the daily usability.

How much money did you spend on it? I've looking for a Lenovo with 32GB for a while but always find just customized versions by third-party sellers

Why not add the RAM yourself?

I paid £1368 for the T470P with the i7-7700HQ,2560x1440 screen, nvme ssd and 16Gb RAM and put the other 16Gb in myself.

It's a little monster of a machine.

If you want to use a distro with first-class cinnamon support try Linux Mint.

After my 2017 mbp developed several concurrent issues (screen, keyboard, speakers) I switched back to running Ubuntu on a lenovo x model. I'm satisfied, honestly, and won't be returning to Apple until they veer off this almost comical form-over-function course they're on (and that frankly seems unlikely)

I never liked Mac touchpads and hate even worse when Windows PCs copy them. Having left and right-click buttons is 1000x more ergonomic.

The PC implementations are really horrible. I have an HP Z Book 3 and the trackpad is unusable for me. I was desparate to get a mouse instead.

If you want 32gb of RAM, it's not an option, but I recently bought a Lenovo Carbon X1 laptop and it's really great [1]. I used to develop on a 2015 Macbook Pro, which was a fantastic computer, but I don't like the new ones as much. I've also used a 2017 Dell XPS 13 and it was good, but the Lenovo feels better to me.

Things that make it great:

1) Slightly larger screen at 14" is very nice, but the overall computer is still lighter than a MBP.

2) Keyboard is fantastic

3) Build quality feels like it can hold up to more abuse than MBP or Dell XPS

4) Has USB-C ports, but also has old USB-A style ports, so no need for adapters.

I dual boot with Windows and Linux. For better or worse, I still need to use Excel sometimes and LibreOffice's version doesn't cut it. The only thing I miss about macOS over Ubuntu is the ability to install Microsoft Office (without using Wine).

[1] plug for Costco who sells a nicely loaded (i7 processor, 16gb RAM, 512GB hard drive) version for $1500, or $1400 on sale.

Would you not be better with a VM for Excel, if that's all you need Windows for?

At a previous job I persuaded IT to build a Windows VM with all of their normal stuff in, so that I could boot Linux natively - it was a good way of working.

> I can't seem to figure out how to install PHP 7.2 correctly to work on Laravel

Overall probably a net benefit for society honestly, if it means less PHP in production. (I kid)

I would suggest using a docker image with a mounted volume for development - there are alternatives, vagrant being one of them. As your production server will _most likely_ be a flavour of linux, this can help weed out "works on my machine" issues.

The macbook pro 2018 keyboard makes me want to cry. My fingers don't flow the rate my brain does anymore :(

I completely agree about the 2015 gen MBP. Unfortunately the Galaga Pro is disappointing in it's own way: only 2-3 hours battery life.

Checkout Laragon (laragon.org). It comes with php, nginx/Apache, mysql/mariadb, etc in a way that you can swap them out. Cmder is nicely integrated and the binaries can be added to PATH, so they will work in Cmder or a y other shell too.

The Zune (media players) and Windows Phone (upto 8, not even 8.1). The fluid interface with focus on readability and content.

The photos app was amazing. Live tiles are amazing. The music player and it's live tile was amazing. The performance was the same whether on a low end budget phone or the top of the line model.

So many good ui and ux decisions like the lack of hamburger menus and placement of all menu items along the bottom of the screen with the extra items being hidden away in a drop-down using ellipsis. System wide light and dark themes jazzed up using an accent color that all of your apps respected.

The People hub (contacts app) was the central point for all social media. Facebook and Twitter were integrated. I didn't need fb messenger. Skype and fb messenger were integrated with the messaging app.

Damn, I wish we made it.

What was a live tile?

On a side note I do wish there were strong 3rd or 4th choices for a phone OS. A shame Blackberry is now just an Android flavor.

A live tile in windows phone, 8, 10, etc is an app icon that contains realtime info like weather. I've never used the particular app mentioned, but live tiles are just a cool way to display info.

Yeah you could flick open your phone and the live tile said the current Temperature. Or rotated your latest photos in the photo app (or favourite photos depending on config), showed the latest headline in news app.

I spent alot less time on my phone cos information was at a glance and I didn't need to open/close many apps all the time.

The next step in the evolution was MixView similar to the Zune software. See this for a demo https://youtu.be/uoZw5PK_6XQ. Do look at the date to see how ahead of the times they were.

Also dedicated camera buttons on mobile phones with two step capture. On the first slight press the focus was adjusted and then on a harder press the image was clicked.

Just looked them up on Youtube. It looks like a very good UI/UX idea. Surprised Apple or Android hasn't copied it, except for the useless live clock icon on their clock app.

I have a ton of widgets on my Android home screen which are exactly that. Google at-a-glance, music player, calendar, stock screener, photos, it's awesome.

Widgets are nice but in the last 3 years of using an Android I've only ever used widgets for my podcast app, music players, a few tap to dial contacts, a calendar widget with the day view.

Widgets are a good idea but they look horribly inconsistent.

> what was a live tile?

Similar to android's "widgets".

yeah but with consistent design ;)

And consistent performance / battery life

Isn't a hamburger menu just a two-dimensional ellipsis?

The difference is that instead of being in the top left or right corners all the all menus / buttons were placed at the bottom of the screen which made them infinitely more accessible to use.

Imo, the hubs were really what made WP special and it would've been amazing with more third-party buy-in (which realistically was never going to happen). Going to a single centralized spot for social media or whatever else, instead of browsing through a dozen different apps, is such a great idea.

I was totally on board with WP but then Microsoft bungled the later WP updates (my phone wasn't supported, and it was one of the last ones with a physical keyboard) and third-parties never really supported the platform.

Blackberry 10 OS had the same thing -- a unified location (called the hub) where all of you communication would go. It was great, except that third-party apps rarely (and decreasingly) integrated with it.

With Android, Blackberry changed its strategy and now integrated all social notifications into the Hub. But it just opens the corresponding conversation in the social app, you can't respond directly from the Hub (which should be possible to implement now with Nougat-style answer to notifications)

Oh, cool. Didn't know that. Getting third-parties to integrate with something like this is a huge uphill battle - they just don't have any incentive when they don't get to design/dictate how users interface with their platforms. Ceding that kind of control to a company like Microsoft seems like a losing proposition to them, even if it may be convenient for consumers.

I must say, the first time in ages I used a modern windows phone was some Nokia in 2014ish, still running wp 8. I was really positively surprised how well designed it was. Pleasing to use, at least what I could judge from in a day of use. This whole tile bullshit from the desktop finally made sense and felt great. Also Scrolling felt smoother than on any Android device I ever held for some reason.

I had the Nokia Lumia 920 with Windows Phone 8. That was really where smartphones peaked. I dislike both iOS and Android, they've just tried to migrate the desktop metaphor to the phone and it's not really working.

For me they peaked with the Lumia 925. The swiping keyboard had an accuracy unmatched by anything since, including the Lumia 950 I'm using to type this, which sucks (win 10 mobile rebuilt it for some stupid reason. It was perfect!)

I still think about going back to the 925. Battery life was great, camera was decent, and it was the perfect size for hand and pocket. Only the browser lets it down and that's mostly because modern js sites don't support ie mobile and a lot of stuff breaks

I finally "upgraded" from a Windows 8.1 phone to an Android phone because no one makes apps for Windows phone. I miss the Windows phone UI. Tiles are just a superior to Android's menu/launcher.

had the same transition few month ago, i can highly recommend `Square Home 2`, i was able to recreate my winphone layout 1:1 sans the hubs

Wow terrific thank you.

I miss large tap targets and easy one-handed nav on those systems.

Absolutely loved the windows phone for what it was.

The UI and UX were both extremely well thought out and worked smoother than any Android phone on equivalent specs. (apart from the confusing settings menus)

My dad's 100$ nokia 840 still runs like a champ. I can't think of any $100 Android phone with that sort of smoothness over 4 years.

The lack of adoption from both devs and users killed it.

I woul love to see it being revived at some point, but I doubt we will see that day.

> The lack of adoption from both devs and users killed it.

Both of these fall square on Microsoft. Developers didn't care for the platform in part because there weren't users, but also because every version had a completely different UI framework that wasn't compatible with older oses, but if you didn't use it, your app wouldn't fit well on the new oses (and occasionally never start up). Developers of Windows mobile 6 apps had no path to wp7, other than rewriting everything.

Users got a very weird upgrade story. Sometimes, upgrades were just not available, despite promises that they would be. Windows Mobile 10 was a mess, Edge is worse than mobile IE, but users don't have a choice to go back. Microsoft pushed back on a mobile Firefox in the app store early, and if they changed their mind it was too late.

Finally, Microsoft decided to retarget towards the high end with Windows Mobile 10 devices -- somehow they forgot that most of the devices they were selling were low end devices, where they could have a lot better responsiveness than a similar cost Android, because of platform differences (single app at a time is probably a big part, but maybe there's some other components).

Windows Mobile 10 also lost all the boxy UI which I loved :(

I still have all generation Zune's and I still use them quite often. They're off the grid, Zune software still works with no online features, FM radio, and the interface is pretty decent. I wish they didn't get discontinued as well.

That feature set sounds pretty similar to the $20 mp3 player I used before I had a smartphone. You can still buy really cheap mp3 players that have FM radios and work offline.

Pebble - they created a series of smart watches that had:

- long battery life (2-7 days depending on model)

- e-ink colour screens, that were always on

- an extensive app/watchface ecosystem

- actual attractive watches

I had a series of them and was all-in on the new models announced via kickstarter, when they suddenly disappeared and were bought by Fitbit. All forthcoming products were killed off.

They've been pretty reasonable with sunsetting the servers and helping the community move towards an open model, but it's only a matter of time before my Pebble Time Round bites the dust and I can't fix it (my partner's has already gone)

Was looking to buy one these in the intermediate future. Was bummed to hear the news.

I have a Garmin sport/smart watch, it lasts for weeks and it has always-on color display. Smart watches from other brands also last for many days or weeks.

Seconded. I really like mine. It does all I need from a watch and then some.

I also got mine replaced without any hassle after it failed.

The Fenix 3 is still going strong for me after two years with it. I don't usually use GPS on it, so I charge it about once a week when it's around 50% charge (sometimes I forget to check, which is why I plan for about weekly charging).

Also, the edge is slightly raised above the face on it, so while there are a couple of nicks on the bezel, there are no scratches on the glass. The sapphire glass may also be part of that.

App ecosystem is minimal, but I honestly don't need any apps anyway.

I got mine for running/swimming/activities but I actually really like it as a daily smartwatch. Like you said, some nicks on the bezel but otherwise it seems indestructible.

I have a refurbished 235. I use it mainly for running, it lasts forever, it's light and you can see your activity history on it - unlike the fitbit i previously had.

Pebble was my watch for years until Garmin released the vivoactive HR. While Garmin loses style points compared to Pebble, it has much better features and durability.

The first weekend I had it, I tested it by wearing it on a Tough Mudder...it survived without a scratch. 2 years later and the Garmin battery life is still over a week. If you miss Pebble and want something still being updated, look at the Garmin watches (but I wouldn't go any lower than the current vivoactive3 line)

The Pebble Time 2 was going to be the ultimate watch as far as I was concerned. Such a shame it never got made. I still love my old Pebble collection and wear them regularly. I have a Garmin, and it's good for running but garbage as a smartwatch compared to the experience I got used to with Pebble.

I settled for an Amazfit Bip, which is not a Pebble but in some respects it's the closest thing there is right now AFAIK.

Battery lasts a month, screen is not e-ink but it's always on (I believe LCD), watchfaces are customizable but there's not a lot of good ones since the resolution of the screen and the colors aren't great. Functionality is pretty limited, but good enough for time, gps and notifications.

I have one and I'm satisfied with it, and I'm looking forward to what they do with v2.

Have you tried it as a running app? I want to compare it to Tomtom Spark 3.

When I go for a run I usually bring my phone with me and use it as a gps recorder, but I also use the watch as a backup. I haven't checked how accurate it is. It usually takes a minute to get a good gps signal, and sometimes there's a lot of noise at the beginning of the route. It vibrates at each km mark, which is nice.

I believe there are some online reviews with better info about the physical activity recording.

+1 for this. The Bip is great for the price (I paid £60). If the SW was a little better (e.g. music control, some better watchfaces) it would be perfect. Maybe being a tad smaller + a bit nicer looking as well. It's great as a notifier on your wrist that works well as a watch.

+1. I paid around $50 USD for my Bip, and it's great for time, step/heart rate tracking, and the occasional notification.

Battery life is ~40 days for me, which is awesome.

Try FitBit Versa, apart from the always-on screen, it has everything you're looking for. The battery life averages 4-5 days depending on usage. I personally own it and it's the best purchase I have made. Drastically improved my life.

Fitbit bought Pebble just to kill it. I will never buy a fitbit.

Pebble went out of business and some of the assets were sold to Fitbit.

Fitbit bought Pebble to catch them before they swirled down the drain. If Fitbit bought Pebble to kill it, they're idiots, because Pebble would have done that on their own (sadly, says the owner of a box of Pebbles).

I still miss my Pebble, but picked up a TI-Chronos after losing mine years ago. It hits a sweet spot for me between being user configurable, having limited communications and display and y'know, being a actual wristwatch. It's not nearly as full featured as my Pebble, but it also has a multi-year battery life and long range subghz RF for notifications and whatnot.

I'm still bitter about this. I loved the low resolution e-ink color display. It was good enough with great battery life, unique and easily readable in the sun. I wish more smartphone makers would use this.

I still wear my gold pebble time steel every day... I dread the day it stops working and I can't get it fixed or updated..

It's the nicest watch I've ever had (to be fair I'm not a big watch guy) and my favourite thing about it is that it doesn't look like I'm wearing a computer on my wrist.

Oh and I only charge it every 5-6 days.. :-)

I'm still wearing my Kickstarter Pebble daily!

Altavista. I miss it every single day.

Searching for technical (unix, programming, etc.) content is so much easier when you can use nested parens and proper boolean language.

This is in contrast to google where searches return things that don't even contain your keywords.

This is in contrast to google where the modifiers like allinsite: and '+' and "quotes" are not respected or change their behavior over time.

Man I miss altavista...

So true. So, so true.

My favorite feature was 'near' queries. One could project n-dimensional spaces to any arbitrary lower dimension with the right semantic and spatial distances.

With Altavista, the limiting factor was the searcher. And my nostalgia that over-estimates the size of their search database.

> One could project n-dimensional spaces to any arbitrary lower dimension with the right semantic and spatial distances.

I'm incredulous. Doing this well for unstructured text would be worth a lot in many industries today, let alone the entire web. If they did this well, they'd still be alive and well in another form.

Maybe a smaller search corpus made it feasible, but this is an accurate description of AV's functionality. From http://jkorpela.fi/altavista/ , which is worth reading in its entirety: The operator NEAR ensures that both are within ten words of each other in the resulting documents. The operator NEAR binds less tightly than the operator NOT and associates to the left.

Near queries are easy on unstructured text. Here's the Elastic systax: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

I also do not recall Altavista ever banning me with a CAPTCHA for "searching too hard".

Can probably blame dogpile for the evolution of that

You just caused me to have a flashback. Waiting for dogpile results was such a pain.

Never heard of "dogpile" before. Are you referring to dogpile.com search engine?

A week or so ago I was frantically searching for "hidden bird illusion", and could no longer find the animated gif on wikipedia, and also nothing related to it on DDG nor Google, until about an hour later...

I just tried "hidden bird illusion" and it gave the michaelbach.de page within first page...

Thanks for the recommendation if you guys were referring to dogpile.com it's always good to have a backup search engine...

yes was referring to dogpile.com

dogpile was/is a metasearch engine. Back before google days there was so much unindexed stuff out there each search engine could bring back different results. Going to this one site and searching would bring back results from all the popular search engines at one time.. querying sites like (altavista, lycos etc.)

First decent index of the web and designed to let you find what you want to find instead of things paying to be found

> This is in contrast to google where searches return things that don't even contain your keywords.

This has become so frustrating as of late, especially when you search for something like "c++ map" and it decides to completely ignore the "c++" part of your search, leaving you with pages of actual maps. Slightly exaggerated example since I can't remember any concrete ones off the top of my head, but the actual situation happens way too often.

I just did a Google search on “c++ map” and didn’t see the behavior you describe.

What if I told you Google search results are partially based on behaviour data, meaning the results you get for a search potentially differ from mine

It doesn't happen to me so it doesn't exist does not apply in this case

Use duck duck go, my lad.

Indeed. Every single result in the first "page" was about c++ maps.

Thanks for reminding me! Just set it up as the default search provider in my browser.

Google search doesn't really work for power users anymore and I don't see that changing for the better anytime soon.

Alternatively, if you can't do without the google search algorithm, use startpage. Doesn't track and bubble you, anonymises the queries.

I can confirm what they say is true, but probably not with this specific sentence. It's also really not useful while searching for phone numbers (which it changes completely without a second thought).

"Slightly exaggerated example since I can't remember any concrete ones off the top of my head"

Google fixed this specific case and a few others last year: https://blog.google/products/search/improvements-searching-s...

I also learned recently that if you search for a quoted string in gmail and there are no matches it will just show a few partial matches, instead of just telling you there were no hits. The google behavior you describe got so annoying for me, along with the inability to copy the link in the results, I switched to DDG. It still provides results that don’t include one of my search terms all the time. It’s really annoying behavior.

google's "must include" feature is one of their worst features ever. it nearly always removes the most unique, defining search term. it has been showing up with increasing frequency. i can't remember a time where it was actually useful or wanted. and if i didn't want the word in the search query, i wouldn't have put it in there in the first place!

I have the same problem.

I think this is a function of trying to make searches more effective for unsophisticated users at the expense of users who know how to be more precise.

Similar to Apple and GNOME, it ends up penalizing the expert users to cater to non-expert users.

This is why you need to have the regular interface for people who shouldn't be expected to be experts, but have a separate interface for people who know what they are doing, because supporting both types of users is often mutually exclusive.

Oh man I used the shit out of altavista! I swear I could find anything on there no matter how obscure, it seemed like magic at the time.

Yeah, Altavista was the shizzle back in the day. I miss it, too.

IIRC, it didn't even have its own domain name for a long time, it was altavista.digital.com. There's another company I miss, having used Vaxen back in college.

I hope someone somewhere makes a new version of Altavista search, if only for the developers. Searching via google is easy for basic errors but is a huge pain if you are slightly advanced. With the capabilities being extended (and more and more people writing code everyday), having a separate search engine dedicated to the developers could cut short the search times tremendously.

There is still http://symbolhound.com/ for search that doesn't ignore special characters but the index is probably not that big.

I wasn't coding when Altavista was around, but I totally agree that Google is terrible for searching code snippets etc.

Fortunately, there's SymbolHound [0], which is designed for just that! Check it out

[0] http://symbolhound.com/

I was just asking about this Google "feature" on Twitter [1]. I can't imagine why anyone would want "must include" to mean anything but, and if it doesn't mean exactly that to Google, then they shouldn't say it.

> does anyone know why Google does this with search their results? what does the word “must” mean here, practically?

1. https://twitter.com/albedoa/status/1047502325005336576

The "must include" bit is a link. If you click it, you're telling Google that results must include that term (rather than may include, which is the default).

I remember distinctly when someone introduced Google (ca 1999) to me as an Altavista alternative where the good results were actually on the first page. As in, with Altavista you needed to rummage through the first couple pages (luckily back then you only had a couple pages' worth of results) to find what you were looking for.

Maybe what we miss is not exactly Altavista but a mid-2000s Google, also with the low occurrence of spam and sponsored content that we had back then. How about duckduckgo, does it fit the bill?

Try selecting "Verbatim" in the tools menu - it can really improve your google search on technical topics.

Learned something. Thank you.

Can't believe I didn't know that. Thanks a bunch!

I miss the graphical clustering representation.

If you searched for something like "rust", you would clearly see multiple clusters which would include a big chunk of stuff around "ferrous oxide" and a smaller cluster around the "programming language".

You could click on the specific cluster you wanted, and the results would rank/limit to just that.

I would kill for that back ...

Grooveshark had a better interface for managing "currently playing" than anything I've used before or since. Most apps don't even track what's currently playing in an intelligent fashion.

Similarly, rockbox was really great mp3 player firmware, when I used to use one of those. It had a funny feature I've never seen elsewhere: multi-lingual article-ignoring sort. I had German band "Die Prinzen" on that mp3 player, and that sorted under P, just like all it sorted the Beatles under B.

Rockbox's latest release was in May 2017 with a ton of changes and features added and the last change in their git repo was from today (Oct 15) with additional commits over the past few weeks, so not totally dead. However since music players as a whole are practically out, I don't know how much good that'll do you.

If you don't mind me asking, I'd be curious about your setup, I'm considering installing it on an old Sandisk e200 I have around.

Mine was definitely one the 200 series SanDisks! I can't say for certain which device I used. I got the device from my roommate, who got it in a woot.com "bag of crap" that included a couple refurbed mp3 players.

I remember the default firmware being extremely slow to use. It spent cpu time it couldn't afford to render animations between "apps" that added nothing. I think it may have been extensor picky about which codecs it supported, though I wouldn't have had much that wasn't mp3s.

I really loved rockbox. I liked how configurable it was, and how minimal it was. I'd previously used sdd based mp3 players. A dell dj (I was crushed when they canceled that line, and more so when the Seagate hard drive failed) and the first gen video ipod.

Rockbox worked very well for music, which is all I used it for. I always used windows explorer to transfer files to /from, and that worked well.

I found installing rockbox very easy. More so than installing ddwrt or homebrew on a wii. I don't think I ever updated rockbox. I probably used it for a year and a half, max.

I only stopped using it when I got a smart phone. I would certainly still be using it today.

My wife still rues the loss of Grooveshark. She’s never recovered. I don’t blame her. All other streaming services suck horribly.

There was a good episode of the podcast Startup about the Grooveshark story. They didn't quite understand how strong the UX was. Too much of the episode's focus was on the exhaustive free library. But it was still cool to hear about it and made the loss sad again.

I brought a premium account, even though I was a student at the time. They had some music tracks that I still haven't found anywhere else. Groveshark introduced me to filk making fun of Scifi I didn't know existed.

Paying for music isn't an issue, but it sucks when copyright is used to control music.

I have google music, and it is good, the music they have is generally of higher quality, but the selection does not compare.

Their "radio" generation from a playlist of relatively few tracks was also out of this world, in contrast to spotifys ““daily"" which only gives me a new list every two years or so. Despite using the desktop application an hearting the living bejeezus out of it...

Have you tried Google music? It can do the same and I can't complain about the quality.

The only extra I wish for would be the last.fm's slider between "mainstream" and "obscure".

I use Google Music now and it still pales in comparison to Grooveshark and Songza

The ability to quickly spin up a "radio broadcast" in Grooveshark for friends was amazing. With a small group of five friends we set up a Friday DJ rotation where one person would queue songs all day and the others listen in. All the "broadcasts" got saved as playlists, which you could "favourite" from your own account and go back to whenever you wanted. People could make requests when they had a "next track" that would segue well with what you were already playing. It was really fun!

I have never had a period of more high quality music discovery and I sorely miss those playlists, many of which featured obscure/rare/live tracks that simply aren't available in today's music services.

You might like https://jukebox.today/ for listening with a group.

Grooveshark was the only music streaming service I’ve been ever using. The way Grooveshark was slaughtered was despicable and turned me down to pay any subscriptions to the online music hienas. Years long curated playlists lost unrecoverably with the shutdown of the service :’(

I might be able to help! If you have the same browser your playlist is store in html5 local storage. I was able to pull mine about 6 months after the service shut down.

> The way Grooveshark was slaughtered was despicable

Well, maybe they should have licensed the content they offered. They streamed unlicensed music - what did they expect?

iTunes sort of has the sort thing: if you open up the track info window, you can specify sorting versions of the various pieces of metadata

I have a ~5 year old Sandisk Sansa Clip with Rockbox. I use it almost every day. I remember the first time I tried Rockbox on it; when it didn't take 5 minutes to boot because it was scanning every file (like the stock firmware did), I loved it immediately. When 3.14 came out last year, I got excited when I discovered that I could play Opus files on it. (Before, it crashed hard every time I tried.)

I got one for my dad last year, and was surprised that Sandisk discontinued the Rockbox compatible models, and used players were going for $~50, presumably because of their Rockbox compatibility.

Same! I threw a 128gb microsd into mine, and it works perfectly. It a very solid mp3 player overall, and the Opus support is fantastic for podcasts. Also Doom support.

I used the Sansas hard for about 6 years, and bought all my kids one. Rockbox had the best interface of any music player ever (along with WinAmp), and even though having all my music in the cloud is great, neither Amazon nor Google seem to have taken into account that you might actually have a large music collection when designing their Android players. Both are often insanely slow.

I miss grooveshark, don't forget that semicolon. There wasnt a good replacement afterwards. Just a bunch of people playing shitty songs from games pretending to DJ

Grooveshark was the best. There had also been a similar Chinese service I used (it was not that pretty and all in Chinese but this is not a problem as soon as you learn where to click, no need to actually understand what's written there) but they have banned access from non-Chinese IPs one day.

Ensemble Studios, makers of Age of Empires, Age of Empires 2, and Age of Mythology, some of the best RTSs ever made. There are other great RTSs, but they're all great in different ways from the Age series, which nothing else resembles.

Microsoft bought them, and shut them down not long after for insufficient profits. Sigh.

Age of Empires IV is being made now since they noticed there's demand, but the studio they chose is a well-known clown collective. Hopes are not high.

I thought it was being made because some redditor asked Bill Gates for it in an AMA? https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/49jkhn/im_bill_gates_c...

Maybe they choose a random studio because were was just trying to appease Gates' whims?

How bad is this "clown collective"?

No, that game was under development long before the AMA.

Well, they've had some success, but Dawn of War 3 was an absolute train wreck. Relic aren't exactly in the best form as of late.

In a similar vein, i wish a remake of Knights and Merchants were available and good.

Maybe not exactly what you were looking for but: http://www.kamremake.com

My mum played that one so much, she must've played it for years. Sometimes pausing for a couple months, only to fertle it up again somewhere and play it.

There’s a full chapter about Ensemble in this book:

https://www.npr.org/2017/09/05/547367445/-blood-sweat-and-pi...

...which I coincidentally listened to via Audible today. There’s a lot more to the story than, “...shut them down... for insufficient profits.” They wanted to branch out from the RTS genre, prototyped a bunch of different ideas, but didn’t really get far enough (or enough traction with MSFT, which wrote their checks) to ship them. Microsoft was wary of them launching new IP, so tasked them with making Halo Wars, which was an RTS for consoles. This was a drastically different undertaking than RTS-for-PCs due to controllers (instead of keyboards + mice), and they all got burned out working on it after many years. Microsoft shut them down after Halo Wars shipped.

I take it you've seen the HD version of AoE2 and the subsequent DLC/expansions. Its all on Steam. As with you and your list, the best made RTS were long ago. Sadly i don't think we'll likely see another AoE type game without all the shit that goes into modern gaming ( freemiums, DLC for even the minor thing, loot boxs and all that shit ).

In the same vein, I really miss Bullfrog, and the company that was formed after Bullfrog was shuttered, Mucky Foot. They made some of the best casual RTS games I've ever played, particularly Dungeon Keeper and Startopia.

I still play them to this day despite having spent thousands and thousands of hours on both, to the extent that I know them inside out, and yet they've never stopped being fun.

Check out Two Point Hospital: https://store.steampowered.com/app/535930/Two_Point_Hospital...

You know aoe2 is pretty big on steam and voobly right now, right?

They are even having a $60k tourney (I think sponsored by MS).

It is still a pretty big and active community and easy to get a game.

Plus, there have been a bunch of great DLCs in the past few years

yeah, I'm one of the most active players there. But that just goes to underscore my point....I'm playing a game from 20 years ago because they're not around to make new ones anymore.

I loved playing Age of Empires on my PocketPC. I can't find anything like it for Android.

What PocketPC do you use?

Do you just use it for Age of Empires?

Have you heard of the Pyra[0]?

It's nearing completion, hardware should be final at this point. Just need the software to get a good run up.

[0] https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/

I used it for a number of things, around 2002 or so. I don't recall the specific model, but I used until it stopped working.

I hadn't heard of the Pyra, but as with all these custom-designed open devices... they are cool, but the cost is always so much higher than any comparable commercial product you could buy. I guess RMS can afford one, but I can't.

Ah, I took it as you still use it today.

I've got a bit of interest in the handheld world, but haven't pulled the trigger on a Pyra (not a fan of pre-orders).

Also, what does RMS stand for?

Richard M Stallman

Met him at a metro station in Boston as I was going for a job interview. The company used Gnu/linux but the devs didn't even know who Stallman or Linus were. I didn't get the job because I wasn't "technical" enough. I was not asked any technical questions. Probably dodged a bullet there.

Google Reader. Now I have a mix of HN, Reddit and GMail, and none of them work really how I like.

Google Reader without a doubt. In my opinion, the demise of RSS started the day Google Reader was killed.

> demise of RSS started the day Google Reader was killed

Maybe killing Reader was a means to an ends.

Or when Aaron Schwartz died

Google Reader for sure. I use Feedly now, but it lacks the social aspect GR had.

There is a "halfbacked" function on the mobile phone (ios only?) version which is "Explore". It seems to be curated by editors. Would be interesting to have something based on your consumption or subscriptions.

BazQux is an excellent replacement for Google Reader. One of the rare products I'm happy to pay for consistently: https://bazqux.com .

It ticks me off to this day. I can’t imagine it being terribly difficult to maintain, particularly with Google’s limitless resources. They burned so much good will with their developer base just to save a few bucks.

It would have been amazing if instead of having Google Plus be an entirely separate thing, they had added Google Plus's sharing and discussion features onto Google Reader and grown from that as a base. Something like that could very well still be a thriving product today.

They did, it was called Google Buzz.

They did it before Buzz, it was the bookmarklet and RSS item sharing and discussion features built into Google Reader. Even had rudimentary friend-of-friend-only visibility for shared articles and discussions.

I'm gonna say Reader was like a dysfunctional relationship for me, once they shut it down and I had to move on (currently using newsblur.com) I saw how good an actively devoped RSS app could be

Honestly, ever since Reader was killed I have way more free time on my hands. Maybe it was my poor time management but it was a time hole for me, I'm actually glad that, at the time, nothing as good was around to make me stick on the endless RSS feeds I was subscribed.

Think about how much collective time that would be multiplied amongst the millions of users. Huge!

So maybe Google did the world a favour by binning Reader.

I used Feedly for a while, but I pretty much abandoned my RSS fix after the demise of Reader.

I have the opposite issue: I love newsblur so much, because I can fast forward through RSS feeds and read them quickly, which means I don't have to keep going to the sites.

Yes this. When I started listening to podcasts years ago, Reader was my primary tool. When Google announced the pending shutdown, I screenshot every part of the app so that I could rebuild it from scratch if needed one day.

Agreed.

I'm sure there were many reasons it died, but my theory is that Google strategically wanted to kill it because the User was in control of the data-sources and the algorithm. Google wanted people to migrate to Google+, News, etc. where they control what you see.

This is what Facebook and Twitter did. Their feeds used to be a simple chrono sort of sources you determined, but then they slowly took control.

In my mind, all these companies have shifted from being Platforms to being Publishers. While they aren't writing the content, they are actively choosing what content you see and don't see, i.e. being the Editor.

This is by far the best explanation I've read. Thx for making my day.

It's a chilling distillation of the fact that making us happy is tangential to underlying corporate motives.

I can't figure out what I've read up to on Twitter anymore since it shuffles tweets around and inserts random "your follower also follows this person" tweets which I didn't ask for

Have you tried using Tweetdeck? It puts that kind of stuff in a separate column which you can show or hide as you wish. The main column is chronological.

The fact that such a service is necessary is a bad sign for Twitter's UX.

If you turn off the "show the best tweets first" option in your content preferences you get a chronological timeline back. (They made this change a month or two ago)

That's it! Thank you

> the User was in control of the data-sources

I think this might be right, but this could be because it was an thus an awful interface for anyone who wasn't somewhat along the HN-user spectrum of technical nous.

Amen to the above. There are alternatives... But GR was by far the best.

I miss Google Reader too. Now I use TheOldReader (no affiliation) which tries to be like Google Reader. It does the job for me.

I recommend http://inoreader.com/ - I'm not affiliated with it in any way, however I am a very happy user of it.

Seconded. With Google reader, I never really was a fan of their web interface and preferred the Feeddemon desktop client. Sadly it was discontinued after the death of GReader. Switched to Inoreader since then and I must say the web interace is much more to my liking.

I just started using Feedly which is pretty neat.

Feedly works for me

I was going to say Google Reader too but have just reconsidered. I do miss it, and the idea that this was a popular way to consume news / content etc. However I can still use RSS on feedly, inoreader and a bunch of self-hosted alternatives. By moving away from Google I am also escaping their all-seeing eye, albeit to some minor extent. In the time since Google retired Reader I have begun to see them as a negative presence in the world. I have moved from Gmail and Google Calendar to Fastmail, self-host my contacts and will move on from Android as soon as Ubuntu Touch or another alternative become fully featured enough.

https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ next year

I've was hit by this hard too. Tiny RSS works well as a self-hosted solution.

Came here to say the same. Although, Feedly has taken over well.

Amen. Post reader I gave up on RSS because Feedly wasn't it for me. I even tried the one as part of Thunderbird.

I have been using https://elytra.app recently. Pretty happy so far (iOS only at the moment, but the developer is working on a web version)

check out theoldreader.com. They suck at marketing but it's essentially a clone of Google Reader. Really surprised it is not as well known as the other guys.

add https://redef.com https://www.aldaily.com/ and https://www.mediagazer.com/river if you want a little more variety.

Try NewsBlur

What did Google Reader do that something like Newsblur doesn't? I transitioned from Reader to Newsblur before Reader was killed and have been happy ever since.

I use Feedly now but miss Google Reader. It was a great way to follow the Internet chronologically and could have been developed much further from that point of view.

Nowadays you are supposed follow the Internet randomly, based on whatever you happen to see in social media by chance or curated by algorithms. It’s not a good way to get a balanced view.

A diverse CPU collection.

For a while we had some good alternatives to Intel x86. Alpha, Sparc, Motorola 68k, PowerPC, MIPS. Now we just have 32 and 64 variants of x86 and ARM. I guess powerpc is technically not dead yet (which is good!) although the new 64 bit powerpc is little endian I think...

As for companies, Sun Microsystems. I'd like to think that Sun, if they were still around, would be handling Java better than Oracle is today. I'd like to believe that they'd operate similar to Microsoft on the open source front.

It's a real shame we lost Sun. It was such an innovative company when it came to technology - one of the few examples of really engineering led software teams where management had no say in technical decisions. Unfortunately, the market doesn't really reward world class technical solutions/expertise. I'm still not sure what it rewards. Predatory business practices a la Oracle?

I'm not sure if "rewards" is the correct verb for what is going on.

Rather, I would say that the market "is succeptible to near-permanent exploitation by businesses like Oracle whose services cost way more than the value they deliver"

You put it better than I ever could, thanks.

No worries!! I worked at Sun/StorageTek as it was being folded into Oracle. It was a hideous, disgusting process that saw more politics and internal lies than I ever thought possible. Google and Salesforce got burned pretty hard by Oracle canceling new tape development and manufacturing :(

MIPS is alive and well - almost all consumer routers run it.

ARM has been picking up significant market share in routers. Most high-end 802.11ac routers are now using ARM-based SoCs, and nobody is adopting high-performance MIPS cores to compete against the Cortex-A series cores. MIPS-based routers will still be around for years, but it looks like they're begun a long decline that will probably not be reversed.

I'd argue that today we have an even larger variety in CPUs. They're all ARM, but they exist and almost anything can be made to run on them. Well, not trivially, but it can be done. ARM is also supported by Ubuntu, Arch, Debian etc. The only problem is that most of ARM hardware is made just for phones etc, where *nix doesn't work great because of manufacturers and their closed-source firmware.

I'd check out RISK-V, I think it will be a bigger player in the coming years https://riscv.org/

Come next March, I'm going to be missing Google Inbox. Completely changed how I use email for the better. I'm dreading going back to the tradition email workflow and hope to God that somebody builds something to replace Inbox in my life.

I also miss StumebleUpon from years ago. I don't even know if the site still exists, but for me it died when it forced me to pick interests. The great thing about that site was that it served me random things from outside of my bubble. I saw all sorts of fascinating stuff that I'd never have seen if I were trying to search for and curate content. I'm tired of algorithms trying to sell me a faster horse.

The content on su was too old sometimes :( 10 years was not an exception

For me that was one of the great features, it didn't try to serve "hot" (new + popular) content but just random stuff you might or might not like.

I've been thinking recently about a similar service that instead of trying to find content that it thinks you'd like and relates to your current interest, it would work the opposite, just for you to find new and interesting things that are outside your normal content-bubble.

Would require a special type of user who is fine to browse through bunch of bad content to find golden nuggets.

Ditto on Inbox. Tried to use Spark as a replacement, but it wasn't even close to providing the experience Inbox does. Do you have any alternatives in mind?

It's pricey, but superhuman.com is very good.

I just made the switch off recently. It actually is a lot more seamless than you'd expect. You can still snooze emails, and then "archive" (mark as done) everything that is taken care of/replied to/no longer needs your attention. Those are probably the two biggest pieces of the Inbox workflow that are pretty much identical in Gmail.

It's not quite as integrated, but all of the pieces are still there. For using reminders, you'll have to use google Keep. And for tasks without reminders, you can use Google Tasks.

On the plus side, it feels like Google stopped maintaining Inbox a while ago and it was getting horribly slow for me. The new gmail is amazingly responsive in comparison. I'm actually glad I made the switch for that reason alone (I had to make the switch before march because the Android Inbox App stopped working - it would crash within second after I opened it every time).

Stumble Upon really died when clickbate took over the world. It went from like maybe a few per stream of sites to pretty much nothing but listicals.

Surprised nobody mentioned them yet: Borland and their approach to UI development. I know some of their products live on, but I am nostalgic towards the wysiwyg days of old without being forced to use MS. I of course am aware of modern equivalents, but sadly the market/users moved.

Try the Red language.

I'm annoyed at how much work at the red project has gone into their ethereum-based cryptocurrency. It feels like a huge distraction from building a better rebol.

Cross platform, macros, homoiconic. Jesus I need to look into that. That sound like a potential practical replacement for LISP

Heck, even their IDEs. I was more productive in BCC 3.1 (in text gfx mode of course) or even TCC than I am with Visual Studio.

I wish Lazarus and free pascal would get some love: Lazarus works on more platforms than Delphi ever did and, ignoring bugs, feels like making apps in Delphi 4.0 did.

We still exist. Look up Embarcadero: Delphi and C++Builder live on. We see increasing interest - I think there is some disillusion with some other dev tools.

There's a new version coming out soon.

-- David. (I work there.)

Sorry, but it's no good anymore.

I cut my programming teeth on Turbo Pascal and Delphi 20 years ago, so I thought I'd help a friends daughter with her homework assignment.

Could not even figure out how to create a project. I mean honestly, as a professional SW dev I could not even create a project to contain her working files, so was unable to open and close delphi and still run the files we were working on.

No info tips to help figure out what all the GUI widgets do. Had to google all the stupid things. No decent property inspection of the resulting widgets. No layout managers, still uses pixel position layouts.

I was originally in favour of our education system continuining to use it, now I'm solidly in favour of switching to Python.

Could you tell me what was confusing, please?

> as a professional SW dev I could not even create a project to contain her working files

I work as a product manager, and one of my aims is usability. I'm very interested in the problems you faced, in order to solve them. Could you reply, or drop me an email at david dot millington @embarcadero.com please? I am always interested in talking to users.

In the meantime, to get you going: When you start, the IDE's default blank state (the Welcome screen) has buttons to create a new project. Or, you can go to the File > New menu, and choose a Windows (VCL) or cross-platform app.

> No info tips to help figure out what all the GUI widgets do.

You are right, that may be assumed knowledge, and the names are often tied to the WinAPI progenitors of the modern day controls.

> No decent property inspection of the resulting widgets.

What is "decent" property inspection? The Object Inspector is a dockable window, shown by default when designing (default position is the bottom left of the screen.) It lists all properties and events, and is similar to Visual Studio.

> I'm solidly in favour of switching to Python.

I'm sorry to hear that. As I said, one of my roles is to improve usability and discoverability, and I'd really appreciate it if you'd share the issues you encountered. For context, I've spoken to six customers in the past fortnight about the upcoming beta release, focusing on UX, so this is something we do regularly and is a genuine offer.

I wish I had a Delphi like IDE and RAD tool but for Golang instead of Pascal. Ability to write cross-platform GUI apps in a Go as easily as Delphi would be a dream come true.

There is Free Pascal and lazarus, but I must admit that if I need a cross-platform tool today, I would make a webapp - not that it compares at all to Delphi, but it works everywhere.

Nokia n900. Portable linux box, real keyboard. http://neo900.org/ doesn't seem to have gained much traction. https://www.planetcom.co.uk/ seems to be the closest thing we have now.

Yes, phone with real keyboard. Last one I had was Nokia E7, five to six years ago, and I still miss the keyboard.

The N900 was such a cool idea and also a pretty decent phone. I owned two of them but then had to eventually let it go..

GPD Win 2; DragonBox Pyra (upcoming).

There is SailfishOS, which is a Linux running on phones: https://jolla.com

Your can purchase it and install it on Sony Xperia X and lots of 3rd party supported devices:

https://jolla.com/sailfishx/ http://verdanditeam.com/device/list/

Here's a picture of various devices (some with a keyboard): https://twitter.com/Mister1Magister/status/10510971372101509...

Have you tried Termux on Android? You essentially get a Linux container, complete with package manager. I have actually used it for development on the road.

That's a far cry from a full Linux install with X, though. Not to mention the hardware keyboard. I've not seen a phone in 6 years that had one.

I had one of these, was a lot of fun!

An N810 was the first thing I bought when I got my on-call bonus money (first job I had that had On-Call responsibilities, paid extra money for our on-call week.) My cell phone had bluetooth, and I could tether from it. Meant I could do all my on-call stuff without having to lug a laptop around or be stuck in the house.

That thing was awesome. Maemo, the linux OS on it, wasn't.

It doesn't have a physical keyboard, but if the Librem 5 pans out, it should scratch that 'real linux on a phone' itch.

Old-school Winamp. I use Spotify these days, but man it was fun to customise skins and play with the awesome visualisers.

Half-Life 3 would also be nice, but I guess it was never "around" to begin with.

Be careful what you wish for :)

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/winamp-returns-in-2019-to-...

Wow, that's great. I'm looking forward to it!

That sounds awesome, if it does seamless search from subscription services and plays mp3 as well! The article doesn't quite make it clear what the functionality will be.

Ive been using AIMP as a replacement but the universal hotkeys don't seem as universal when you are in certain fullscreen applications.

Webamp - "A reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and Javascript"

- Load any classic Winamp skin just by dragging it onto the main window. - If a skin specifies some transparent regions in its region.txt, they are respected.

Features - https://twitter.com/captbaritone/status/961274714013319168 Source - https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp

But does Webamp “Really whip the llama’s ass”?

Indeed it does. Track one when you open a new tab. https://webamp.org/

You can still download the old Winamp and use it on a modern Windows installation. Works just fine, though it doesn't know what media buttons are.

the thing i loved with winamp was at one peak where it was fast and simple.

You wanted to queue songs? middle click the heck out of your playlist. want to stop on end of queue? that was an option

you want to add to queue on spotify it's like 2 cumbersome clicks, you can't just go gattling-gun i want "this this this to play next"

jump to song was fantastic - with a global hotkey.

audacious with the winamp skin gets close to all this, but just misses somehow.

If there are specific ways you can pick out to improve Audacious, open some issues: https://redmine.audacious-media-player.org/projects/audaciou...

Hotkeys and mouse bindings should be fairly easy to update.

I got close to contributing once (but ended up somehow clobbering my installed copy of audacious (edit: this is likely through my own incompetence - not saying the dev env sucks or anything)) - i think i should try again cos i do use it as my non-spotify player.

WINAMP, WINamp, winamp... it really...

Still works. Winamp is still my main music player (with classic skin, of course). I run it through Wine on Fedora 28. Some things cause crashes, but the only things I really care about are MilkDrop, the media library, and playlists and they all work fine. I've never been able to find something that comes close to MilkDrop.

Here are my installation instructions (after installing Wine) although I haven't tried them fresh in a few years (Fedora and Wine upgrades haven't screwed anything up):

  $ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
  $ chmod +x winetricks
  $ ./winetricks -q directmusic directplay directx9 gdiplus ie8 mfc42 wmp10 windowmanagerdecorated=n
  $ ./winetricks winamp
  Launch Winamp
  To get rid of some weird font issues: Right click Winamp > Options > Preferences... > General Preferences > Playlist > select Use font: MS Sans Serif
  To fix bug https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12060: Winamp > Options > Preferences... > Plug-ins > Visualization > MilkDrop v2.25c > Configure > WINDOWED settings > Uncheck Integrate with winamp skin

I used to do this, too, but it eats up a lot of CPU for just a music player. For Linux music, I've moved onto cmus.

You can get MilkDrop 2 on Kodi, which turned out to be a just fine replacement for winamp once you strip all the other nonsense away.

I've been using foobar2000 (win) or audacious (linux) as a replacement for winamp for close to a decade.

do you know something like foobar2000 but for mac?

Well there's Foobar for Mac in beta [1] but I really like Vox player [2].

[1] https://www.foobar2000.org/mac [2] https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player

Not quite as configurable as Foobar, but on Mac I always recommend Swinsian: https://swinsian.com/

I don't know if it works anymore, or were to get it, but Spotiamp was a Winamp clone for Spotify.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/22/5235456/spotify-debuts-s...

Old-school Winamp is still around and works just as well as 15 years ago.

Indeed, the lack of the UI shittification creep that we saw in iTunes, Skype, MS Office etc has made it look even better, faster, sleeker in comparison!

Westwood Studios. I loved their games including their final game C&C Renegade, even though EA rushed Renegade out the door and shut the studio down.

Nox. Oh Nox.

Nox was a fun lan game for sure

Great game

Ahhh, the memories of spending after-school hours buying and selling silos for extra money (there was some thinko in the game logic - full silo was sold for more money than it cost to build, or something like that) in their first C&C game to build a massive army and crush the AI opponent. :)

    full silo was sold for more money than it cost to build

Seems like it makes sense though, since it would be full of money (ore)

C&C didn't have ore, it had Tiberium. Red Alert had ore and diamonds.

Red Alert is also C&C though :P

The trouble was that if you had many silos, when you built a new one, it got filled with tiberium from other silos and I think that when you sold the tiberium would get redistributed back to the other silos. Anyway, all I remember is that you could generate free money just by buying and selling silos in a loop (if you already had many silos and they were full).

Microprose studios.

Whilst the studio is dead, there are rumors of remastered C&C(s) on the horizon from EA.

RIP Westwood. They made some awesome games and I spent so many hours playing them...

Despite all the corny acting in their in-game dialogue, if they released a movie based on C&C, I would definitely go watch it.

OMG, I’m so glad somebody mentioned Westwood Studios...

Check this out btw (Red Alert 2):

https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA

C&C Red Alert 2 and C&C Generals were the best RTS games ever made, hands-down. Much of my life was spent playing these games.

Nice! I've tried OpenRA and enjoyed it, but for whatever reason Tiberium Sun captured my attention the most :)

All the afternoons after school playing this game with friends. So much fun. I also remember the humor of discovering lag and kill lag.

Sun Microsystems, especially after hearing more about the company, it’s culture and products from this [0] talk posted in this [1] comment in this [1] thread.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217952 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217762

Good products, engineering. Badly managed.

One of the crazier things Oracle found when they were buying them was that the sales staff were given commission based on the total value of the sale, with no requirement for a profit to be made. People in the sales team would merrily sell stuff that cost $200,000 for $100,000, and earn a tidy commission, even though it meant the company was hemorrhaging.

It was also great if you were an academic and needed equipment for a cool research project.

"What kind of discount will we need to give you to make sure you're doing all this work on SPARC/Solaris equipment?"

"100%"

"Done!"

...and then they'd send you the servers you need, and perhaps one extra that ....accidentally...fell off the truck.

I remember... Google Reader - Dont even have to explain why :-) Kuro5hin - Site similar to slashdot Windows Phone UI - The phone didn't work but has changed mobile interfaces a lot. Specially remember the black UI and readability, which is now known as Night mode. Nokia Phones - Now back, bright colors and good camera. I have accidentally drop tested it many times, once from a 2nd floor, which landed on pebbled surface.

Surprised more people haven't named Google Reader - I wonder if it's because we wouldn't choose to use it again, after having been burned before.

Several of the alternatives have gotten pretty good in the meantime. I wish it wasn't dead, but I don't miss it.

You can use https://theoldreader.com, which is supposed to be similar.

More mentality than product, but I’m tired of companies not focusing on solving problems well and focusing more on generating a religion around their tech. I feel like prior to the iPod, things either worked well or didn’t. Now, you can put out the most half ass tech, generate a religion and have an “argument” against well matured tech and call for its death by fire. Looking at you NoSQL-anything.

Maybe it’s always been this way, I’m only 31. I just feel that making a real attempt at solving a problem is now a discontinued goal. It’s all about that religion. And you know what, tech geeks are extremely religious. At times, I feel there are fundamentalist terrorists that’d tell Apple and NoSQL folks to chill out and have a cup of tolerance.

Yep, we are right at the middle of that craze. A group of buzz makers tries to steal the glory from the real titans under disguise of so called disruption. All without delivering the real value, but with tons of religious preaching.

The computing industry probably reached the levels of Hollywood in 1930s where every Joe and Mary were going to make it. It clearly is a fad, but at the same time we have to face the fact that computing industry had become more mature.

As a result, it started to absorb wider areas and masses of people. While the "preaching fad" will certainly fade away, we have to deal with increased technological segregation caused but the massive influx.

As much as I wish you were correct, but I don't know if this is the "middle". It's all speculation. Hell, maybe tomorrow will be the day that social media will be banned and punishable by death by the Hague. But, I personally don't foresee too much of a slow down until there's a catastrophe due to it. Theranos I think is a good case study as to how the whole cult/religion mindset in tech is stupid and potentially dangerous. But that religious modal works fantastic in the scope of Apple and Google. Yes, there are the rebel movements against these guys, but let's be honest: "There's dozens of us! Dozens!". Relatively speaking to whom they cater to. Hell there will always be folks like Musk and Jobs. Both were the second coming of Jesus for their respective groups. Both are deeply flawed... well, assholes if you actually knew them. Jobs literally funded one of the largest sweatshops on the planet to make iPods and iPhones. Musk has the same emotional temperament as Trump. Facing the fact, most people in tech are just as religious as West Boro Baptist Church followers. Actually, I'd argue more because they don't realize they are. At least in most well rooted religions "Don't believe in false idols", at least teaches you that you are praying to something. That makes you aware that you are "praying". No difference between Sunday service and a tech stage conference with the giant projector images of everyone's current worshiping idol. "We removed the audio jack and you should all be happy, amen".

And people clapped to that shit.

This could actually be a super long legit post I could make. But long story short, Silicon Valley is the new Vatican. They're imposing their ideology of what they think is right (We own your personal information to better sell to you). Only difference, there's many more sects within it, all going for the same populous (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc). They hide behind having "faith in disruptive tech" but deliver, first off crap tech and second really intrusive, ethically shit-stained privacy practices.

I'm getting soap boxy and this requires a lot of explaining. I still think there's still more room for this all to get worse. Obviously, I want to be wrong. Like, I hope one day you can go "Dude, you realize how stupid you were?"

My legs are getting numb from doing this on a toilet with my phone.

> Maybe it’s always been this way

I don't think so. I used to link the 'evangeliser' word with religion, now I link it to tech. Steve Jobs 'presentation style' was an exception, now is the rule everywhere - companies hire evangelisers to preach about their products/agenda as the truth. Religions morph but they will never disappear.

I didn't even think of that, but you're right. The whole "evangelist" term, for tech, really did start popping up around the iPod era. My first conscious memory was the lead up to Adobe CS5. At the time, I thought it was weird, but funny, that they had "evangelists" for different products. Then, CS6 came around, I heard it again and I never flinched.

Amazing how that shit can creep up slowly, then take over.

Groklaw

There are important legal things happening, involving our industry, and which I think do not get the coverage required.

Can't really believe I had forgotten about that. Feels like I read it a few months ago and last update was in 2013!

I guess life is short and moves fast!

I miss Boundary.

Their traffic flow monitoring with per second granularity was utterly amazing. It had almost no overhead, it gave the equivalent of netflow data for instances in EC2, way before AWS gave VPC flow logs. It was incredible.

Alas their sales team were incredibly difficult to deal with, managing to both seem to not know how or what they were selling, whilst at the same time being incredibly heavy handed, escalating to my VP over a minor delay in contract signing and causing trouble to the point I had to almost beg my VP not to tear up the contract because of their actions.

As a result of what I perceive to be the sales org's failure, the company was forced to pivot into a generic monitoring product, which lost its identity and got borged by BMC.

There's nothing like boundary on the market today, if there was I'd be lining up to buy it.

Was Boundary agent-based? You'd install something on all your instances, or start from their AMI or something?

Yes, Boundary is agent-based.

I visited their office in SF when they were 2 guys. :)

We used Boundary at Netflix to monitor Cassandra clusters - you can see mentions of that on Slideshare.

VividCortex takes the Boundary concept a step farther for databases.

RackPing.com currently has non-agent visualization tools for SREs now, but will also have a Boundary-style agent shortly. (Disclaimer: affiliated with them.)

What happened to them?

What happened to SignalFX?

I miss variety in smartphone design.

Everything looks the same these days. Samsung and Apple endlessly copy each other and virtually every smartphone has the same phablet aesthetic now. I miss the variety in shapes, sizes, physical keyboards, gaming features, operating systems, etc.

This ++, I massively miss my Nokia E71, there's been no decent replacement for it. Ok maybe the n900. But since then they're all the largely the same.

The Nokia E71 was almost the perfect phone. Sturdy, offline GPS capability, dual SIM variant, comfortable hardware keyboard. The only thing holding it back was the OS and app ecosystem.

I'm sure this will change - someone will come out with a phone that is weird and wonderful in a way that captures the imagination and we'll start to see the roundrect as uncool and ugly. I am the same as you - while I appreciate the engineering that goes into these amazing devices, the way we've just settled for a while on one boring style is pretty lame.

I agree, I own a BlackBerry Passport which my wife just stopped using and every time I touch it I fall back in love with the design, it's just so damn cool, I wish more phones were weird and comfortable like that. I had a Priv, which was a bit different, but now that I have an S9+ I see every 2nd person with the same fucking phone I have, when before I was so much more unique and different.

Blackberry KEY2 has a good design and gets monthly security updates, https://crackberry.com/blackberry-key2-review

While the variety was nice, I think the phablet aesthetic is most popular for good reason - the sheer amount of screen real-estate and convenience is really unparalleled.

What I could see in the future is built-in ways to expand functionality without loss of the current usability - imagine a phone with the ability to project images and a keyboard on a table, and recognize keystrokes, while still being just as good of a handheld device.

> the sheer amount of screen real-estate and convenience is really unparalleled.

Personally, that's my exact complaint. I miss smart phones I could operate with one hand without straining my thumb to reach the opposite corner. I want a quality smart phone with a screen size ~4.5". I don't really want a screen larger than that. It would be nice if the big brands made a small version instead of a "normal" and "XL". The iPhone homepage currently has the motto "Welcome to the big screens". If I wanted a tablet, I'd buy a tablet.

There's some attempts, but it's gimmicky - more cameras, foldable phones, etc. Nothing that really causes a revolution.

Oh, indentations like Apple did for the iphone x are apparently a design element now. :/

I'm cheering for the Razer Phone 2.

It has no notch, it isn't obsessed with a high screen-to-body ratio. It isn't that thin or particularly light.

But it does have a 120hz screen that nobody else has, and once you see it with your own eyes you'll be wondering why other manufacturers aren't pushing for it too. It does have unashamedly large stereo speakers for market-leading volume and clarity. It does have a unique glowing logo on the back, just like the old Macbooks. And it also has a 4000mah battery that'll last the whole day easily.

If you want a phone that's trying to break the meta, this is it.

How's the build quality tho? Razer keyboards and mice I have bought were trash.

Eh my iPad Pro has a 120hz screen and I couldn’t care less. I notice no difference when using my phones 60hz screen.

Safari browser for Windows.

I miss the option of having a well made browser from a trusted source as an alternative to IE, Firefox, and Chrome (which was then still a relatively new entrant into the browser market).

Apple stopped supporting Safari for Windows OS from v6.0 onward, back in 2012. [0]

[0] https://www.ghacks.net/2012/07/28/safari-for-windows-discont...

FFFFFound [0] [1] [2]

[0] https://ffffound.com

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFFFOUND!

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14204960

I was so sad when I found out that they've pulled the plug on that project. Too late to export data, so I lost all my data.

Blizzard Entertainment, back when they made well-written atmospheric games instead of e-sports garbage.

amen

I think they are still pretty good at atmospheric and I don’t think they were ever really that great at writing. It was just easier to enjoy when you were young, but a lot of bad writing is.

I do miss blizzard north though.

I don't know.. Diablo 2s storyline was quite a bit better than whatever happened in Diablo 3.

Oh man, this grinds my gears so much. It's not even the story itself, I thought the plot was pretty ok, even good for a generation of gamers that never met Diablo.

You know what was the real issue there? The dialogues, the screenplay, what the voice actors end up saying you know. The fucking dialogues in this game is so bad, the worst action flix of the 80s pale in comparison.

Especially the first demoness, Magda or whatever her name was. Holy fucking shit. I've never seen a character given that shitty dialogue in my entire life as an avid movies fan.

There was some boss that had a steampunk cannon/gun that he carried around and shot stuff with. Any form of gun does not belong in the Diablo franchise. Hopefully Diablo 2 remastered can give us something to sink our teeth into.

That's a fair point. I remember being especially frustrated by Azmodan, the supposed "most capable battlefield general" _literally_ yelling his secret plans at me in Act 3.

Mac Pro "cheese grater" towers and arguably Apple's best Pro machine or tower ever [1].

Mojave macOS version just recently unfortunately EOL'd my last Mac Pro (Mid 2010 with no Metal capable GPU), such a nice design and powerful pro machine still to this day.

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/07/apples-mac-pro-ch...

I'll take it a step back to the PowerMac G3, not for any technical reason but just for the look of the damn things. Those candy Macs were beautiful and colour choices abundant. I really wish the anodized colours from the iPod Nano line would have been extended to the mainline aluminum Macs. :(

You can upgrade to a Metal-capable GPU, if you want.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208898

I’ve tried this recently, but then I found I needed a new PCIe power cable, which I had to order from NewEgg.

HyperCard.

It's been decades and I've still never found a better way to make simple GUI applications.

Maybe give ViperCard a try?

https://github.com/downpoured/vipercard

I think the site (vipercard.net) got hugged to death, keen to look at it.

https://github.com/downpoured/vipercard/issues/14

Yeah this one surprises me. A generic card/db app... tempted to do it myself. A self-contained, no-fuss flexible thing, maybe with a few extras like calendar based events etc. Access I spose is close, buts its awful, and Microsoft.

I slowly working in something alike: A relational lang:

http://tablam.org

Eventually, the idea is have a FoxPro-like experience.

Is this by any chance influenced by the "Out of the Tar Pit" paper?

Piggybacking on a SQLite backend was also how I have envisioned it ... very interesting project!

Originally, was just thinking how build a foxpro-like experience :)

But this eventually make read a lot about how databases are built and eventually I cross to that paper. I start investigating about the relational model and discover that in fact, is much more simpler and versatile than I think, so I'm building a full relational language as by-product. I also take clues from kdb+/J, and others perspectives about how treat data.

I have several small prototypes and now working on rust:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/8ygbvy/state_of_rust_...

because I wanna this to work great on mobile. My dream, is that I not only embed sqlite but also move all the data/bussiness logic to this. And keep the UI and native services using the native platform for each target.

Filemaker tried to get into this with Bento, but I think that's been 86ed as well. What I really loved about Hypercard though, was that it was so much more than a database. As a school kid in the 90s I used to make lots of interactive presentations for different classes using Hypercard (at least until I got ahold of Director).

Fun fact: some of the early versions of Myst were just Hypercard stacks with images on each card and transparent buttons to link you around the island.

Check out https://onuniverse.com/

wow, TIL. looks amazing.

Maybe give http://www.hyperfiddle.net/ a try too.

In general there seems to have been a trend away from trying to enable users via personal computing. I'm sure you'll get a bunch of responses to this post linking you to someone's web-app builder, possibly some that are hold-your-work-hostage subscription services. It's not the same, and people who didn't live through the 80s and 90s, when the future of computing was still bright, won't even see why it isn't the same.

100%. Whenever I say I miss Hypercard, people find imitations but that's not the point. Hypercard was holistically perfect for a personal computer of the mid-90s. Having an equivalent today would be beyond mere imitation. It would have to extend the values and respect for users (ahem, "authors")

I run Hypercard in sheepshaver and every once in a while show it to younger developers I meet. They are always blown away.

The Palm Pre (and WebOS)

When it first came out I thought it was kinda cute so I got it for my gf but I ended up loving it.

The slider mechanism was solid, the OS was a breeze to use, and it was years before Android and iOS fully caught up with the "cards" concept.

It revolutionized the mobile experience in many ways for me.

I had a Palm Pre Plus the moment they launched on AT&T, WebOS was amazing - and ironically ahead of its time with all the popularity technologies like React Native have these days.

I'm actually kind of pissed at the new Palm device TCL launched, what a waste of the brand.

Kai's Photo Soap and Kai's Power Goo. Or anything by Kai.

Especially the little tools like the texture explorer and fractal generator.

The user interfaces were refreshingly unique.

Check out Adrian Mendoza's photo-based works. He's still using Kai's Power Tools and other filters on a PowerMac.

(Not sure he has a site with that work but it's scattered throughout his Twitter feed[1] along with some neat aerial photography of SF and the bay area.

[1] https://twitter.com/Amenfoto/status/1002426100767526913

I got to take the reigns from Kai for my first paying UI job ever (Redesigning Bryce) and was super honored. That man was revolutionary for his time.

Browsers that did not have to reload the page when you hit the back button.

Webpages designed to use the least bandwidth, load fast and be accessible.

Companies that had older staff who had enough experience to not make the same mistakes over and over again.

When a site has a redesign nowadays, I can almost always count on them breaking "Open Link in new Tab". Most recent example was Chase bank and I think Google's account security page. Same with a redesign project I just joined at work....

The behavior of the browser upon back-button depends on the cache policy of the server when it first delivered the page.

Aardvark was the best Q&A system I've ever seen, felt like the most miraculous thing I've seen in my life. Sadly I've only learnt about it from the news when Google bought it and in just about a year Google closed it.

It worked like this: you just write (on the website or in ICQ) an question (in whatever a form on whatever a subject, no limitations or rules, just avoid offence), it gets routed to a number of semi-random people all over the world (you included for the other people's questions, once you receive a question you can answer it but there is nothing to encourage or discourage you, purely voluntary, and nobody but the question author will see you answer), you receive the answers (you can also answer an answer to thank/feedback or ask for a clarification). Everything was semi-anonymous, you were not forced to disclose yourself. Unlike Quora Q&As were not recorded (openly at least). Unlike Quora, whatever you ask (whatever a question you could imagine) you would always receive at least some useful and interesting answers in minutes-day (and could request more if not satisfied). Unlike StackExchange you hadn't to bother with boring rules, the format was just like asking a good friend that knows everything and enjoys answering your questions. I've ran out of questions my imagination could supply back in the days, now I have much more but there is no Aardvark any more :-(

What was their business model?

I dunno. Maybe they could scan a question for keywords and show some targeted ads but I can't remember any (my brain has already got trained to always ignore ads so I can't even remember if there were ads or if there were no ads, there were not too many if there were).

Demonoid, a private torrent tracker.

It had a wide range of quality files and the enforced ratio kept seeders around.

And on that note: what.cd

Oink as well

Oink's Pink Palace. I miss the musicians uploading their own music there and the wealth of otherwise impossible to find things.

Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails was a member too:

https://torrentfreak.com/nine-inch-nails-frontman-was-a-memb...

Oh man, I miss what so hard. Can't find anything comparable today. Those were the golden days, when I could find obscure albums that you couldn't even pay good money for.

https://redacted.ch

Redacted(dot)ch

Jeez I haven’t heard that name in forever, completely forgot about it.

I miss ShareReactor.. and later SuprNova.

Nowadays I wouldn't have much use, but as a student they were godsent.

Kickass Torrents was really good too for public, there doesn't seem to be anything else like it out now.

Picasa, the best image manager I have used. Nothing come close to it.

amen, I'm still limping along with it on Windows 10 but nothing else compares at all for managing your original photos. (I also use Google photos but that is a recompressed jpeg copy of your original)

Even if you pay for storage and upload in full quality, it re-jpegifies it?

I use Google Photos, but only the free, "high quality" uploads. I keep all the high res versions on my home server (backed up of course) and just use GP for viewing remotely, search, and its assistant features.

I run Picasa on my Windows 7 machine, but the latency when loading DSLR JPGs is too slow. Thus the software is unusable for me.

Here's an old discussion of the slow refining behavior (to view a JPG) https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/picasa/-XPN4e...

We're slowly getting closer, https://textile.photos/ our desktop app is in a readonly state in the github builds but the mobile app is coming along quickly. Follow here for progress updates, https://github.com/textileio/textile-go, it's where the desktop app is released.

damn, almost all your comments are advertisements

I'd have no problem with self-promotion if they were also joining the larger discussion on the state of photo managers and talking about their frustrations with Picasa/Apple Photos/etc. I mean you'd think if you're building a photo manager you have to care about them at least a little bit.

Is textile a mobile-only software? I can't really tell from the main page, there's nearly zero information on it ;)

And so fast!

Thanks 'herf.

What did it do that Google Photos doesn't? I never tried it, but I know there are some die-hards who really miss it.

It managed a local photo library without uploading everything to the cloud.

That could be the killer feature for a new product. "It does x without uploading to the cloud!"

It would be nice to have some kind of Google-Photos-alike without the Google part. E.g. I can host on my own NAS.

Check these out:

* https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

* https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos

Would you pay for an end to end solution? Have had it at the back of my mind for a while. No Google. No Apple. No cloud. But all other features from machine learning like face and scene detection, convenient cataloguing, and probably apps across devices that'll help you store and access all of this centrally backed up on your own NAS. So would you pay for it?

Probably, maybe after a while, depending on the price. (My budget is often stretched thin.)

Less than USD 20 and a convincing web page or demo instance: immediately, without even trying it first, if for nothing else then to support a good idea.

Less than USD 50, same rules as above + convince me you are going stick around: once I have some spare cash and after trying your demo.

More than USD 100: you have to convince me.

I'll also be happy to pay reasonable amounts for feature keys etc as they become available.

I'm more hesitant to anything that stops working if I can't pay subscription for a month but in some cases like the old WhatsApp it was a no brainer because of the low cost and low friction.

Edit:

ways to mess it up even if the product is otherwise perfect:

- Windows only or Mac only (I'm primarily a Linux user.)

- Chrome only. (I always was a Firefox guy, but it is now at the point were I actively avoid Chrome)

Rdio. No other streaming service has come close to the UX perfection of Rdio.

When they were both new, I tried out Rdio and Spotify. Rdio won my subscription hands down and it was long after they'd shut down that I finally bit the bullet and subscribed to Spotify.

Queue management, albums as first-class, actually useful social/discovery features—so much good. RIP Rdio.

Glad I'm not the only one who thought that.

Yes, the auto play recommendation algorithm was soooo good.

I miss the social features of the original del.icio.us. Pinboard is okay, but it's much harder to find other people to follow.

I miss it too because of that I am working on Zibillion as a hobby project currently, https://zibillion.com/ but it is not there yet.

Video game arcades. They were amazing during their heyday, but I was also young. I want both of those things back!

Douglas Adams:

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

> 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

> 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

> 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Look up "barcades" in your area. There is a big resurgence of them. It's old school arcades in a bar, basically.

They still exist, but they're incredibly niche nowadays. Arcades are split up into two categories: small stores that cater to niches, like classic American games or imported modern Japanese games [1][2], or huge chains that specialize in 'family entertainment' [3] that include bowling and food.

The arcade isn't dead yet - there's still plenty of enthusiasm for rhythm and fighting games, which I believe is actually growing. At least among my friend group, it's much more rewarding to face off in person than to be trashtalked by some anonymous gamer on an online console gaming service. Also, when the arcade closes, there's nothing better than just sitting around and chatting for a few hours. Arcades make a fantastic "third place" [4].

[1] http://freeplayrichardson.com/

[2] http://arcadeufo.com/ (disclaimer - owner of this place)

[3] https://www.round1usa.com/

[4] https://www.pps.org/article/roldenburg

Wow, I've completely forgotten about ArcadeUFO. Completely fell off my radar which is strange since you guys have more legacy than institutions like WNF and, in some sense, Next Level. I even still see mentions of 8otB here and there. You had a F-Zero AX machine at one point, correct?

I definitely agree arcades make a fantastic third place. Planning trips to e.g., Arcade Infinity (RIP) or a Round 1 is one thing, but having a place outside of school and home I can routinely drop in and feel welcome even when I have no particular business to do there was why I kept going to local mall Tilt arcades (and Borders bookstores while I'm at it). Even as more machines go online in Japan[0] or scenes establish other events for their game[1], I still think they're a worthwhile addition to a community.

[0]: https://medium.com/@sasuraiger/japan-trip-2017-2018-online-f...

[1]: https://fugutabetai.com/?postid=581

http://www.gallopingghostarcade.com/

In Bury, England there is something called The Arcade Club[1] which is a two-storey factory converted into an arcade. One level is all retro games and the next is PC, Xbox, PS4, Wii-U and VR. It’s incredible.

[1] https://www.arcadeclub.co.uk/

There are several in my little tourist town on the New Hampshire coast - on the street that runs along the beach, among the souvenir shops, pizza places and so on. They're a place where kids too young to go to the bars hang out in the evening or if it starts to rain during their day at the beach.

And then, of course, there's FunSpot a little further inland which is basically arcade heaven.

Inflation changes things. 25 cents back in 1984 would be worth about $2.00 now.

Not in the US.

$0.25 in 1972 (Pong) = $1.48 today $0.25 in 1978 (Space Invaders) = $0.95 today $0.25 in 1984 = $0.60

http://cpiinflationcalculator.com

Though now cabinets are bigger and the controls are more sophisticated.

I used this one but must have done something wrong. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com

A nice one no one seems to know about is near Seattle in Monroe WA. Called "let's play Cafe". I used to take my son there to teach him video game history.

Move to Tokyo!

Adobe Fireworks.

Easy, intuitive vector-based editor with bitmap support. Ideal for creating/editing images for UIs.

It worked the way I expected an image editing tool to work. The complete opposite of Photoshop and Gimp (I don't understand the mental model there).

Sketch is a decent replacement—although there are some UI decisions I don't agree with—and I believe Figma is also very similar.

Adobe really screwed up letting this die, now they've only realized it was a mistake, and released XD which is so far inferior to Fireworks

I miss Fireworks too, but Affinity Designer has become my go-to for all things vector design.

Director was amazing as well

This. I still have the CS6 installed and use it often.

> Adobe Fireworks

Oh man! Such a joy to use.

Former Fireworks user; now happily using Sketch.

I miss Adobe Image Ready and Macromedia Freehand. And Macromedia in general. And buying software, instead of this crazy rent-to-pay model.

I have a lot of love for Sidecar. When I first moved up to SF, 'ridesharing' was truly in its infancy as Uber was still Black-car/Taxi only and Lyft was still a part of Zimride. Uber might have taken most of the market while Lyft might have won as the 'not-Uber' but, having had all three in the early days, it really stood out to me how much Sidecar was innovating ahead of the other two product-wise, only to be immediately copied thereafter and eventually driven out of business. Off the top of my head, they were the first to debut real time price quotes, line/pool service, some kind of delivery integration, and if I am not mistaken was the original 'rideshare' wherein a regular person could pick up passengers. Might be a few more I'm missing. I've always held the belief that they had the best product team of them all in the early days.

Have you hear about Via? Unfortunately it hadn't reached SF yet, but it's active in NYC and I LOVE it. Super friendly drivers, very efficient and pretty cheap. Don't know how they preserve these low prices for so many years but...

Virgin America- not perfect but when I was flying BOS<->SFO a lot it was simply amazing. One of few corporations that felt like it had soul. The seat back ordering system made things so much better. Not to mention decent internet on basically every flight. I looked forward to flying. Def cried a few tears losing them.

AIM - settable status plus chat that almost everyone I knew was on

Early to Mid 90’s Radio Shack. Felt like culture was growing, in a good way

Apple Newton - stupidly ahead of it’s time and for all it’s flaws, still one of the best note taking paradigms I’ve used. Continuous scrolling plus shape/text recognition and vector editibility, multi copy-paste via drag and drop to edge of screen and decent assistant logic as well.

VX was the only airline in recent times I actually look forward to flying with. I dreaded most of the others.

Sony Walkman music players with long battery life and without massive screens [1]. Particularly the stick style with a built in male USB connector.

I still use one every day, but it's starting to show its age and I know that one day something will give. The battery life has slowly degraded and the buttons are a little more wobbly than they used to be.

The beauty of them was that they consume little power, are very simple to use, are very rugged and are exceptionally reliable. It did one job and it did it well.

[1] https://www.sony.com/electronics/walkman-digital-music-playe...

I miss DabbleDB greatly.

I once made a real meals-and-visits schedule signup sheet app for a sick relative (dozens of folks signing up for slots over days, etc.) in about 20 minutes, including learning a bunch about the tool.

Ultimately it "just" made CRUD apps, but it made the process amazingly fast. The equivalent of updating a Django model and view was usually a click or two with no waiting, and the only typing was to name things.

This was a cool illustration of the Smalltalk programming language. I never found a use for Dabble (well, until recently when I went looking for it), but the demos were magical.

The demo is worth a watch if you haven't heard of DabbleDB before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY

Airtable?

What are the current alternatives? Airtable?

Yes! It was amazing. It makes me want to learn Smalltalk (the language which it was written in).

Not the product itself, but there were only two features of Spotify around ~2010 that I used, which have both been removed:

* Set as Current Playlist: would allow me, with one action, to set the next playlist, but not interrupt the current song. Song would finish playing, then only song from selected playlist would follow (until I'd set a new 'Current Playlist' again).

* Empty Playlist: I used to have a plsylist called NULL with no songs in it. Combined with the Set as Current Playlist feature, this would allow me to, with one action and without waiting, let the current song finish, and then not have another one start (e.g. to go to bed, play a game, or to focus more intensely). Nowadays you cannot have an empty playlist anymore.

In order to achieve the NULL playlist you could have a playlist with one song which is silent.

Or better yet -- make it that sound TV stations play when they've stopped airing for the day, for some extra nostalgia.

Ah but that would keep the audio devide alive, and my headphones )both the wired pair and the bluetooth pair) would keep emitting that white noise.

But that's only a problem if I want to keep them in. Otherwise Cage's 4'33" might well do ;)

Google Music has the first, possibly the second

I also used to use "Set as Current Playlist" all the time. I do not understand why they removed it.

Sounds like you used it as a replacement for a sane queue system. Rdio had it and it allowed to persistently queue songs, albums or even playlists across any rdio client.

LucasArts and the best adventure games ever made, like Monkey Island and Grim Fandango.

totally agree - also the Indiana jones games

SGI Cosmo Worlds.

This was a VRML authoring tool that worked on a PC. The interface was like a cut down Maya in some respects but it was also 'better than Maya' if you wanted a real time scene graph with scripts to make it interactive with sounds and content updated in 'frames' outside the 3D window.

This software was well ahead of its time and more fun than Lego. However, much like Lego, you did need to have a child-like level of creativity and ability to get absorbed in non-addictive play. Games can have you hooked for hours, for you to feel guilty for wasting time. Spending the same time creating virtual worlds in Cosmo Worlds was just as absorbing, however, you could feel quite proud of what you made at the end, much like childhood Lego experiences.

Despite how brilliant Cosmo Worlds was and how sophisticated one's creations were, the problem was that the rest of the world were not on the same page. They were happy with faux 3D and a flat, 2D world, particularly when it came to the web. We are still stuck in the boring 'Windows' 2D world and do not appreciate what the people at SGI were trying to do.

Sunrise calendar app.

I’m a naturally unorganized person, and sunrise was honestly the only calendar/task tracker that has ever kept me organized. I loved it and really used it, but it was bought by Microsoft and shutdown.

They integrated some parts into outlook, but outlook is used for work and I don’t like to get my work schedule and personal schedule mixed up. Sunrise just worked and I really haven’t found something that’s helped since. I’ve paid for some other calendar apps and they just aren’t the same. RIP

What was so special about that app?

I've checked info at wiki and it seems like it was just calendar with daily schedule - birthdays, meetings etc. Nothing extraordinary. The same functionality you should have nowadays in every calendar app - Google, Microsoft etc.

It was the same functionality, however the UI was better imo and the platform integrated with almost every service. And since I use Microsoft for work and Google for school for me it was nice to have one with everything I wanted in it. Maybe any 3rd party app would have worked that way but I haven’t found it.

It’s been awhile now, but I remember it took me about 10 seconds to add an event which was really nice and all the fields I cared about were right at the top, so I didn’t have to stop in the middle of a conversation to actually add an event.

That’s what I remember anyway, technically pretty much every calendar app has the same functionality, sunrise just had great UX/UI, and integration so I could avoid the big players.

The scripting language for the Macintosh's rolodex-type database (Hypercard) called "HyperText". I'm not aware of any more natural language scripting tool before or since. I can still write code in it, some two decades later... For example: 'put the first character of the third word of line 5 of card field "sometext" into theChar' or 'put the value of card field "typehere" * 1.25 into theValue'

Reading about hypercard/hypertalk, especially the pages devoted to it in whole earth's Signal [0], is one of those things that makes me nostalgic for an era I never experienced.

[0] http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1300/

I was on the HyperCard 2.0 team. I'm also nostalgic for it. It's a shame no one has created anything as simple and useful for generating web pages.

Agree. For a few years, almost anyone could create a filing system for whatever they were interested in or depended on. An online version would be dope. (I see I called HyperTalk "HyperText". Oops...)

One could argue that things have regressed:

https://twitter.com/ecgade/status/1029795513514774529

When I saw this article in the HN list the first thing I thought of was Hypercard. I started using it a uni to do text analysis for my sociology thesis. I went from knowing nothing to a visual word mapping stack in 2 weeks, my only programming experience prior to that was apple2 machine code and AppleBASIC nearly 10 years prior. With that experience I was employed by the university to renovate their Stacks. Now I do programming everyday, and am constantly nostalgic for the something like the Hypercard experience. I search all the time for language alternatives and as interesting as it is, no languages are as intuitive as HyperTalk. Just as I was telling myself Hypercard could be my career, Apple discontinued it! There were some companies that jumped to 'replicate' it but I suppose they didn't have the genius of the Apple engineers, they weren't the same. Even today I have to build a web app and I'm agonising over having to do a HTML interface and hook up functions and the ajax in javascript and do all the sql for the database, its just so repetitive and boring and hard, not fun. Anyway nice choice.

Though HyperCard itself is long gone, the HyperText language did inspire AppleScript.

Is there a site that anyone knows of that allows people to track if a consumer item has been discontinued and what the best alternatives are?

This is less about tech products/services/games and more about stuff you'd buy at Walmart or the grocery store.

For example, my wife has used a very specific eye liner for years in a certain colour, and then the brand discontinued the line with no equivalent replacement and we can't seem to find a similar one (so many wasted trips to various stores). We had to google it and find a few other folks complaining as well on various random forums that it's been discontinued just to confirm. Same goes for specific products in sensitive-skin editions or that one flavour of something you like.

I was thinking of maybe making a site like this, but figured I'd ask the crowd about what I might be missing or if anyone else has the same issues and would be interested in using it?

Why does it always feel like the one thing we like and use regularly is the only thing that no longer has shelf space at the store?

Interesting idea, an alternativeto.net style site for consumer products with crowd maintained lists. I'm sure you could affiliate link to a lot of the products to help finance the effort.

FoxPro.

So far, the dbase family was the best, IMHO, for make business apps.

I'm working slowly in a modern take:

http://tablam.org

Starting from a relational language (not a rdbms!) that be as usable as lua/python. Eventually, add a interactive jupyter-like terminal and Access/FoxPro like IDE environment to make forms and reports. Integrate sqlite and maybe lmdb or similar.

Yep... a lot of things!

Pebble, they we're hands down the best watch I owned. The Apple watch needs a constant charge and really is it's own phone outright. Pebble was the watch that worked with the phone and the design seemed to understand (especially the Pebble time steel), that the watch needs to be an assistant, not the main thing.

Psion[0] - in particular the Series 3c[1]

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/26/psion_special/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3

You have no doubt heard of https://www.planetcom.co.uk/ , a psion alumni project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29

Clementine and MusicBee are pretty good replacements

The Graffiti shorthand for Palm PDAs [1]. It still far outshines any handwriting recognition systems available on modern devices both in terms of speed and usability.

Also, not really an individual product, but I miss durable consumer devices - I used a flipphone that had survived being run over by a tractor for years after the fact, and my old laptop could probably stop a bullet. If we could develop touchscreen glass that didn't break on a strong sneeze, I would be delighted (though the phone repair industry, perhaps less-so).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29

OMG I miss this so much! I had a Palm Zire 72 growing up long before getting an iTouch and it was amazing to use. Writing messages took longer but felt more natural back then, these days it'd probably feel too clunky though.

For the keyboard, see: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/a/42032

Alas, it seems to have been removed from the Google Play Store. I'll have to see if I can find it elsewhere, preferably malware-free.

I really miss AIM. It's great having real-time conversations with people you know are online. Facebook Messenger is similar, but it doesn't fill quite the same need.

I think that feeling has more to do with the way people used the internet than it does with AIM itself. Nobody "goes online" any more. Now we're always online, so it's less special.

But statuses were VERY useful, and we have no analog today.

Glitch by the makers of slack. I had two usernames which I played under to experience the various talent trees. The game is in my opinion unique up to this day as a shared multiplayer world where the odds of meeting a random who was friendly and helpful was very high.

I would spend an hour or so each day meeting random people and we'd go off on random quests, exchange materials, grow things together.

The game may not have survived but the game itself certainly left a mark where it proved that a community based game could be peaceful, cooperative, and a metric ton of fun. Even more importantly, the game was amazing even if you met only two other real players in a single hour session. I could go on for hours praising everything that tiny speck made with glitch.

It would be a dream come true if Stewart used some of those millions from slack to revive glitch as a pay to play game so that the game is self supporting. There are a lot of us who miss the world of glitch terribly. Good times. Sniff. Good times.

I miss a functional democratically elected government. Too bad it was discontinued years ago :’-(

Direct Democracy.

We had that 2500 years ago and it lead to the most amazing flourishing of culture, science, arts etc ...

It has not honestly been tried since then. Maybe it became impractical because states grew too big. Now with the internet it could become practical again.

Unfortunately it was opposed and subverted in the Pirate Party. I was shocked how many people are opposed to true democracy. They seem to confuse individual ignorance with the wisdom of crowds.

Working quite well here in Switzerland...

Please elaborate

I think direct democracy in the States would be fatal

Squaresoft, the company that made Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears. After merging with Enix, their games just lost that magical touch they had.

Firefly TV series.

Comme des Garcons Kyoto perfume.

And, of course, I second the MacBook '14-15 revival! Touchbar begone!

Love Squaresoft. Also love Enix though, they did some great games (E.V.O., Robotrek, Actraiser, DragonQuest, Bust a Groove). But I agree, after the merger, they both seemed a little less interesting and unique. I always loved how quirky all the games were.

Also, Koei games are amazing.

Try playing Octopath Traveler, it gave me that classic Squaresoft feeling.

Google Inbox. It's still around, but not for long.

I tried switching to gmail after I heard the news. Terrible experience. Wound up deleting a bunch of emails I had archived from Inbox. Switched back, I hope the sunset is a long ways off

Switching back to Gmail feels like going back to stone age. Inbox ui is so much cleaner.

Try superhuman - it feels like this but better (faster, more keyboard shortcuts, filtering), imho

I love the idea of Superhuman but haven't been able to get an invite. Do you happen to have one (email in profile)?

Same here!

Same here.

There are alternatives to Google Inbox (Spark, Superhuman - that I just discover) but I don't want to add a third-party that can read my emails.

Given that Inbox is sunsetting and the trust issues I have with Google in general, it's the first time since I created my Gmail account that I'm considering moving to something different.

If Fastmail or Protonmail had the Inbox features such as Snooze and grouping of emails with the quick "Archive", I wouldn't hesitate a second.

Impressions Games. Made the Caesar, Lords of the Realm, and Civil War General series of games. I put thousands of hours in on those games. Most of them are now on GoG, but my favorite, Civil War Generals 2, is still not, and is very fiddly to get working on modern OSs.

The old HP. The one that designed and built wonderful calculators like my ancient HP 42S. The calculator that still works 25+ years later, and just needs the occasional purchase of a few button cell batteries to keep it going.

The old HP probably would have been able to give Apple a good run for their money in smartphones and laptops.

I miss the REAL ThinkPads from 2011 and earlier with REAL ThinkPad 7-row keyboards.

The ThinkPad 25 Anniversary Edition is a step in good direction but Lenovo does not plan to introduce more of them.

Same with Dell D630 with extended battery that was in front and server well as palm rest, very nice piece of hardware.

Same with ThinkPad X301.

Not to mention SparcBook or PowerBook ...

Napster, Gnutella, etc... There are a lot of modern improvements such as much faster internet, much more storage, etc... Bittorrent doesn't quite achieve the easy discoverability of new content. I think it is time for a new piracy paradigm.

Eudora! Like, classic Eudora. The only good email client ever.

Came here to say the same thing. So amazingly fast, and the absolute best for filtering, sorting and searching through your email.

Mulberry Mail!

Opera! Like Opera 12. The only good email and nntp and rss client ever. Full text indexed search speed and huge folder handling...

Wunderground. Whatever they've done to the site in the past few years is just terrible.

I think it was bought by IBM which is what screwed it up

The downhill slide started when The Weather Company bought it in 2012. TWC’s site was useless for all the ads at the time and that’s largely what pushed me to search and find Weather Underground. After the acquisition they plastered Weather Underground in ads as well. IBM hasn’t helped them, but they didn’t make them much worse either.

The 10 day forcast chart still seems to work decent, but it feels like someone didn't like the short page view times, not realizing they had short view times because the display was so perfectly concise and convenient.

The downhill slide has been tremendous. But they still have that one graph that nobody else can match.

I could not agree more.

The app is also terrible now... Wundermap -> Storm -> now whatever it’s called... worthless app now.

Bump, actually. The other day was trying to transfer files and contact info and it's still an annoyance.

I came here to say this. Nowadays I use magic-wormhole and nitroshare, but when it comes to transferring Android to Android, Bump was the easiest.

I'm pretty sure Google bought them, and I was hoping they would actually do something with the technology, but nothing ever came of it.

There was a discussion the other day that the Bump team merged into Google Photos, which is certainly a creditable application, but not maybe as distinctive as Bump was.

Sort of tragic that the company folded, could have been a nice lifestyle app for someone I think.

RoboDJ, an old Winamp plugin.

I have an absurdly large music collection, and tend to listen while I work. I tried doing the 'just queue up albums and hit play' model. Random songs I'd picked up from nowhere, or albums I'd forgotten I'd got, just slipped out altogether. Shuffling the whole collection means you end up listening to a lot of mediocrity.

RoboDJ let me score each song (with default values for unscored content), then auto fed my playlist with a weighted average. It wasn't perfect - it could crash and wipe your library, and its maths model contained a basic flaw which caused averages to drift off. But it provided a really pretty good experience of having a personalised radio station, and did a much better job of normalising content across slightly inconsistent tagging than any other library plugin I've used.

I've now got some really complicated smart playlists on iTunes which almost do as well, but they're much less powerful. Plus Apple pushed through a change in a software update a while back which stopped anything but trivial smart playlists updating on the device, which kills that unless you sync every day. Not great when you're travelling and the massive library is on the home NAS. Plus, that iPod classic isn't going to live forever.

One day, I'll find the time to write the player app for Android that'll replicate RoboDJ, minus the dodgy averages, plus some extra features I wanted. I know what I want, it's not that complicated a tool at its core. But there's always something more important than 'slightly nicer auto playing music' to write :-\

Opera presto. I only realized how "close" I was to my browser in every aspect it worked when it became unusable due to age. I was quite surprised about that discovery, since other switches I made in the past (windows to Linux for example) seemed much larger. I'm still recovering from this loss. ;)

What is your opinion of Vivaldi?

Opera (presto) was snappy. In Vivaldi, there is a noticeable lag and the user interface written in Javascript simply doesn't measure up to a native one. The interface itself is rather nice, but the perception of latency ruins the overall experience, even on my PC with reasonably powerful specs.

It's chrome on steroids. I use it mostly on my laptop, with chrome exclusively for google services.

While it's trying hard to please old Opera users while at the same time moving forward and introducing new ideas, it's just not feeling like home. I like that it's making "power user" features easier to access than Chrome, that's one of the things I got used to with Opera. But overall it feels a little slower, which might be attributable to the JS user interface, or just in general that it's quite fat, being based on Blink. Especially opening up new windows feels really sluggish. There isn't many pages left on the web that do that, but you run into those every now and then. I think FF and Chrome "fix" this by just opening them as new tabs, but Vivaldi tries to restore the old feel of having those simple UI-less floating popup windows; with mediocre success.

I still use Opera 12 alongside of Vivaldi and Firefox at work just for fun, it's fine for browsing status pages, cgit and similar things on our intranet, and with those simple pages it's notably faster than anything else on the market. Navigating the history is another big offender here on FF/Chrome. Clicking back multiple times in Opera will instantly restore any previous page, there is no perceieved delay or re-layouting, which just feels "right" and so much more consistent than any modern SPA that tries to achieve the same in millions of lines of Javascript.

I could come up with a bunch more examples, but that's already more rambling than anyone wants to read I guess. :-)

Skype before Microsoft got their hands on it.

What's wrong with skype now ? I think they've done a good job with it, plus it's a nice platform to test their experimental bot stuff on.

Small iPhones.

Held on to my last SE until the cracks were too many and I had to put pressure on the cable to get it charging...

Did you try using a safety pin to remove dust from the USB port? Works everytime with a bunch of friends who had an SE but could not charge it properly.

Same, just did this the other week.

Wha! I'll try this in the morning, I've been still using it on the side.

I use tooth picks for this purpose :)

Dental picks

Amen

The Print Shop : that tools allowed to print lots of stuff like cards, banners, etc. But what set it apart IMHO, is that it was soooo easy, so rewarding. Kids could use it. And it had a style of its own (that's so much cooler than printing stock internet photos).

All 4th gen languages efforts such as powerbuilder, dBase, etc. I still feel like they were on the right track.

Windows Phone on Nokia Hardware. Have extensively used both iOS/iPhone and Android/Xperia since my last Windows Phone and neither come even close to WP usability, and although the sense of quality the iPhone gives me does match what I felt with Nokia, nothing has come close to matching the 1520,the best mobile device I've ever used.

Shame that there are no alternatives in mobile OS market. WP was a really good attempt with a realistic chance of success.

DEC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation

I always thought they were really cool.

Though admittedly this might just be nostalgia as a DEC server running Digital UNIX was the first system I got to write "real" software on as an adult.

DEC running VMS was my first real programming experience... FORTRAN 77.

DEC was awesome. VMS was the foundation of Windows NT as well.

Standalone Google Talk app, back when it could still federate with XMPP.

I'm so bitter about this I still run an ejabberd server for a close group of friends (things like central message archive or carbons finally work, and there is conversations for android)

All nationally emblematic products that have now be sent to China for production. (I am Swiss, so when I see a pure "Swiss product" actually made in China, I feel uncomfortable about the marketing trying to highlight the Swissness of a Chinese product especially when they are considered luxury: Bally shoes, Sigg bottles, ...)

A US state went so far as to ban sale of US flags not made in the country. It was seen as a xenophobic statement then, but starting to change now.

You have to watch this "Confederate shop supplier from China" (Whole video is amazing): https://youtu.be/RDd10-poMm8?t=900

Sega in the game console business (dreamcast).

Eudora circa '96 or so. I loved that it had personality. If you started typing without any window open it would beep for the first several keystrokes and then a dialog would pop up after a bit that said something like "You can continue typing but no one is listening right now."

In later versions it was changed to some terse message like "No window open to receive input" and it popped up once for every keystroke, instead of waiting til the 5 keystroke or so.

1.) The old Google before they messed up search and went so far that they needed to remove the slogan about not being evil.

Stumbleupon. I remember spending hours discovering all sorts of strange and niche sites, that I would never have found otherwise. So much esoteric and random stuff came up, and sent me down many rabbit holes that changes my life such as learning about DIY electronics etc.

I forgot how fun that was! I'm checking out their new site right now!

One discontinued product that comes to mind - and is missed almost daily - is Evernote's Clearly. Nothing else comes close for simplified reading in the browser. Pocket does the reading experience well, but items have to be added to its archive in order to be read, and its ability to consistently capture articles in full lets it down (in contrast to Clearly and Evernote's 'simplified article' view, which lets users easily adjust the scope of page elements to 'capture'). It was also Clearly's styling that gave it an edge over other on-screen readers (light-on-black styling shouldn't be a competitive advantage for something so simple, but it is for simplified reading plugins).

I miss Borders bookstore, especially the flagship store in Ann Arbor. That was a great place to explore what I don't know.

As far as big box bookstores, I miss Borders too. Don't care for Barnes & Noble for some reason. Borders just felt...better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitz_(drink)

Funny story, when he was trying to recruit me to change majors to Chem. E., the head of that program talked about how he reverse engineered how Orbitz was able to keep the balls suspended, using GC/MS and NMR and all these fancy tools.

The next booth over was Food Science. They laughed so hard at him and said "You could have asked us, it's xanthan gum"

I still have an unopened bottle, it does not look very tasty anymore though.

Are the little balls still intact or have they disintegrated?

They are intact but have gotten darker in color, they are no longer the bright orange you would have hoped for.

https://i.imgur.com/Pu3mNsb.jpg

Irix and SGI computers 90s era design in general.

Sad to see Silicon Graphics so far down this list.

IRIX Indigo Magic Desktop was the Rolls Royce of user interfaces in an era when Apple computers couldn't even do multi-tasking and PC's still had an interface (Windows) that sat on MS-DOS. Linux was a 'toy' with a GUI that was positively 'off-brand' and the Sun version of X-Window was just plain awkward, clunky and slow. Meanwhile, on SGI computers, you could have a 'CPU eater' 3D rendered desktop background with real-time video compositing in 3D scenes going on in your programs.

SGI computers were also 'useless' at things normal people used PCs for. So no spreadsheets and certainly no word-processors. Games were also lacking, yet so many games were built with SGI machines.

Regarding the design of the boxes, nothing exuded power and awe in quite the same way. Racks of SGI hardware made a place 'mission control', other stuff is just data centre plumbing that just does not project a futuristic vision of cool. To take an automotive analogy a gaggle of SGI machines was more like a Formula 1 grid of cars whereas any other computers en-masse just looked like a supermarket car park.

There was something accessible about video and 3D on the SGI machines that has not been seen since. Hardware may be better today but it does not compel you to want to play with it.

I blame Microsoft for destroying SGI even though there were problems with the wider SGI management and business model. We ended up with a 2D flat web whereas had SGI been around then I am sure that things would have been 3D, in the browser, as per the awesome demos that came with the machines back then.

SGI's 3D APIs, OpenGL and Open Inventor, were sublimely innovative. Some of us are even trying to keep Open Inventor alive:

https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/wiki/Home

https://common-lisp.net/project/clive

I wish more tech businesses were about the greatest common factor, and not the least common denominator. If I could find a place like SGI to work, I would camp on their doorstep until they let me in.

The thing about SGI back in the day was that it was more fun to work in TV, movies, geology, weather forecasting, serious computing at a respectable university and so on. I never aspired to work for SGI but knowing how to turn the behemoths on and type a few commands kind of got me working in disciplines that normally required extraordinary levels of study and professional dedication, e.g. meteorology.

I am glad that Open Inventor lives on!

However, IRIS Explorer, remember that one? That was awesome and I wish it existed today. My peak time for playing with IRIS Explorer was when I had my first SGI box, an early purple box Indigo. I think I had the super-deluxe 'Elan' model, but that was still under-powered for Iris Explorer. In latter times when I had a small fleet of Onyxii and O2s at my disposal I didn't have access to IRIS Explorer.

NAG in the UK bought IRIS Explorer and didn't port it to more modern computers. At least this was a better fate than what happened to CosmoWorlds, this was sold to Computer Associates who killed it.

In an odd way I think that the world was better when it cost $100000 to have a decent computer on your desk. You valued your time more.

I miss pretty computers. Everything is black and has been for years. Well once in a while you see white or grey, but that is about it.

The imac did some neat colors, but they SGI/Irix colors were pretty without screaming toy.

I really wish RethinkDB the company with all founders and engineers would have survived. Their documentation, polish, and web admin interface was heads and shoulders above.

The concept of changefeeds at the database level was super powerful. ReQL was nice to work with and using a ORM such as thinky[1] was a pleasure.

If only (I know it's not easy) they could have inked some enterprise deals and focused on the business and generating revenue.

[1] https://github.com/neumino/thinky

RethinkDB was forked by some members of the community as RebirthDB and now it is being merged back to the original repository. Lot's of exciting stuff is going on on that front and those guys need help pushing the newest release.

Me too, do you think you could use it at all in production now or would you not touch it?

I was looking forward to trying out FoundationDB before Apple shut it down.

Apple recently open sourced FoundationDB https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/

2.) WhatsApp, the paid messenger app with a decent approach to pricacy, before Facebook bought it and made it into a metadata harvesting engine.

Gmail (pre-August 2018)

Have you dug into the settings? I hated the change too, but found that the aspects I most hated (mostly the hover buttons that made everything jump around when used with the preview pane) were configurable.

The aspect I most hate is the load time. Takes about 6 seconds to start displaying emails. Is there something to be done about that? (Note: I'm using Firefox on a Mac.) I've been mostly using the "basic HTML" version, which loads in less than a second.

I'm using Firefox on Windows 10. Loads in about 1.5s for me. Obviously it'll depend on PC and internet connection. I would try it with addons disabled though. (Restart with addons disabled / in safe mode in the help menu.) In the past I've found misbehaved addons (particularly the god-awful skype one that used to always force install itself) would bring gmail to a crawl.

If we can consider discontinued features as part of 'discontinued products', examples that come to mind are things like boolean operators on eBay (also coinciding with a time when eBay search results weren't filled with irrelevant junk). And index dates on Google search results.

Crashplan for home. Still haven't found another unlimited plan with linux client.

Yeah, same boat here. Currently using the discounted small business version. Not sure what I'm going to do once that expires. I haven't decide whether it's worth the time investment to use something open source like https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy with eg Backblaze B2, or if I'll just bite the bullet and pay the full $10/month for Crashplan SB.

I moved to Duplicacy with paid Google Drive backing store. Very very happy. Unlimited storage with Linux client, and doesn't have the horrible resource consumption of Crashplan.

(I paid for Crashplan SB for a while but dropped it when it was unable to restore my data. Test your restores!)

After using the discounted small business version till this month I finally moved my backup to: restic [0] + B2.

It was really just a 30m job and I have a setup that backups 4 times a day and prunes etc twice a week. You might want to checkout their forum if you need any help. I had tried Borg and duplicity [1] too but found restic to be perfect for my need.

I also have Tarsnap[2] for the double backup of my most important data.

[0] http://restic.net https://github.com/restic/restic. This project also lists alternatives with supported feature list https://github.com/restic/others

[1] http://borgbackup.org, http://duplicity.nongnu.org

[2] https://www.tarsnap.com and has a simple but functional Qt GUI https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui

Came here to say this... had various family members using it, clients, etc.

Backblaze's "we don't support Linux desktops because they'll abuse it" policy is pretty annoying, in context.

I miss the multiple destinations and "backup to another computer on the same lan" feature. Had mutual between the grandparent's computers, an attached USB hdd and then both to the cloud. Easy. :/

Switched them over to Duplicati + b2 and it's much cheaper for the amount of storage they're using. Still safe in a catastrophe but regular "oh I deleted that file" restoring won't be so fast.

edit: oh and the continuous backup thing and monitoring emails if it stops working was nice

Backblaze B2 supported by several linux clients I believe. https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-d... B2 is not unlimited by at $0.005/GB it's pretty cheap.

Macbook pros when they had a good keyboard!

They were called Powerbooks back then :)

Old school Radio Shack.

"Resistor? Sorry we only sell Sprint phones."

Actually, the last time I was in one (Fredericksburg, TX maybe 2016?), they still had components. The folks in the store had no idea what they were, and there was a really bad selection,

but there were parts.

Haagen-Dazs black cherry amaretto gelato

Oh, shit, that was discontinued? I thought my grocery store just ran out.

It doesn't seem to be on the retired list:

https://www.haagendazs.us/products/retired-flavors/

Friendly's Forbidden Chocolate

Friendly's Maple Walnut

real chocolate chips (irregular broken fragments) in Breyer's Mint Chocolate Chip

generally, ice cream without emulsifiers and thickeners

The Axis-49 [1]. Ninety eight velocity sensitive keys in a hexagonal layout, ready to be remapped to Wicki-Hayden. I discovered them after they were discontinued and when a used one popped up after several years I bought it, but I'm really disappointed these didn't catch on.

[1] https://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-49

Have you become proficient with them? I thought it was an interesting idea but the quality of the hardware is really pretty poor (buttons get stuck as you press them) and the hexagonal layout does not really seem that easy to learn / operate.

> Have you become proficient with them?

After about three weeks of playing around with mine I was better at playing melodies on it than I am at piano, and I've been playing piano for decades. https://youtu.be/3Qyg914392Q https://www.jefftk.com/jeff-band/marcell.mp3

>the quality of the hardware is really pretty poor (buttons get stuck as you press them)

I haven't had that problem; hopeful that I don't!

> the hexagonal layout does not really seem that easy to learn / operate

Are you talking about the Harmonic Table layout that it ships with? I don't like that layout at all. I converted mine to Wicki-Hayden: https://www.jefftk.com/p/rearranging-axis-49-keys

Yeah I was talking about the harmonic table. Good tips, I'll give the wicki-hayden layout a try!

Mac OSX Snow Leopard. Butter smooth and uncluttered.

aah the good old days

Google Finance. I really liked the interface and ease of use of tracking tickers and looking up balance sheet metrics. I also liked tracking a personal portfolio.

Same. I've learned to deal with finviz.com instead, but its not 1 for 1..

You should check out bravos: https://bravos.co/

The interface is great, and it was started by people that really miss Google Finance.

Zeo sleep monitor, a low accuracy low precision low cost EEG-based sleep monitor, which worked a lot better for me than the movement-based systems. What I mainly cared about was tracking when I actually went to sleep.

Was looking for this. Completely agree.

I really wanted a Pebble Time 2 ):

Right behind you. Can't get behind of any of the wearables on the market atm.

I bought a Pebble Time Round just before Pebble went under. I honestly think it's the best smartwatch made yet. Nothing matches it in terms of aesthetics and functionality for me.

I still use a Pebble SE almost two years in. The original pebble was painful to wear due to it's bulkiness, but the SE was getting into the right dimensions and weight - paired with a light woven watchband I'm comfortable wearing it during day and sleep.

I have a Pebble 2 HR and two OG Pebbles. The app store and most functionality is still active through http://rebble.io

If you want a Pebble, definitely get one. I wear the HR daily, and will wear it until one of us dies.

Not tech related, but I could go for some Altoids Sours.

On the tech side, I switched from a Pebble Time to an Apple Watch. I like all the fitness stuff, but I think I would've liked a Pebble Time 2 with fitness stuff better.

Glad I'm not the only one who though of Altoids Sours

THEY WERE DELICIOUS. And apparently not popular enough, for reasons I'll never understand.

Related, if they could put back lime Skittles instead of this green apple nonsense, that'd be great. What do people have against citrusy candy?

The Amiga, can't remember another time when computers were that much fun.

AMIGA!!!

One thing I really wanted, but never picked up was a Little Printer from BERG. [1]

The only thing holding me back was the use of thermal paper, but the overall concept is excellent for us compulsive list makers.

My dream is to find a narrow impact printer (2" wide) that I can print to via network or USB.

[1] https://vimeo.com/32796535

Rdio. I’ll just leave it simply at that.

Friendfeed. The community [1] a small group of bioinformatics folks started there was just amazing. We were never able to recreate it.

1. http://cameronneylon.net/blog/friendfeed-for-scientists-what...

I really wish the Logitech Y-RAU7 wireless keyboard was still around.

1. In my opinion, its ergonomic/split keyboard design is much more comfortable than the standard 108-keyboard layout (which I find causes wrist cramping). 2. The mechanical keys offer key feedback that is often not found in a wireless keyboard 3. The four programmable buttons, the seven media buttons, and the sleep button offer convenience without being obstructive. 4. Even being a wireless keyboard, it is responsive enough for playing most video games. 5. The overall construction of they keyboard is quite solid, without being overly bulky (though it is slightly larger than an average keyboard). I've had mine for more than a decade.

In my opinion, this is one of the best keyboard designs I have ever come across. I like the design so much that I have one for work, one for at home, as well as a backup for at home in case it ever breaks.

Macromedia Director. Probably an unpopular opinion but I loved it.

Flagship smartphones with a plastic body and a removable battery. For those who do not need the waterproof feature, and need the ability to go from 0% to 100% in a few seconds.

The samsung S5 line has headphone port, waterproofing, removable battery, sim, micro sd. Why compromise?

Old dumbphone indestructible nokia phones. That was a thing. I usually have a dumbphone at in case my smart one fails, but the dumbphones of today are just like cheap junk..

The old crispy bubbly apple pies at McDonalds. I think they are still like that in Europe. I had one in London a couple years ago and almost got a dozen to smuggle home.

Yeah we still have those in the UK, they're amazing. Where are you from that they discontinued them?

Grooveshark and Songza; I'll skip over Grooveshark since there's already a post mourning its loss.

I liked Songza's non-tailoring to me and more to the situations (rainy day for rainy days, party for late nights, even novelty playlists for Game of Thrones, musical scores from movies, etc).

When Google Play Music acquired Songza, they "sort of" integrated these things, but now just a shell of its former self where the "themed" playlist names stayed, but now its an echo chamber of stuff I've already heard. Sadly, there's no discovery anymore. And while it seems contradictory, I don't want to look for it. Grooveshark's radio stations and Songza's original playlists had a way of playing songs I never heard or haven't heard in a long time.

Oh, man.

Polaroid SX film

Nikon CoolScan 9000 scanners

Clorets gum

Fruitips popsicles

Panago's "Mediterranean" wings

GE Bright Stik tubes

Moves app

Pebble Time

Glitch (@stewart's game between Flickr and Slack)

Dropbox Packrat addon

Winamp

ICQ

Infiltration zine

Shift magazine

I didn't even have to put effort into this list; it's way longer in reality. However, making it made me sad and frustrated.

Old MathCAD in the Windows 95 era was an amazing intuitive visual math program. Helped me learn and I miss it whenever I have to delve into heavy math of any kind.

Modern tools have regressed a lot UI wise. I feel like excluding easy but shallow web and mobile UIs we are in a UI dark age.

Bolo by Stuart Cheshire. Originally release for MacOS in the early 90s. Ended up playing that game for a decade before switching to the good WinBolo Clone. Honestly one of most fun multiplayer games I’ve ever seen that has somehow faded into history.

Oh man, probably the most played game of my childhood. Certainly my first networked multiplayer game I wonder if there are communities out there still playing it.

Turntable.fm was the funnest and IMO the best way to discover music and users had an incentive (gamification) to play new interesting music.

Dr. Dobb's Journal

And Game Developer Magazine... between these two I must have spent a year reading magazines on the toilet.

and Byte magazine.

small consolation: the back issues are available on the internet archive

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine

Original Gmail [+].

[+] https://i.imgur.com/aJC5NK1.jpg

You're in luck - Gmail html version is still available https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en

Macromedia Fireworks makes a cameo! Talk about nostalgia...

SimCity up until SC4.

EA really dropped the ball there, completely destroying a classic. No one ever asked for a multiplayer version. And most just want to build a big city, not the tiny shthles it only lets you build now.

If they would've iterated carefully on the fundamentals and religiously focused on optimizing the code to allow for absolutely enormous sprawling cities, people would've loved it and kept buying new versions.

On the off chance you (or someone else) didnt come across it: Cities Skylines is worth the price. (though i didnt stick with it through the expansion packs)

https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines/CSCS00GSK-MASTE...

Cities: Skylines is an amazing city builder with a massive library of mods. Check out r/CitiesSkylines for screenshots of some of the cities people can build--some of them look like photos of actual cities!

I miss Umano. It was an app that collated a feed of human-read articles. It’s one of the few iPhone apps that I was willing to pay for a yearly subscription in order to unlock some premium features like offline listening.

Great UI and all of the readers were top-notch with new content every day. Haven’t found a replacement that works as well or where the voices used are as good. Sadly, Dropbox acquired them and then shut them down - really wish I knew why they wanted them in the first place. Just hope the founders got some decent $$$ from the deal for their excellent product.

Weatherspark.

It's still around but a mere shadow of its former (flash-based) glory. Using every other weather site is agony.

Yes! Their charts/graphs were amazing to play with.

Using it today feels like a "Show HN" MVP version of their full product.

I love weatherspark. Never used the former version so can’t conplain

The mailbox that was acquired by Dropbox. They invented the “swipe your email to do things” trick and then no more. They have clients on iOS and Mac that work seamlessly. I still miss it very much.

Metrowerks CodeWarrior.

Xcode and Visual Studio have come a long way, but in its day CodeWarrior felt so much more efficient and productive than the alternatives; imagine what it might be today if it had continued!

Wow, you miss CodeWarrior? That is so surprising to me, I hated it :-)

Fair enough -- different tools suit different users! :)

The Commodore Amiga. The desktop would have looked much different had they stayed alive. For better or worst.

Be and BeOS!

HaikuOS (modern rewrite of BeOS) just had its first beta release!

https://www.haiku-os.org/

Before they added the POSIX layer and got desperate. Their OO framework the entire OS supported was amazing, but POSIX just meant it was another also-ran: Oh, look, we can run GIMP too... great Be, bravo... sigh

Aardvark – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)

Ubuntu Unity. As soon as it got mature (some last Ubuntu releases including it) it became the best desktop environment I've ever seen. I was not amazed when they gave up Gnome2 and started Unity (I've moved to XFCE for many years) but learnt to love it later and the move to Gnome3 feels a disaster to me (IMHO Gnome3 is great for tablets but horrible for desktop). Now I've reproduced an environment very similar to Unity with KDE5 and enjoy it but I would certainly love Unity to actually come back.

The whole digital audio player / MP3 player product category, before the middle-end got hollowed out. As far as I can tell, the choice is now between dodgy sub-$30 knockoffs and gold-plated audiophile gear. Since the buttons fell off my Yepp, I'm much less able to carry around my music collection than I was ten years ago. I used to get 30 hours of playback from a unit that was only slightly bigger than its double-A battery. (So what if I could only carry 10 hours of music? It had an FM radio!)

3d Doritos. There was something about their packaging (some aerated black plastic) was bad for the environment but they were really good and they could find some other way to package them

They still sell them in Mexico, and you can buy them on eBay

The Acura Integra (or anything like it 3-door hatchbacks are all mostly gone).

TV's with more than 3 HDMI inputs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_CR-Z

Problem is, the integra had independent wishbone/multilink suspension, that was much more expensive to produce and maintain than todays McStrut cars. There will not likely be an economy car with amazing suspension in that manner again until electrics are cheap, due to price factors alone. Even BMW moved to struts. Thankfully the new Mx5 are just as good as they were in the 90s fo those who lack cargo... and passengers.

Sunrise Calendar. They shut down the service shortly after being acquired by Microsoft for the Office 365 team and I haven't found a calendar app I like as much as that one.

the older models of the the ThinkPad X line by Lenovo. The current model is just a fancy ultrabook instead of a working machine. Althoght they have a similiar product (the X1 line) they decided to make the current line useless with less battery power, no Ethernet jack (in corp environment this is essential) and with almost zero options for upgradability and fixability. Really miss the older models like the X240, X200 and even before which was just sturdier.

The Sunrise Calendar <3 It was close to perfect for me. http://blog.sunrise.am/

DabbleDB, it was such a great way to play with data til you knew how it should be organized.

The original PlayStation Portable. No other console I've had so far has been quite as fun to play, mobile gaming just isn't the same, and I had a lot of fun learning to crack it and install pirated games. I used to take it on road trips and even watch full movies, it was a great way to pass the time as a kid. I had it repaired twice before it finally gave out, and the nostalgia sometimes hits and I consider getting one again.

Have you tried the Nintendo Switch?

Physical qwerty keyboards on phones. I still miss the Motorola Droid 3 after all these years. photo: https://bit.ly/2yXQWU3

On-screen keyboards are good and all, but there has never been as great a feeling as sliding out a full keyboard and wailing on it. I doubt I'll ever be as fast with an on-screen interface as I was with actually typing on a physical keyboard.

1password stand-alone desktop version with no cloud connectivity/saas requirement

Would KeePassXC work for you? There are mobile apps that read the same format it uses.

I used to use an old Linux file manager called DFM back in 2002 to 2006 or so. Doesn't seem to be online any longer, but this looks like a copy of the original website sans graphics: http://distro.ibiblio.org/amigolinux/download/DeskTop/IconMg...

I have the source code saved somewhere.

This file manager had one nice feature that I haven't seen again: the use of a plain text config file to set which commands are used to open particular files. It might have used regex. You could also override the configuration manually by file too in the properties dialog box. If I recall correctly the icons were also set in the same file and also could be manually set.

The file manager is obsolete otherwise, but from time to time I have wanted to have the same feature again. You could easily get very precise this way. I use Thunar now, but maybe there's another file manager that can be configured more to my liking.

You can use Ranger (https://github.com/ranger/ranger) which is available on most Linux distros nowadays. It is fully hackable (written in Python). You can change the file association (which command to open which file) by editing ~/.config/ranger/rifle.conf. More details here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ranger#File_association

Thanks, I was hoping someone would be able to point me towards a similar file manager!

Palm Pre. I'm not a die hard Palm Pre fan but powered up the first gen recently and one could see the beauty of the user interface.

I know this will not be a popular reply but I miss the Apple Newton dearly and wished they had the chance to ship a 3.0 version. The Newton OS 2.0 was so much better than what came before it, I think the message pad was the best personal computer I had in terms of actually being personal. It felt like your machine in a way that modern smartphones don't.

I miss companies being able to put out one really good product without being bought out or trying to become a huge corporation. Github, Nest, Waze, Oculus, it's a long list. I think we'll lose SoundCloud to a buyout within the next year. Roku and Sonos are decent holdouts but I'm sure they're getting offers all the time.

Chrome Bookmarks Manager. Since its removal I haven't been able to find a good alternative for saving bookmarks on Chrome.

Agreed, I loved it. I moved to Firefox with their Quantum release, and I barely even use bookmarks now because it's such a clunky UI for it.

Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0. Easily most pleasant to hold mouse. It's heartbreaking to use anything else after that.

I'd think that the rise of gaming industry, and especially competitive games, would bring us more refined forms of computer devices, but in fact, every new shiny gaming mouse I tried wasn't even close.

Since no one else mentioned it, Yahoo Pipes.

Indeed!

Black Isle Studios (Fallout 2, Planescape:Torment, Icewind Dale) and Troika Games (Arcanum, Vampire the Masquerade)

Don't forget Baldur's Gate?

Sure, but IIRC Baldurs was developed mostly by BioWare, Black Isle/Interplay were publishers.

Aha I did not know that, thanks!

Craigslist personals. I met my wife there almost 10 years and 3 kids ago. Quite a bummer that it's gone.

Palm/HP WebOS

I loved my Palm Pre.

I really miss the multi-tasking dynamic where you could have 'stacks' of documents within one app (e.g. browser tabs).

It's amazing that webOS pretty much nailed multitasking on mobile years ago. It took Android and iOS several years to copy the cards interface, and even then it's a half baked implementation.

Definitely Palm, the Palm Pre, and that tablet that I so hoped for, but never got my hands on. The whole system was amazing, the phone was amazing, Enyo was amazing. The whole company had charme and a great product and a great outlook. Up until HP came by and smashed them into pieces...

Scrolled through a lot of other comments to find this one.

Palm Pre was the first true smart phone I ever owned and I still maintain it was the best - way ahead of its time with the card interface and all you needed to code apps was HTML/CSS/JS.

I am super jealous of the other timeline where someone else (or no one) bought Palm and they continued developing WebOS and releasing it on new hardware for the last 10 years.

iPhone SE

Microsoft word 5.1 for Mac.

That was my favorite “word processor”. Great balance of features, ease of use, and reliability.

Turntable.fm

Came here to say this. It was such a fun service.

I still spend time in Plug.dj on a regular basis. It doesn't have the population or momentum of Turntable, but there's still something magical about social music.

Youtube without ads and easy download.

youtube-dl[1] always seems to work for me. Can't help with ads, though premium has been great for me.

[1] https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/

Youtube-dl and ublock.

Adding these to ublock as custom filters removes a lot of extraneous stuff in the player, too:

    youtube.com##.ytp-pause-overlay
    youtube.com##.ytp-title-channel
    youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
    youtube.com##.subscribecard-endscreen
    youtube.com/get_endscreen?

Try peertube.

Hmmm, I'll have to think about that one some more.

Ironically, what directly comes to mind for me are two mice:

- The Genius DX-Eco

- The original Roccat Pyra

As far as I can tell, both aren't actively produced anymore. The DX-Eco was an attempt to power a wireless mouse with a capacitator that is loaded to full charge (~4h of usage) in 4 minutes. The Pyra was just a great mouse (and its successors have lost a lot of its great features): Optionally wireless, running on easily exchangable AAA batteries, not too big, good sensor, not too pricy (~30$, if I remember correctly), didn't need the crappy Roccat driver to work properly. I really wished I had bought a second one when mine broke.

On second thought, combining the two would sound even more exciting than bringing a single one of them back.

Logitech MX Revolution mouse. I’ve tried their subsequent mice but none of them feel quite the same.

The gaming mice are pretty nice, but like you said, they are not the same.

Never understood how a company could do a product so well and then regress from there.

Atchison topeka & santa fe railway passenger service

I wish I had gotten the chance. I got to ride the Southern Pacific and Rock Island from Tucson to Topeka, but I was only four at the time, so I don't remember too much about it.

I really really loved del.icio.us RIP. Today I am using the alternative https://yabs.io - but I don't understand why something so good was closed and now needed to be developed again.

IBM ThinkPads

The Lenovo ThinkPads are surprisingly not that bad

But they get worse every generation. Sometimes they undo something horrible (like when they replaced the function keys with a touch strip on the X1 Carbon, or got rid of the track pad mouse buttons), but other mistakes remain (like changing the keyboard to the same style as everyone else, instead of the Selectric Typewrite shaped keys). And they used to be the poster child for good Linux support, but that's starting to drift away also (things like the fingerprint reader).

I'm typing this on a X1 Carbon Gen6 running Arch Linux. I don't know about the fingerprint reader, but everything else works 100%.

I got an X1 Yoga (2017 model) last year, and if I can't use bluetooth headphones while on wifi under Linux. Soon as audio starts playing, the wifi will cut out. Problem doesn't occur under Windows. (This is with the latest Fedora, haven't tried other distros yet).

The problem goes away if I switch the wifi to a 5GHZ band, however that isn't an option except at home.

The Lenovo consolation prize does little to fulfill my want for a modernized classic IBM ThinkPad.

Lenovo has become so bad that Linux-oriented shops have started pivoting to Dells.

They’ve confirmed (and had a horrible history of) bundling spyware into the firmware.

That was the IdeaPads, not the ThinkPads. Very different computers made by competing divisions of Lenovo.

“I stole that with my left hand, not my right. This one is totally clean, I swear!”

I want to trust them, they make better machines than Dell. But I feel like I’d be lying to myself if I did.

Sun Microsystems https://web.archive.org/web/20090228143021/http://www.sun.co...

Screenhero, which got acquired by Slack and integrated into it. It was great as a stand-alone product which I used not only for remote pair coding but also for just calling friends and family whenever we needed to share control of one screen.

Ultima Online 2

* Sun Microsystems (not oracle)

* Psygnosis (before becoming subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment)

* IRN BRU candy bars

I'm surprised Sun wasn't posted sooner.

Can we add Solaris Zones to the list? I mean I know they're not technically dead, but it can't be long till it's gone can it?

Used to love Obitus by Psygnosis

Widget Workshop [1]

It was a electronics tinkering game where you had different components like timers, light bulbs, switches, gravity testers and what not, which you could connect with wires and build interesting things.

They had several demos that you could check out, like poem generators, dog barking sound generator machine and other interesting stuff.

As a kid, it really helped fuel my imagination to make new contraptions out of random things.

I haven't seen an alternate that works on modern systems or phones. The original version, I believe, worked only till Windows ME or so.

[1] https://youtu.be/Vc9F_QayL5s

I really loved the incredible machine[1] Apparently there was a version released in 2011.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine_(series...

everything about the 2012 mbps. the iphone se. the ipod. the headphone jack. mag safe.

Creature House's "Expression". It was a natural-media vector art program, with amazingly snappy performance on early-2000 era machines. They got eaten by Microsoft right around the time I stopped being a broke college student and could actually buy a copy, so I ended up learning Illustrator inside out instead.

I still miss its "freeze layer" feature. Got a complex vector layer? Freeze it: the program would cache a bitmap copy of the whole layer with whatever complex transparency you had, lock the layer for editing, and use that cached image for the preview render as you worked.

Screenhero used to be great for remote pair programming, but as its gone to premium slack only I haven't been able to use it since. I'm surprised there haven't been any copycats made since it was acquired

https://tuple.app/ is aiming to fill this gap

Zite. Nothing has come close ever since for dropping random articles in front of me that were perfectly relevant. Flipboard was no good and nothing ever worked. The amount of times I tweeted an article and somebody asked me "how did you even find that?" was a clear indication it worked well.

https://readwrite.com/2014/03/05/why-zite-flipboard-acquisit...

Canv.as by m00t from 4chan, it was really fun remixing stuff and a lot of it was very wholesome and light hearted.

MP3.com, as there was a lot of strange unsigned music on there. I lost my archive when CD backups failed, such a shame. I had so much good stuff.

Geocities, but I think I miss more the web as it was before it got mainstream, back when it was weird and you had to hack up some HTML to make a 'personal website', and kids would put comments in saying I WORKED REALLY HARD ON THIS PLZ DO NOT COPY :)

Though there's a lot of great stuff now, Youtube is amazing.

KDE 3.

I used it for years, it was a good and mostly stable desktop environment. Then with KDE 4 they added all kinds of fancy features that added instability, strange error messages and then made them non-optional.

It’s IPC system dcop was the most shell-script friendly ipc ive seen

and GNOME 2 at that!

Gnome 2 has been forked into Mate.

https://mate-desktop.org/

KDE 3 has been forked in to Trinity.

http://trinitydesktop.org/

Oh I didn't know that... I'll try it out!

Google Wave! Turned into Apache Wave, which officially retired Jan 2018.

SageTV. You could hook up an HD cable box and record shows to a PC or server with a simple, intuitive interface for later viewing. Basically turned your PC or home server into an infinite PVR. It was wonderful. Google purchased and shuttered them a few years back. For a while I tried a regular pvr + Slingbox, but found it to be such garbage that I basically just stopped watching most sports rather than deal with the hassle of trying to use it. (For anything besides sports the streaming options work alright now.)

It looks like SageTV was open sourced: https://github.com/google/sagetv

Interesting. I wonder if I still have the hardware around here somewhere. Not sure if it's worth the time at this point though.

Plex and silicon dust does the job for me.

Doesn't offer most cable sports though; with Sage I could record anything on cable and playback on any device.

I bought a laptop last week and made sure not to get a Macbook for the simple reason that I cannot stand the keyboard. I got a Dell line business laptop (Latitude). Although it’s priced more highly than other laptops with the same specs, the keyboard and feel of it are unbelievably good. It’s probably my favorite dev machine I’ve ever used. I know the attitude towards Windows machines, and maybe even Dell, but I would suggest people walk into a store and just feel one of these in person. It’s incredible

Manual typewriters. I have two that I use every week, and they're wonderful distraction free devices that don't require power.

Seems like the the best manual typewriters were made in the sixties.

Windows 2000 and Windows 7. Those were the most polished versions, IMO.

Even though Windows 10 is technically better, the unpredictable experience brought about by the update system is a step backwards.

Fatbabies.com was the scathing gossip site for any Internet company bad behavior. During the original dotcom boom, guessing if you knew anyone described was a common drinking activity.

Screenhero.

Unfortunately, when Slack acquired it and supposedly included the functionality, it just wasn't anywhere near as good.

Still, to this day, there's nothing as good as Screenhero for remote pairing.

It isn't quite the same, but I've had great luck with a combination of VS Live Share (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliv...) and then Zoom or some other tool for voice communication.

Unfortunately, there's no substitute at all for having access to the entire desktop, with super low latency and built-in voice.

ScreenSharing.app is about as good as it gets, I've found.

Kazaa, not so much wish it was around but I wish the experience was around. I would be up late downloading all sorts of random stuff some really strange videos people made, or some music someone created or modify. Didn't have the legal hurdles people have with youtube or soundcloud so you would find some really random or strange things people created. "If_You_Like_Korn_limp_marilyn.mp3" was all the info you got and you would never know who the band was or anything.

Yeah, I miss the concept of a special folder that is shared with the rest of the internet. Drop files in there and they are automatically discoverable by random strangers. Like a massive common drive that we all have access to.

My first iPod Nano with a scroll wheel. I could adjust the volume and scrub back/forward through a podcast without looking at the device. All it did was play music and podcasts, and it did it very well.

Now I have an iPod Touch. It's heavier than I want in my pocket for running. It has a bunch of apps besides music which I don't need, and which necessitate it having a lock screen. And ironically, because it has a "touch screen", you can't use it solely by touch.

Thinking Machines.

That company was too far ahead of its time. The trends in process technology steamrolled their architecture, but if they were around now they could probably do incredibly well.

The Sony Ericsson K550i, amazing phone, with a beautiful camera cover which opened the camera app when flipped. Also supported J2ME apps, which was the best part about it.

Commodore International

Incredible Universe was an IKEA-sized, mid-90's electronics retailer that existed before the dominance of Best Buy. It was an amazing customer experience and you could demo pretty much anything in the store. They famously had video game consoles even in the child-care area. Every DIY PC builder, circuitry geek and soldering enthusiast went there for supplies. Eventually they started hemorrhaging money and sold out to Fry's.

Soluto - it profiled your Windows boot time and did some other performance monitoring. There are alternatives (e.g. Task Manager's Startup tab), but I feel like they lack some of its killer features:

  - Option to defer process start, rather than disable it entirely.

  - Aggregated statistics on what other people did, and recommendations for a curated set of processes (e.g. Spotify, Steam).

  - Generally nice UI design.

Crazy Eddie

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Eddie

The email-based reminder system / assistant "Sandy", it was so nice to just forward emails to "her" and get reminded. https://lifehacker.com/321644/sandys-your-personal-assistant... Shut down with virtually no equivalent replacement. :(

the Xtranormal website where you could script cartoon movies of anything for free.

I clicked through to say Xtranormal. Here's one of my all time favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc64xWxRsag

Most of the successful products/companies that got acquired and destroyed by larger players. I want them all back as independent companies.

Taptu (rss reader app)

Google news and weather app (not the horrible new Google news app with all those annoying animations)

Flagship/higher-end phones with a headphone jack

Panoramio. I used these photos in Google Earth heavily before every travel. Street view is a poor replacement, I'm missing so much stuff that was off the road. I could see what the beaches look like, what's the terrain at some point, path through wood. Heck, even just frequency of Panoramio photos at some location would tell me what's interesting to see there.

It seems mapsights.com was able to backup most.

Jinni.com was an amazing movie/tvshow recommendation service. You could enter the movies/shows you've enjoyed (or just choose one particular) and it would recommend you other movies/shows you may like and specify in what particular aspects are these similar to your choice/preferences. I haven't found any alternative nearly as good so far.

11 inch Macbook Air. Best laptop I have ever owned

Give a 12" MacBook a try. For me, that is the best laptop I've owned.

Thanks! The reason I haven't is I feel they went too far in the power/thinness balance. I never thought "if only my MacBook was a bit thinner". So I get less power and have to pay 1/3 as much again. The new ones seem so underpowered. Also I am not a fan of the new keyboard and they got rid of the mag connection for the power cable. Not convinced so far.

https://del.icio.us/ it was a link-sharing site that used to attract great contributions. It was bought by Yahoo who for reasons best known to themselves shut it down just as it was at its zenith, and just before link sharing sites became the most important thing on the internet.

kimonolabs – cloud-hosted web scraping, configured in a browser-based UI. It would let you make a GET request to your scraper, which would live-scrape the web and return structured data. They were acquired by Palantir, and kimonolabs shut down. http://www.kimonolabs.com/

The text editor "Brief" - by UnderWare iirc - in an age when humour was still allowed in commercial software. Was a fully programmable editor for DOS - a sort of cleaned-up, nicer UX riff off emacs. The programming language was its own lispish thing, though in later editions they also glued on a C-like language that did the same things.

Moves app, it was a fitness tracker startup, bought by Facebook and recently closed. I was logging all my movements with it as a lifelogging app. It worked pretty well and I had 5 years of my data there. Maybe it wasn't the best fitness tracker app but it was the best movement tracker. Now I am using Gyroscope but the data is kind of lost.

I forget what it was called, or even who had it (a social media site?, maybe Blogger?), but it was a service that slideshowed images that users were uploading. It was a good way to waste time. It was a site that seemed to have users that would post interesting images, and it was fun to see some of them. You could pause it, I believe.

The Here One earbuds by Doppler Labs.

Absolutely the best BT earphones I've ever used-- and I've owned about 25 pairs in my life.

Eudora email client. I still use one of the last versions. I don't know how I'd function without the filing systems and filtering features, as well as the easy to manage multiple POP accounts ("personalties") and the templates ("stationary"). It just makes juggling everything so much easier.

Google Reader. I know there are many better options, but I had all my RSS there and it was really easy to use for me.

SGI. I wish they'd return, and build laptops and pocket computers. You know, give Apple a run for the money ..

Mailbox. I've missed it less since I discovered Spark, but Mailbox was the OG app that made me not hate email.

The Nokia N9. The swipable interface was a joy to use, and the always visible clock/notifications was ahead of its time. The window/app management system was also heaps better than anything today. It was a travesty what happened to it, and I still unreasonably bitter about the whole thing.

Nokia N900 with Maemo 5! Physical keyboard. Camera with a shutter slide (I'm still not comfortable with my phone having 2 cameras exposed at all times). Highly customizable... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

turntable.fm. Amazing product/community. Better for music discovery than anything else I have ever used.

Commodore Amiga

Honestly? The Pantech C300 phone. Any more, anytime I'm anywhere I don't care about interruptions that aren't urgent enough to warrant a call or text, I wish I was carrying a ridiculously tiny luddite flip phone rather than an entire pocket full of expensive fragile computer.

Google Reader

I loved the simplicity and the usability aspects of it. I use Feedly these days. But, I hope reader was around.

Pschitt!

This is the absolute best soda drink, low in sugar and very refreshing.

It’s not really discontinued, but it’s basically impossible to get in the US; extremely hard to find in France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pschitt

The Kmart that used to be by my house

[powerbuilder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBuilder), for business crud apps. i think was version 11 when it peaked before going all web/.net

Sparrow Email Client (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(email_client)) - Simple, fast, easy-to-use email client. As good as it gets!

Still works on macOS Mojave, and I use it everyday. True email client not relying on any third-party API / company to work.

Gnome 2 with Beryl. Not practical but damn if that wasn't a fun desktop environment to use.

The Kawasaki KLR 650 and the Suzuki DR 650. These make great, reliable long distance adventure bikes suitable for almost any terrain.

You may argue that these bikes are still in production, but in Europe its all but impossible to lay hands on them due to EURO5 emission norms.

BufferBox. I was, and still am, so pissed at Google for simply buying them just to shut them down. It was so convenient to get packages shipped to a box rather than to my apartment, which invariably ends up with me having to go to some distribution centre.

The original Motorola RAZR flip phone. And in general, phones with actual buttons you can feel.

It boggles my mind we've been suffering with virtual keyboards for over a decade now. Surely someone will remove this pain? Anyone? Hello?

there will be a new interface for controlling your phones and future devices that doesn't require typing. I would hold out for that :D

Look at Neuralink

I had one of those, they were very satisfying. I've been considering trying out a Blackberry that has Android at some point...

Secret. Good for a quick social interaction but never led to long sessions like FB or Twitter.

The Next Thing - are the makers of CHIP and PocketCHIP. Such cool retro products. I still use my PocketCHIP daily. A tiny linux machine with a full keyboard. Products that are open to hacking and extension and give a feeling that anything is possible.

Wildfire, the phone system. Way, way ahead of its time. Microsoft bought it and dropped it.

Logitech Elite Keyboard for its volume jog and "mouse" wheel to scroll web pages.

I wish that Symbolics was still a going concern. I wish that openGenera was a going concern so that it could developed and distributed to run in a VM. The lisp machine computing environment still sounds so well thought out and engineered.

The Zeo sleep monitoring headband. As far as I know, the only consumer device that accurately measured and reported sleep stages based on actual direct brainwave measurement, and not just secondary indicators like pulse and movement.

Firefox OS, Windows Mobile / Windows Phone

Diversity matters, otherwise we loose standardisation.

I miss rdio, before Spotify. I loved how in Rdio, you could search for a song, and then the next song after the one you play would be from that album. In Spotify, the search results begin playing! It's so frustrating.

Full keyboard flip phones. That old Env3 might be the handiest phone I ever owned.

this! A decent full keyboard Android phone (even at the cost of a reduced screen size) would be fantastic.

Atari ST & Commodore Amiga

AudioGalaxy. So much better than Napster and all of the others around that time.

H.D. Smith perfect handle tools.

From my understanding they went out of business in the great depression. However their hand tools endure through quality and continued utility.

If you ever get to hold a he Smith 660 screwdriver it is a surprising joy

Aol instant messenger. I always thought that team was forgotten about during multiple buyouts. I had been using it since the 90's. I stayed logged in the night it shut down and was disconnected.

I miss being able to +1 a website via Google+. I never used the social aspect of Google+, but seeing +1's on a page was super helpful and was my way of giving a quick compliment to any website.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_text

Back in the day, to chat with a coworker you and him would connect into the same unix box and do `talk <username>`[0]. You didn't have to press Enter to send a message, the other person could see what you were typing on every keystroke. Like in Google Docs.

I probably only like this idea because it's different. The wikipedia article mentions that older versions of the ICQ messenger used to have this feature. I have no idea why they removed it but I'm guessing they it's because it was a useless source of complexity that no one was using. Another counterargument is that Google Docs actually stores all the information you need to play back the creation of a google doc[1] and no one really seems to use it besides teachers checking for plagiarism. This could just be because no one knows about it.

But it's still surprising to me that none of today's chat clients do this or even have it as an experimental option. You could use peer-to-peer UDP for real-time text and only provide delivery guarantees using your centralized service after the user hits enter.

It's difficult to describe, but I noticed chatting with people in this way leads to more abstract conversations, so you'd probably have a hard time adopting this with people that don't already trust each other. It's also frustrating to see how slow people type and everyone types slow because you're comparing it to speech.

It could be useful in situations where you need answers as fast as possible (think first responders), but it would be such a tiny improvement.

You could generalized this idea to any piece of human generated text. It would be cool if instead of just the finished text of a book we also had a list of every key stroke the author and editor typed and their associated timestamps. It would be like open sourcing a small part of their creative process. Such a fine grained revision history might let you clear up some ambiguities in the finished text. Beyond that, it's probably useless for creative writing since composing the book would become an artistic performance, which might take a toll on creativity. I still think about it from time to time. Storage is cheap, why not collect the data now and see if it becomes useful later.

We could have a Hacker News where you could watch me composing this comment, like in a Google Doc. And play it back after I had posted it. It wouldn't provide any value, but still, why not? We have the storage space. Why not have it as an option? For those who want to be a bit more "transparent" or just want to watch themselves type after they're done. I'd use it. Surely there's no drawback (besides performance/scalability and space) for simply giving people the option to not destroy information...

If you had this information for all the text you've ever written, you probably would want to keep it for at least a few files.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software) just do `apt install talk`. If you're on macOS, you have it installed already I think.

[1] http://draftback.com I don't know if it still works. I also don't know if Google stores absolute timestamps or just a history of edits.

Not only could you chat in real time, you could also share parts of each others console. When I was in school, this was very useful as most of my friends were older than me. A couple of them effectively tutored me over ytalk (this was before we had learned what screen could do, then we switched to that). ytalk was great for ad hoc chatting and sharing, though.

DEC Alpha

Visual Basic (the original version, pre=VBA that was embedded in office)

MediaMonkey, and the OCD of making sure every single IDv3 tag was correct and formatted to a standard. I think that's a big part of why I'm so obsessive over coding standards now.

- glitch (the game) - Ubuntu Linux with Unity - Posterous - Ducksboard

I'll miss unity too, allowing you to scale the resolution per monitor is something that gnome can't just do :(

last.fm in the pre-CBS era

Amiga personal computers were amazing, that's a pity there is no active development in the Amiga world nowadays and an Amiga is not a viable alternative to a modern PC/Mac.

Sparrow (email client)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(email_client)

Carousel and Mailbox by Dropbox. God i loved the design language and maturity of Dropbox as a company/product in the 2012-2014 era compared to the trash it has become now.

Ubuntu around 2010. It got fat and lazy after that so we no have to use xubuntu etc. for old pc's. Lots of PC games naturally: half-life, quake3, fallout2, gta2 etc. etc.

Simple, ad/tracking-free websites as the gold standard for the web.

Basic HTML, maybe a little bit of CSS and some rudimentary JS for forms and such. Hell, even good old frames. The frontier days of personal web pages, with questionable design choices, full of personally chosen content. Anything relevant to whatever interests, from Amiga graphics to ornithology.

I miss the simple web of the 90s, where you could have an open contact form (or even your personal email address) and a guestbook on your webpage, without it getting instantly spammed to hell.

Maybe I should get around to making my own retro-style webpage, hand-coded for old times' sake.

Google Moderator. It was a reddit-like service that allowed you to crowdsource popular opinions. We used it to pinpoint UX issues in the early days of our startup.

Miss Google Reader.

Now I have to host a miniflux to have relatively similar experience. Still, GR was much more convenient.

Miss Mr.Reader as a RSS client on iPad. Miss AlienBlue Reddit client.

Palm and the Palm Pilot. UI responded instantly to every input. 2 AAA batteries lasted a month. With years of heavy usage I never encountered a single bug.

Google Desktop Search

Macbook Air

Still avail at the apple store I think.

Will never forget being in the audience at the unveil, watching Steve Jobs pull it out of an envelope.

Rockbox supported music players.

The best music player I've ever had was Sansa Clip with Rockbox installed. Sadly they don't produce them anymore.

Timeful. By far the best calendar I’ve ever used nothing else even comes close. I literally felt an order of magnitude more productive.

The Spectrum ZX from Sinclair. I miss the immediacy of a blinking cursor, just waiting there for you next command. Simple and elegant.

Tilt payment app in Canada, we don't have half of the payment apps like Venmo in the US and it is quite inconvenient sometimes

* Psygnosis

* Amiga

* dumb TVs

* Blackberry OS

* Zune

* Bryce

* WordPerfect

* Gopher

Psygnosis and Metal Fatigue game <3

Rdio

Rdio! It's really a shame Spotify "won" the music streaming battle. Rdio was such a beautifully designed service.

Ducksboard, it was a prettier geckoboard alternative which worked better. Acquired by New relic to integrate into insights IIRC.

Roku SoundBridge M1001. Beautiful VFD display, simple to use, and no phone or tablet required.

BlackBerry 10 devices with physical keyboards.

Ambrosia software

They're actually still around and make iPad, iPhone games and have ported several of their utilities to OS X, but it's nothing like their late 90s heyday. Played the crap out of Escape Velocity, Avara, Barrack, etc. Learned to make website just to put a page up for my EV plugins (mods, addons? can't remember what they were called).

Old-style Heroes of Might & Magic by NWC/3DO. Versions > 3 look fancy but don't feel this magic to play.

I miss the old Mint app. The new Mint has one screen with nested navigations and four useless tabs that I don't use.

Topsy. Being able to see the tweets surrounding a keyword was so useful. as well as seeing the monthly trends in volume.

Pebble! The only smartwartch with a battery.

And the never released pebble core ! It would have been the perfect partner for running with GPS tracking and bluetooth music ;)

Tap Tap Revenge, Disney removed everything from app stores after buying out Tapulous for financial reason of the day.

Dr Dobb's Jolt Awards. There are still many technical books being published would be nice to have some curation.

Punchfork. Much better for recipe discovery than other sites I've found. It was integrated into DuckDuckGo, too!

Sunrise Calendar

The Sony digital headset AM/FM radio.

Sony.

Palm Pre and webOS. Form factor beat the Nokia N900 in portability and the OS was just as Linux-y as Maemo was.

Aces Studio/Microsoft Aces, responsible for the Microsoft Flight Simulator series, shutdown by MS in 2009.

I know this story! I was told approximately the following by someone who used to be on the MS Flight Sim team.

So years ago, Flight Sim was part of Home and Office, but they were in the process of moving over to the gaming division. Back in 2009, the call came throughout Microsoft that teams had to cut a certain % of their head count, it so happened that for Home and Office, the size of the Flight Sim team was about the % of the headcount that needed to be cut.

So the head of Home and Office didn't let the transfer of Flight Sim go through, and instead kept them in the H&O division as a sacrificial lamb. Thus, a perfectly profitable product got cut.

(Division names may be wrong, they change a lot over time)

Coke BlāK. It shouldn't have worked, it's a terrible idea... But why did it taste so incredibly good?

Yes! Part of the fun was figuring out what random bodega carried it.

ScreenHero.

Slack built it their app, but made it way slower and ruined the simple UI. What used to take 3-5s now takes 30-60s.

Microsoft Money. Very convenient and had good reporting. Mint is ok, but it's reporting is very weak.

hinv form SGI IRIX.

With 5 keystrokes you could see what kind of hardware you were running. Very handy to open a support case with a simple copy and paste.

SGI IRIX was the second Unix I learnt. Cool OS, Cool Desktop, and I miss the blue SGI Indy box my boss had... and that I inherited when he left the company.

Prismatic

It was an intelligent news reader that had amazing content discovery based on my interests and a solid UI.

four11.com, an early (1995?) opt-in contact directory.

Vaguely recall it supporting LDAP. When Yahoo bought it in 1997 they promptly shut off everything but the web mail, much like Comcast buying Plaxo a decade later and killing most of the utility of Plaxo once the deal closed.

Caselabs :(

(Sorry to be the bearer of bad news about their recent closure if you didn't already know)

I miss Mailbox. They had a Mac client and mobile apps that where best in class at the time.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Nokia N9 / Meego yet. Slickest mobile UX ever!

MySpace - social networking was better back before the facebook "real name" era.

Really? Don't get me wrong, MySpace did have its own thing going on back then, but was filled with creeps and strangers I'd rather not connect with it. When Facebook came about in my freshman year in 2004, it was a breath of freshair....now, not so much.

Ultimately, yeah, I preferred the random, weird, mostly anonymous interactions on MySpace to having my relatives and highs school acquaintances who I haven't seen in a dozen years stalking my Facebook page.

Fair enough.

Window phone

Anything related to RSS, XMPP...

I totally miss Pulse.me before Linkedin bought it and absorbed it Gravitonium style.

I actually enjoyed Google Wave.

95% of the time, I wondered what problem Google Wave was trying to solve. But that 5% of the problem where it was the sweet spot was amazing.

Rdio GrowlVoice (Mac-native Google voice client) Plancast Kimono Labs Yahoo Pipes

It's actually still available but not for a long time - Google's Inbox.

MSN Messenger and/or ICQ.

The entire minidisc ecosystem.

Bump. Exchanging contact information by bumping phones was fun and frictionless.

I really loved Detour. I feel like it could have changed the way people travel.

The old evernote, before all the crap.

And Google reader. Not perfect, but it was all I needed.

Google Reader and the old Google Finance (the stock screener was awesome)

Google's Nexus phones.

for the most part I think that OnePlus fits this gap, although they are maybe a little too expensive still to truly fit the same role

Limewire

i used to use an app or a feature for listening to music while going to sleep, and it would fade the volume to zero for the last bit of your sleep time setting.

none of the apps i have now do something like that.

Macromedia Flash.

Not the browser plugin, but the authoring tool to make animations easy.

Lotus Magellan. It made searching for things on my computer easy.

Google Reader. It's much faster and cleaner than Feedly...

Do soon to be discontinued products count? If so, Inbox (Google)

Detour (tour guide app)

CygnusEd on the Amiga.

The Macbook Pro chassis before the low-travel keyboard.

iPod shuffle before they stuffed up the design. That was the perfect device but of course they had to make it smaller thus the clip no longer held.

wired apple keyboard

last.fm. the best music discovery community. I wish I could afford to buy it back from whoever owns it now and is letting it die slowly.

kozmo.com

Xbox Kinect and Microsoft Lumia dual sim phones.

PalmOS, the touchpad was ahead of its time...

OpenSolaris from Sun. It was a joy to use it.

Commodore (brilliant makers of Amiga and C64)

Google Reader, QuarkXPress 3.2, Lotus Improv.

Google Wave, Google Reader, Google+, Schemer

First, Sun Microsystems.

Second, maybe Radioshack.

Third, the twillight zone.

Palm Tungsten T

gmane.org

for browsing archives of various interesting mailing lists in a nice way, with a lighweight, dense, and fast UX

Dedicated server software and lanning.

Electronics

* The Commodore Amiga * The Pebble smartwatch

Food

* Yonett Yoghurt (Hungarian)

Groove shark!

Radium paint kits for watch hands

Scary stuff. Good it's gone.

Flip phones, like the Startac.

The website tracks4bikers.com

Corn Flakes, the old recipe

Snapple Elements (beverage)

Rdio.

Grooveshark.

Sparrow email client.

de.licio.us

ffffound

TextMate (I know it’s still around)

bu.mp

Parse.com

PyGTK.

Ecco Pro

Same for me. I used to take all my notes in Ecco Pro, and I haven't found any outliner that comes close. A modern Ecco Pro with cloud-syncing would be awesome.

McDLT

Pownce

The old 7-row ThinkPad keyboard.

Also Rdio.

orbitz, those guys who made those weird drinks with floating things

The incredible machine.

I really miss Muxtape.

Mary Janes, the candy.

These are still around. You just have to shop for them a bit.

https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Janes-Old-Fashioned-Candy/dp/B01...

I just bought 5 lbs. on Amazon, but they are recently discontinued, so once they're gone, they're gone.

Rdio and Google Inbox

the Escape key, Apple

I know! I wish the non-touchbar models got 8th gen processor upgrades, now I'm stuck with the touchbar but it's not that bad I guess......

Gorillas.bas

BZFlag on networked SGIs.

The Nature Company

Palm Pre and WebOS

Google RSS Reader

Inbox, very soon.

Sunrise calendar

Sunrise Calendar

Google Inbox :(

PC Accelerator

Google Reader

Opera Browser

Wunderlist :(

google reader

Google Inbox

Google Wave.

Dropplr

Rdio :(

Rdio

Kozmo.com

Screenhero

Skype

Atari

Commodore

Pebble

Windows 7

HyperCard

Olivetti.

The zune.

Mouseflow

- MSN Messenger

- KDE 3

kozmo.com

Kozmo was two full evolutionary cycles ahead of its time, and pretty much defined peak optimism for what the internet could weave together. Things since have been [much] bigger in effect, but the ambitions for tacking non-existant infrastructure seem petite in comparison.

Cuecat::

screenhero

It was such a well engineered piece of software. It worked so effortlessly and without any issues. It was so good that I had it installed on my family members’ laptops as well and used it instead of FaceTime for simple calls

HP 200 LX

The Gemini looks interesting: https://www.planetcom.co.uk

Would love to try this.

The thing about the Hp was that I could open it up and make a note within seconds. Faster than any other known method. Including pencil and paper.

ep.io and PiCloud

google reader

what.cd

iPod nano.

del.ico.us

Some of the original Palm devices. I had a Palm IV or V and later a Palm Zire. Bought the former from Malaysia and the latter on a trip to the US. Both were great devices, considering both hardware and software. Instant booting back into the app you were last using after a shutdown, good bundled set of productivity / PIM apps, many third-party apps (I even tried Pippy, a port of Python for my Palm IV/V, but while it worked some, sadly, it crashed a lot), great-looking bright colorful screen (in the case of the Zire; the IV/V was black and white), light weight, the Graffiti handwriting recognition system, etc. One not so good thing was that net connectivity was via separate add-ons like small modems. This was before wireless Internet access became ubiquitous. Unfortunately, as often happens, later changes of biz and tech direction led to changes in products and to the company later closing or being sold, don't remember which. There was also a similar product company started later, called Handspring, IIRC by one or more of the founders of Palm. They too may have had a good product, one might have been called the Treo. Didn't get to try it. Lost track of what happened in that product field after that. Later there was Palm OS, which I think HP bought and then sold off, the usual corporate buy-keep-sell sort of story that happens a lot.

Thinkpad T60 series. 4:3 screen, great keyboard, thinklight and trackpoint.

4:3 monitors in general

17" macbook pro matte.

Yahoo Messenger Google Reader

I would have though ICQ or MSN messenger would have been the first one mentioned. Did you end up on Yahoo because all of your friends/contacts were on it?

Anybody from Germany want to ship me some Red Bull Cola?

If you're in the US, it's finally back in stores!

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