What closed-source, proprietary software that you once loved is not being developed/enhanced any more? What more features would you like to have it in the future? Would you pay for it to be resurrected?
* Microsoft Image Composer. A little known sprite-oriented graphic arts program. Combining its sprite model with the necessary several years of modernization it would have enjoyed had it not been abandoned would be impressive and easy to use.
* High-performance lightweight desktop email clients. I was especially fond of one named AK-Mail in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Blisteringly fast on PCs of its era, a modern incarnation would seem incomprehensibly fast compared to today's bloated apps that have difficulty keeping up with keystrokes on 8-core 3.5 GHz monsters. Of course, back in the day, desktop apps were built in systems languages and not in JavaScript.
* As a broader concept, a return to prevailing use of on-device processing and computation. Today the too-facile argument that data must be shipped off-network to a third-party cloud in order to be processed efficiently means this happens all the time without users paying it any attention.
[1] https://twitter.com/boxnwhisker/ (scroll down to see a bunch of examples)
In a similar vein, Palm webOS. I still maintain that it was several years ahead of its time with the whole "mobile apps using javascript" Enyo framework.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS
[2]: https://pivotce.com/2018/11/28/luneos-november-stable-releas...
It's not the world's most advanced mobile OS, but a good way to escape the Apple and Google ecosystems.
It is possible to purchase the OS and install it to Sony Xperia phones. https://shop.jolla.com
Google oozes from every part of Android. I very much doubt that installing LineageOS with closed-source blobs for most of the hardware makes Google/NSA/OEMs completely unaware of your activity. Moreover, Android is such a critical piece of software that probably every significant 3 letter agency in the world has some sort of a backdoor in/to it. Android suffers a security fiasco quite often and the update situation is quite awful. Lineage is also often not as stable as one'd like and the update process from one major version to another can be itself nerve-wrecking.
On the technical side, it is running ancient, out-of-tree kernels that lack a lot of the security work going upstream, which is especially concerning considering there's a new Spectre variant patch in practically every release.
Lastly, having the full GNU/Linux experience in my pocket is something I've always wanted.
Whether 'regular users' care about this is not particularly concerning to me, as I think the 'enthusiast crowd' is large enough to get the ecosystem started and once we feel comfortable recommending this to our 'regular' family members and friends, they need not to be aware of any of the additional benefits - it would be just the new smartphone that they have.
Nevertheless, I hope that Purism will be able to deliver a product which is as easy to use as a "normal" Android device with those privacy/sustainability features as a bonus. That way I might be able to give the people who ask me which phone they should buy next some good advice.
Not enough people value openness to make the trade off versus iOS and Android.
Does iOS not provide the privacy you need?
I think Purism would be satisfied with much less initial adoption on the overall market than somebody like Mozilla/Canonical. In short, they'd probably consider it a success much sooner. Also, both FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Touch were essentially adopting the same philosophy as Android in terms of having a closed-hardware approach and a software stack that while open in principle, was largely restricted on-device to run just the apps available in the respective app-stores, made for the platform specifically, which weren't that many.
Purism is making it so that practically any Linux app can be installed out of the box and with a small amount of work, any GTK3/4 app can be made touch friendly as well. I think this could provide them the app ecosystem head start they'd need.
> Not enough people value openness to make the trade off versus iOS and Android.
I think you're, sadly, right. However if PurismOS becomes a solid choice in its own right and then you have the privacy advantage on top, it might sell.
> Does iOS not provide the privacy you need?
Kind of, that's what I use now, however I have to trust Apple on keeping its word, which may be difficult considering they're moving more and more into "services" == rent seeking. Also, I have serious problems with the war on general purpose computing Apple is involved in and the closed nature of their software, where they have the ultimate say in what I can run on a piece of hardware I paid thousand pounds for to own, not rent.
Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then. Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison.
As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.
Also being able to select text from most anywhere was useful.
Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps. It's an instructive story of how an inferior product can win. I'm not saying that happens all the time or that it's inevitable, but I think it's safe to say that's sort of what happened here.
I wonder how much of it was because they had a sorry arse mobile browser? Not supporting ontouchstart etc events must have been a killer. MSPointerEvent was awfully buggy in the initial release, and what dev wants to rewrite their web app/page to use PointerEvent?
Why wouldn't you make sure Hybrid apps (Cordova etc) work well? Why not just copy WKWebView (20/20 hindsight now!).
Their equivalent of WKWebView is some sort of zombie IE11 version (not edge, with different features and flaws than IE11 desktop). Hideous.
Disclosure: we developed a Hybrid app for Windows Phone (based on Xamarin).
A far cry from developers, developers, developers.
Windows Phone though? Absolute pleasure to type on. I've never used any device that was easier to type on than my old Lumia 920.
This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what circumstances this would happen. I have hundreds of thousands of mails in tbird, in various accounts and folders. It's never struck me as slow. And its search (one of the features i use most) is simply fast.
The rendering corruption/lag issue with scrolling only happens while scrolling a message while in split-pane view, not when the message is maximized in its own tab.
I see it both fast and slow. Ironically it's absurdly slow on my 8-core desktop and just fine on my older dual core laptop (both with SSDs and same accounts, etc). Definitely weird, but this behaviour has peristed for years, so much that I had to disable TB features on my desktop just so I could type without stalling.
Might also recommend a disk check, perhaps FS needs fixing.
While helpful advice - if you need to do this manual maintenance regularly, the application is broken.
One day I'll finally take the plunge and jump to notmuch, which I've been told is the only email client actually capable of handling millions of emails without sucking.
Example: on two identical iMacs (4 cores, 16GB RAM, PCIe SSD) with about 100GB of local synced IMAP and the same accounts, it's slow for one user's iMac but fast on the other. Deleted TB and profile, fresh user, fresh TB install, fresh config; same result.
There is an Android launcher (launcher 10, i think) that offers tiles, and some of them even live tiles. It's okay, not quite the same slick experience though.
I don't have either of those problems, using TB for a decade. Not sure what your issue could be but first thoughts would be to compact your folders and if that doesn't help, vacuum the sqlite files.
I leave Thunderbird open in the background and come back to a notification that some component or other crashed. Happens all the time, no clue why. Email is common enough that I'd expect there to be a half-decent client for it, but I don't know of one...
(IRC is also common, at least among people who write code, but I don't know of a free client that isn't worse than running irssi in cygwin.)
I still miss having my next appointment on my lock screen. The Pixel gets this mostly right with calendar info on the ambient screen display, but still seems a bit shy about showing it.
Compared to Gmail or Microsoft Outlook online it's very very fast. Gmail lags severely compared to when I use Thunderbird.
To be fair, my work email account is an exceptional case - it's got somewhere around ~1 million emails.
Gmail, particularly with the new Gmail interface launched a few months ago, also sucks performance wise, but in different ways from Thunderbird.
The number of times where I am typing an email and somehow trigger hot keys is absolutely ridiculous. Mid-word and suddenly I've deleted the draft, changed labels, and muted & archived a critical conversation is absolutely infuriating. It's Outlook level bad.
So download widgets to show what you want?
It's effectively single-threaded, with all the I/O running on the same thread as the GUI (oh import is so fun). And you need to load the entire metadata database for a folder into memory at once.
I have looked into fixing it before, but it does require redoing pretty much the entire API, which means its several man-years of developer work. And Mozilla has never invested enough in Thunderbird to let that sort of work get done.
and while javascript is certainly one of the worst choices if you care about performance, it's also one of the best choices if you need to iterate really quickly (which I believe is very important in overall, especially for new projects)
I hope there will be lighter electron one day (I'm actually working on something like this already) but it's unlikely that people will start doing UIs in systems languages.
XULRunner does the same thing, includes, in addition, a full XML GUI language and assorted technologies and the full runtime distribution, on my Windows10 system, including debugging, crash-reporter aids, VC libraries, D3D libraries, consumes 72MB.
xulrunner may be a superior technology, but if it's a PITA to work with, then nobody is going to want to use it.
Documentation was poor or non-existent and IIRC the API was based on the half-baked XPCOM because COM and CORBA were all the rage at the time it was created.
That's absolutley not true.
"Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" has been published before 2004. It is still online: http://mb.eschew.org/
XUL (and assorted technologies) is/were broadly documentet on MDN.
When xulrunner was being developed there wasn't the same interest in desktop software. It seems like Chromium reached a point where you could build desktop-class software, but the distribution model wasn't right. Someone then decided to adapt Chromium to solve the distribution problem and you have Electron.
If Firefox had evolved to allow the tipping point experience that Chrome did, then you might well have seen xulrunner be that thing. It was years ahead of itself, but perhaps you could question the focus of the folks on the Mozilla side who were spread across so many concepts/ areas compared to the folks at Google - but I think that's for a different thread.
webapp development is a lot of work and SPAs are actually even harder... and so is server development with node. I love javascript, yet I don't think it's suitable for everything.
electron got popular, because companies could reuse code and tooling, only for the cost of cpu & memory
it's nowhere near to XUL but it's also little more powerful because of react (vdom is more dynamic than XML, it will be possible to use react-devtools and it should support HMR too)
javascript is very dynamic and V8 has very limited time to make its magic so the optimizations can't ever reach level of rust/c++ (but V8 can do some runtime-only optimizations)
it's very hard to predict performance of given code (and this itself is why it's the worst choice for perf-sensitive code, V8 is moving target, and what was fast yesterday might be slow tomorrow - so basically, it's not worth time and money to actually spend too much time optimizing javascript, it's much better to identify hot spots and do them in rust/c++)
It usually doesn't matter and it's more than fast enough for any kind of scripting, but it's certainly not a good fit for cpu-heavy tasks. I love javascript, to be clear.
BTW: run some node.js code with --print-opt-code so you have an idea how big amount of code is generated even for very simple things.
We have TypedArrays, WebAssembly, very smart JITs. With Typescript, JavaScript is a very productive and sane language to work with.
I 100% agree with you that the current state of desktop apps are extremely bloated.
Mostly agree with your comment on the broader point that front-end (coding) is a lot saner than it used to be. This sentence however sounds to me like "With C, assembler is a very productive and sane language to work with." (FTR: I used to enjoy assembler.)
It seems to be missing an OSX client, but Windows and Linux is supported.
Seriously, I recently had to disable Thunderbird's spellchecking so that typing emails wouldn't stall for 5+ seconds at a time on my 8-core machine. Ironically, my older dual core machine has no such problems, and the same email accounts, OS and extensions are at play.
The gigants buy up competitors and bury it, shot down the project.
We would have more freedom and viable options as consumers if not the big companies such as Facebook, Google buy up the competition. It should be illegal to do this. The world is a more poorer marketplace because of this.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles.....
Would love to see a 64 bit version and with some more advanced features.
Still loving it and it's one of my main stream editor which just works with just one executable and part of my big list of portable apps collection which mostly consists of single executable based tools for almost any task!!!
I don't think anyone ever liked developing for the web. It solved three problems pretty well:
- Data portability: log in from anywhere, have your data at your fingertips.
- App model: no broken installations of programs into desktop environments, dependency problems, DLL hell
- No concern about the mostly broken Windows desktop: viruses, etc.
(1) is mostly a solved problem even on desktop, the web just got there first. We have everything from Dropbox to various data APIs.
(2) is largely solved in mobile app development. It's instructive to consider how: very locked-down app APIs to the operating systems (e.g. no dumping files all over the place), standard packaging formats and distribution channels (.apk, .msi), etc
(3) is also mostly solved on mobile.
I would go as far as to say that in 2018, software should be native-first. And indeed it is, in mobile. The major shift is desktop->mobile. Mobile development has much more in common with native desktop development than web development. The reason desktop isn't likely to come back is because it's a niche market. Everyone has a phone but if you aren't in tech circles, it's surprising to see how many people barely use computers at all, especially those who don't work in offices, older folks, and the less well-off. A mobile device does about 99% of what they need -- most people aren't "creators", they don't author websites, write code, edit videos, design buildings, etc.
But this is precisely the problem. And also why mobile apps aren't really native, nor becoming native. Developers think, "since our app is just a thin wrapper on our web service, why not just make a webview and do everything through the web?". APIs being opaque to the system means you don't own the data. Saving actual files in actual filesystem is still much better for user freedoms.
> A mobile device does about 99% of what they need -- most people aren't "creators", they don't author websites, write code, edit videos, design buildings, etc.
True to some extent, but how many of those things they would be doing if the mobile platform wasn't limiting them? Users don't imagine the hypothetical things they could be doing, they choose from what's available.
I work in a warehouse, and the specific thing I do requires a laptop. They've tried to train backups for me, but they have a hard time finding people who know how to use a computer. Most people don't - they only have a smartphone.
I call it “the Photoshop test”: Pretend you’re Adobe and you just invented Photoshop in 2018. How do you build the GUI for each desktop operating system?
...considering you need to do things like OpenGL hardware acceleration, 30-bit color, support binary plugins, and access certain low-level hardware features (e.g. supporting TWAIN, Pro-level broadcast media devices and interfaces, etc).
On Windows it’s an unfortunate situation because all of the “new” application frameworks since 1998 are unsuitable: WPF is .NET only, UWP requires your application to run in a sandbox, you can’t even use MFC because it’s tightly coupled to User32 with its lack of support for 30-bit color. The only choice is the long hard road of doing almost everything by yourself through low-level interfaces with the DWM. Not pretty.
The sad thing is that UWP is very capable - if it weren’t for the sandboxing then it would be perfect (that, and you would need to build your own widget library as UWP’s stock set is almost entirely touch-first controls that are utterly inappropriate for a mouse-first desktop UI)
There's so much malware, anti-virus that slows down all I/O, browser toolbars, etc. Just open Internet Explorer and see how long it takes. On my computer it takes <1s. On many computers I've used in peoples' homes, small offices, etc. it's more like 10.
Calling that anything but "broken" seems like a misnomer. Look at the 99% of computer users, not the 1% power users/people at companies with good IT groups.
Interesting, haven't had performance problems with email in about well, never. Been using Thurderbird for a decade. Not perfect, but slowness isn't a problem.
On the other hand I think the web is awesome and I’m 36, I remember very well what the landscape looked before web apps. So I don’t understand the fetish for native to be honest.
Will probably come back with edge-computing.
For those of you haven't tried a Windows Phone, this video gives a good overview of some features:
I Used a Windows Phone for a Week in 2018! I Will Miss It:
Don't dismiss it because of the lack of bells and whistles on its web page, it runs circles around everything else. Outlook mail folders also can be imported through an external utility. Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and reportedly can be built on MacOSX.
https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/features.php
"Continuously improving since 1998"
When I have 100 firefox tabs open and it starts to go wonky my thunderbird also has issues doing just about anything. Sometimes even get the "stop this script" on occasion.
I think this has more to do with the java heavy pages in firefox getting bogged down while other software is trying to run backup tasks and AV and such.
I still enjoyed the older outlook, but with the current two I'm not longing for shiny new tools lately. I also realize that my lack of trust in cloud servicing means I am not using some likely popular features like calendar notifications and other things that may be important to others. So bias, ymmv, etc.
Nobody cared about Windows phone and nobody noticed when it died.
It enjoys the same prestige as Microsoft Bob.
Agree. It feels like apple respect users privacy which is great, but are you not interested in ios you are stuck with android and how google collects everything about its users, which feels really bad. I also think that "google play store" is rather bad. So it really needs competition here and a 3rd option.
What I really hope is that Microsoft (which have the muscles) should embrace android fully and build an "MS android app store" and an ecosystem around it for android so there could be an real option and competition to google and "google play store" on android.
WP died a lot because it did have to few apps. But because this should be android, developers shouldn't need to convert any apps, just simple upload the same app to "MS android app store" too, more or less. This way they could get a lot of apps in their app store and fast. To get developers to upload they could give better deals (ex lower %) and for users they could give an better user experience, focus on privacy like apple to differentiate them self from google and play store etc to get traction and popularity.
If MS did and got some traction, smartphone manufacturers would have an real option not to be forced to install play store and all googles apps just to be able to sell their phones, because there whould be an viable option for it users to download all android apps they want anyways. And competition is always good for consumers. At least for me, I would love to buy an android phone without google, with someone that respected and focused on privacy, and with an good app store out of the box.
I hope the SublimeHQ gods are listening to this
The only significant failing was that it couldn't handle removable media at all well.
Shotwell is the best I've found so far, but it's not quite the right feature balance for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotwell_(software)
I could point it to a directory and it would read all the images. It wouldn’t copy them to it’s database, it wouldn’t try to change their format. It would simply read them as fast as I’ve ever seen and show me what’s in that directory. Then it would keep the directory hierarchy in place. I haven’t been able to find anything similar. I search for a similar piece of software every now and then but nothing shows up. Lightroom is close but it’s god awfully slow. I just loved how fast Picasa.
I actually did some cleaning on my computer last night and found the last Picasa dmg. Maybe I run it and see if it still works.
Part of the problem is that only a small fraction of the population needs a high-performance photo manager. Most of the market has always been for "color snaps" and that has just gotten worth with the proliferation of cell phones.
If you are handling lots of RAWS and you care about speed then you have to start with hardware.
For instance, if you care about performance you just can't use a mac. Forget about it.
An application that cares about performance might tell you to ditch the hard drive on your computer for an SSD if you want to run it and that we'd rather give you your money than just give you the same bad performance you expect from Lightroom, Photos, etc.
Having your images on a RAIDed network server could be good but if you are using WiFi performance will be bad. If you feel entitled to keep using your 100 Mbps Ethernet hub on your DSL modem than performance will be bad.
Wedding photographers spend $5000 for a camera and would probably get much more than $2500 of value from a $2500 photo management suite, particularly if you factor the lower blood pressure from not staring at a spinning beach ball all day and the lower health care costs and extra years of life they could get.
Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil" might have made since back in the 360 mainframe day when you couldn't get N very high so an N^2 algorithm wasn't as bad as it is today.
People today have the wishful thinking that they can find the "one" bottleneck and open it and that was sometime true in the past for prototype projects (eg. less so in the age of networking, deep cache hierarchy, ...) but in real-life systems there are usually 5-10 bottlenecks that all need to be cleared if you want to make a difference in performance that people will feel.
Most people think they can clear two or three of them and will spend a lot of effort for it and will argue until they are blue in the face and bankrupt that they don't need to fix the other ones.
Love it for quick and easy edit controls. Like the speed and looks. Wish some remaining bugs were fixed.
After the Nth photo sharing website that I'd early-adopted decided to close up shop, I determined I wanted to own the next solution I invested time into, and I founded PhotoStructure.
I've got 20-odd hard drives from laptops and servers and backups. No software that I tried, either open or closed source, would do what I wanted: organize everything into a nice, timestamped, deduped folder structure.
Many years ago, I'd shot myself in the foot by using tools to do JPEG editing and rotation, but those tools quietly deleted EXIF metadata, so PhotoStructure applies a suite of metadata inference heuristics to heal those holes, too.
The MVP is focused on high-quality metadata extraction and inference, and has a simple web-based UI. Simple editing support, along with GPS POI and face detection, is planned.
After spending more than a decade in the ads business, and (helping build) ML-powered behavior targeting based on metadata, it blows my mind that so many of us give the most rich metadata stream, our photos and videos, for free, to the FAANG. PhotoStructure isn't just an effort of love, it's also, at least in some way, penance.
I've got a limited number of beta users trying it out right now. If you're willing to share your feedback, please consider signing up. Use of PhotoStructure during the beta period is free.
Curious about privacy aspects though. When you say it's a private cloud, does it communicate back to your servers at all?
Any goals for Linux compatibility?
I'd love something that can store the photos on a NAS or network share drive, runs its processing in a Docker container on my LAN, and serves a web app locally with absolutely no external internet access. That's basically my dream photo manager. I can connect to my own LAN remotely to access it then, without any need for the privacy/security risk of hosting my (and my clients) photos on some 3rd party server.
Your images, videos, and metadata stay yours, and are not uploaded anywhere.
Currently I've got error reporting that phones home if there are critical problems detected, but the log events only include the stack trace and possibly the path to the problem file.
PhotoStructure spins up a webserver bound to localhost by default. In other words, other machines in your LAN can't open the PhotoStructure web UI (unless you set an environment variable or use ssh port forwarding).
Sign up via the website or send me an email, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
Then I browse the pictures, star the ones I like and process them.
An no other software I have tried so far comes close in terms of speed and UI efficiency.
So I would also love to try PhotoStructure and have signed up via your landing page.
Also, I'd love to switch to Linux full-time but that's the main program I'm lacking. I've tried most the suggestions but none handle high numbers of photos without becoming intolerably slow.
- UX-wise, it solved many issues browsers today are still struggling with. Vivaldi is working in a similar direction, but they've basically started from scratch again so aren't close to the point of development Opera had achieved by version 12.
- These HN posts from today's frontpage [0] [1] give some idea of why we really need Presto today. Not only would it just be good to have more competitors in the space, but also, for most of its existence Presto was ahead of its competitors in every detail (except for the one important, and very political, issue of "site compatibility", a.k.a. making badly written websites work). It also, similarly, got many UX points working at an engine level that modern browsers still get wrong, like text selection of html content and link text, responsiveness of scroll and of page links during navigation, etc.
- M2 will never be surpassed by Thunderbird, and quite possibly will never be surpassed full stop (though I really hope I'm wrong about that).
... so many other things
Learned that rather recently even though I'm practically living on the web.
When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”.
You could map all sorts of census data. Want to colorize the map based on crime rate divided by median home price? No problem.
You could import lots of data from a spreadsheet and do useful things with it. I used this when looking for my first house. I scraped the data from realtor.com and made maps where the icon changed on the number of bedrooms and the color changed based on the price.
You could make drivetime zones. Want to see how far you can drive in 30 minutes from your office? No problem.
You can probably do a lot of this with ArcGIS, but I don’t know since its way out of my price range.
I keep hoping that Microsoft will bring some of this to Bing Maps. I would pay to use these features again and adding them to Azure would definitely differentiate them from Google Maps.
It's noteworthy, because I've only seen this feature in Rolls-Royce navigation in recent times.
No-go zones have been used all over the world for decades.
Waze still tries to navigate me through this neighborhood all the time. It makes the app nearly worthless for finding routes home. There are also some other streets I've learned not to trust when Waze tells me to take them home, as they often have much more traffic than predicted. I'd love to be able to block those as well.
Also as votes are hidden here me-toos provide useful info.
It’s perfectly okay to consider this and still say the feature’s benefits are overwhelming. But the rabiat outburst of denying even the possibility is an indictment of the posters more than the suggestion that triggered them.
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/05/americas/brazil-wrong-dir...
https://www.npr.org/2012/01/25/145337346/this-app-was-made-f...
The issue you linked to seems different. I agree that the headline is hysterical, but the patent mentions, among other sensible ideas, that it would plot paths factoring in demographic data. Which is just plain weird when you already have crime data available.
I've never used MapPoint so I don't know how it compares - I expect the ArcGIS stuff is more powerful but less usable (for your particular needs) than a more focused solution.
Note: Esri calls isochrones (30 minute drive time) 'service areas' and you have to search for it under 'network analysis'.
He delegated to me the task of putting together his route using Streets and Tips, a great introduction to navigation, mapping and spatial reasoning. Been a cartography geek (not to mention massive road geek) ever since.
Will be a lot easier in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software)
I would happily pay for an update that fixed outstanding bugs and ensured compatibility with future versions of macOS. It would be nice to have some new features, too, but it is basically "good enough" as it is and I dread the day I can no longer run it. I'm really not sure what I will do.
The claim that Photos was going to be a meaningful replacement for Aperture was obviously a lie at the time it was released and even nearly five years later it is still not true.
I'd have moved to Lightroom had Adobe not moved to a subscription model.
When Photos just came out and Apple was making the claims about how they've taken everything good from Aperture and stuck it into Photos I was pretty optimistic considering how solid of an app Aperture became over the years.
Now, few days down the road, pretty clear that Photos is just a marginally better iPhoto with the vast majority of features that were useful for professionals such as Stacks, never coming back.
The dumbification of professional apps to the lowest common denominator continues ...
I'm trying to find an alternative and, quite frankly, everything I've tried is not great. I ended up buying AfterShot Pro, but I'm not terribly satisfied with it. It runs on the Mac, but it's really hurt by the fact that it's not actually a Mac application.
Adobe is out because of the subscription model. I'm willing to buy the software, and I'm even willing to periodically buy new versions when it makes sense, but $10/month forever is hard to stomach.
Specifically, the date is December 18. There's also a (small) discount if you buy in the next 8 days: https://skylum.com/luminar
Not involved at all, just discovered this while looking around.
Several months later, something happened that basically reaffirmed my decision. Nikon released a new camera, which I bought at launch. Lightroom added support for its RAW format in a minor patch almost immediately. Meanwhile, Aperture couldn't be bothered to add support until 6 months later and a major version update.
Flash-forward, I really wish Adobe didn't become so obsessed with their subscription models. While cloud storage/backup definitely has its advantages, I'd much rather simply own my software and use my own servers. (But since the "run it yourself" options are always grossly inferior, I just put up with their new approach and make sure I have a local copy.)
We run every day.
The battery life is pretty phenomenal, the step counter and weather bits are handy, the GPS just works, you need the AmazTools app if you want to share your runs to Strava (but it works great), I have an alarm set to shake my wrist every morning at 7am, and if I destroy the watch.. it was all of $70.
The continuous heart rate monitoring is also handy for our gym and zone workouts. I wish it had multiple levels of heart zone alarms, like the TICKR FIT app -- which is amazing for more refined zone training, but it will tell you when you pop out of zone 2 on a run, so it's still useful.
Sleep tracking works great for my girlfriend, doesn't work great for me. So I turned it off and that doesn't bother me.
I think it's a great starter watch, I can see upgrading to the Garmen vivoactive 3 Music, since I'm not very interested in an Apple Watch.
It genuinely is really great, if it had an app ecosystem, slightly higher resolution and was a little smaller / more stylish it would be perfect. A FOSS OS and support for emojis would also be nice
I used to be big into those dorky digital watches when I was growing up, and I've been tempted by fitness trackers. My concerns are:
A) Is the Bluetooth connection secure? Are they taking steps to make it so the Bluetooth connection isn't easily trackable? How easy is it, for instance, for me to set rules to turn off the Bluetooth when the watch isn't actively syncing?
B) Does the watch send any data to someone else's remote servers, at all? Do I need to go through a 3rd party to get access to my own data (ie. what Fitbit does)?
I already have a Smartphone, I don't want my watch to act like one. I don't want to have to do a bunch of syncing through a 3rd-party server that will get shut down and sold off with all of my data someday. I'd pay a lot of money for a device that uses my Smartphone as an access-point/hub, but that largely just works offline and independently.
You can still find Pebbles for sale in various places and I'd recommend getting one over any of the Android Wear watches. They're just that much better.
I keep looking at the Fitbit Versa, which is clearly Pebble's spiritual successor, but it doesn't have an always-on screen or the Time Steel's 7 - 10 day battery life. I just hope Fitbit keeps the Versa around by the time I need to replace my Pebble.
But the killer feature to me is notifications. I can keep my phone completely silent with no vibration and never miss an important call or text or calendar reminder. I never have to pat my pocket to see if my phone is vibrating. I can decline spam calls and decide whether to respond to messages without taking my phone out. I can even leave my phone in silent mode on the counter across the room and not miss calls or texts.
I also love the Google Maps integration (third party app). Being able to see my next turn on my wrist is very useful and the navigation screen is more informative and easier to read than the native Google Maps Android Wear integration. When I get in my car that doesn't have Android Auto, I can still say "OK Google, navigate to X" and without taking my phone out of my pocket I get voice directions through car Bluetooth audio and visual directions on my wrist.
It's also just a good watch. There are lots of faces to choose from, some with extra information like weather or stock prices or step count or whatever. It's far thinner than any other smartwatch and you don't have to flick your wrist just to turn on the screen and see the time.
I couldn't find an email address for you, mine is HANEEF at PDX dot EDU. I've never actually had a smart watch before, but hearing all these people talking about the pebble is making me really interested to try this one.
Started looking for a comparable smartwatch: always on, good battery life, and Android notifications, there's just nothing there.
Ended up ordering a Pebble Time Steel from eBay. I feel like a part of my life and sanity was restored.
It seems like in the physical economy, if you create something of value and you aren't making money off it, you will sell it and someone else can make money off it. With software like Picasa, it's just gone. Some programs release a sunset version, but you never know how long it will work and you can't promote it because they might take it down.
There's also gnucash, never used but its interface may be similar to Microsoft Money (which I also never used).
I would not recommend anyone start using it if they are not already.
Didn't inuit buy and kill / sell quicken or something. If they would of just kept the ux wrapper from Qhnb 98 and layered that over the DB of quickbooks it'd be okey with me.
I too hate hate hate quickbooks, and price structure, layout and all that.
1. The Genera operating system for Symbolics Lisp machines. Ever since I've gotten bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp machine bugs, I've been wanting to use Genera, but I was born at the beginning of the last AI winter, and unfortunately the operating system is still proprietary, with no word about whether or not it will become open sourced. It's regrettable that the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater when Lisp machines lost out in the marketplace to RISC workstations and the x86 running Lisp on other OSes; there are a lot of interesting lessons we can learn from Genera in today's operating systems and programming environments, and an entire generation of computer scientists and software engineers are unfortunately completely unfamiliar with Lisp machines.
2. I've heard wonderful things about the productivity software developed by Lighthouse Design for NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. I haven't used them myself, but I've read that many NeXTSTEP users were devoted fans of Lighthouse Design software, and the presentation tool that the company designed influenced the design of Apple's Keynote.app. Unfortunately when Sun acquired Lighthouse Design, Sun hasn't done much with the Lighthouse Design codebase. It would have been nice had these programs been updated and further refined for Mac OS X.
3. I would love for someone to resurrect the ideas of Apple's OpenDoc platform, which allows for component-based development of GUI applications, much like how pipes and redirection in Unix allows for different command-line utilities to be used together.
My dream is an operating system where all objects can be inspected (like Smalltalk or a Lisp machine OS), where there is a component framework similar to OpenDoc that allows for component-based GUI application development, and where there's a REPL that allows power users to have complete control over their applications (both command-line and GUI). All applications would adhere to some type of well-designed usability guideline (I'm thinking about the classic Apple Human Interface Guidelines from the pre-OS X days), and the interface would be reminiscent of Mac OS 8.
On the other hand, an official emulator is in the works and should be released at some point.
Its use on the open Internet was a nobrainer from an implementation perspective, although it killed the reputation of the entire thing (make a Google search for ActiveX and 99% of the content you'll find is about its use on Internet Explorer) and .NET cemented its demise.
But yeah, the idea is solid and actually other platforms had similar tech, like BeOS's replicants, AmigaOS's... something (i don't remember the name :-P) and i think KDE's KParts was originally supposed to be something like ActiveX.
To this day no Android phone I've used ever as fast, reliable or plain refined as WP8 was.
Unique design and many genuinely useful features, and it reflected a time when smartphones could have been vibrant and diverse, not our current two mega-platforms or nothing.
The biggest problems in my mind for using a Windows phone today are really that what apps there were are going away (which open sourcing the os isn't going to help), and the browser is bad. On Windows phone 8, the browser is bad because the rendering engine of mobile IE isn't very good / workable with modern web; on Windows mobile 10, the browser is bad because Edge frequently delays responding to user input and it's uterly unusable at times. Plus or minus when the browser locks up the phone and the watchdog timer reboots it.
Source: I worked on it.
I'd like to believe that in the world of progressive web apps Windows Phone would have had a higher chance of success. Firefox phone tried the same and failed, but with the backing of a huge company like MS... you never know.
And it was fast I really dislike the pointless animations that iOS and Android go through - since the icons in Windows Phone were rectangles the few animations it did have were quick because they didn't have to worry about clipping arbitrary regions.
There's a perverse incentive on other platforms for app makers to send you notifications that require you to open the app to view. It increases user engagement numbers, because no one really knows how to measure user engagement properly.
n-dimensional spreadsheet with a logical data model (including hierarchies) rather than rows and columns:
Net Worth := Assets - Liabilities
Amazing.
I'm collecting a pile of "good ideas"... Someday I'll do something with it.
It had all the right features for graphics editing targeted at the web. Mixing vector layers with raster layers, both fully featured, is still something many modern programs either don't have, or half-ass.
And it was dirt cheap, compared to the competition.
Krita is making serious moves in this direction.
I've tried Paint.NET and others, but none of them feel as intuitive to me.
I still wish the previously free graphics library was attached and that the old GIF animator that was included with some versions previous was still available.
I keep buying it again to avoid hunting for the cdroms and activation codes buried. Also throwing some money at it keeps it from going to the graveyard hopefully.
It's been decades and I've still never found a better way to make simple GUI applications.
For a tour down memory lane: https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive...
Of course there is also https://vipercard.net/
Also i made this some time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rshZHDDruAE (the URL at the video is outdated, the code is now at http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lilcard but note that after i made the video above i lost interest).
The problem is people start using them. Then they have collective needs. Then the tool adds complexity to make those needs go away. Thus begins the slow process towards the tool no longer being simple and/or maintainable.
You could do it, but you’d need a Craigslist-like “we’re not adding anything, it seems to work ok” attitude.
That attitude is totally incompatible with VCs, who generally set the tone in this industry.
Ecco is still being used 20 years later and has been binary patched to support Lua extensions. Written by a four person team in Seattle.
doogiePIM has been resuscitated by its founder, hopefully it will carry a torch for some of the ideas in Ecco and Agenda, https://bitespire.com/details_doogiepim.php
TreeSheets (http://strlen.com/treesheets/) is an open-source cross-platform codebase (wxWidgets) with fast graphics, since it was designed by a game developer. That's one possible starting point for cloning Ecco.
NoteLynx on Android has the ability for an item to be in two places within the outline, https://www.appbrain.com/app/notelynx-pro-outliner-mindmap-w..., as does Mindscope on iOS, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-thought-organizer/...
To this day. I can only find IDE's that do 1/2 of the features VB6 had. But yeah. After .NET hit, all the VB6 devs I know, bailed.
Add to that that after Delphi 7, which by many was considered the most stable and generally best version, they got distracted by .NET and Linux (with a very hacky project, Kylix, that never got any traction in the Linux community) and decided to make Delphi a .NET product, rewrote the IDE with a highly unpopular (at the time) interface with a lot of bugs and generally a much worse experience for developers and you get the idea.
They basically did the worst thing they could ever do at every single front: abandoned their core audience (Delphi was very popular with smaller developers, especially in Europe) to go after enterprise customers, closed the gates to new blood by increasingly rising the prices, created a sense of unreliability by changing their minds every few years, replaced a stable product with a buggy mess and drove a lot of their skilled people to leave over the years.
The same stuff apply to C++ Builder too, btw. They actually lost a chance here - C++ Builder could have been a the IDE to use for tools in the game industry that relies a lot on custom tooling and some developers did try to use it (e.g. Bioware and i personally worked on another company that also considered it) but Borland/Inprise wasn't very cooperative and they left their C++ compiler stagnate (in our case the compiler simply couldn't build the codebase due to outdated standards support).
Delphi and C++ Builder are products that you can't help but wonder what they could have been at the hands of a company with more competent management.
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
I'd say the Delphi of today is better than ever. It's a shame it isn't more widely used. I really like it.
Going further back, I think Symantec JustWrite was an extremely fine piece of software; I remember it being blazingly fast on the 486 monster I had at work. But my glasses may be rose-tinted :)
Webamp can also do Milkdrop visualizations, which is pretty crazy - eg https://webamp.org/?butterchurnPresetUrl=https%3A%2F%2Funpkg... I had a link I've since lost to one which was a shader-skin, which mirrored milkdrop back into the rest of the UI. It was pretty trippy, and wholly unexpected!
Both projects have good Discord servers, as well. :) See https://discord.gg/XuJPJEm and https://discord.gg/248Z7QA, respectively.
Sure, the runtime sucked. But not in any way I cared about as a kid! Plus, this is a hypothetical scenario, so we can have it be good :)
Then there's the whole thing about interactivity. Many of flashes best moments were Easter eggs. Most SBEmails have two or more. There's something about the hunt and realizing you "discovered" the extra bit that makes it so much more fun than a stinger.
Last but not least: flash is now much more... Hard to pirate. Much of flash animation was created by students and kids who were working with a tool they wanted to learn and with zero budget. It was an act of creative rebellion. It's hardly impossible, but it's not the same as it was.
The other large part is that flash is no longer as new and impressive and pioneering as it was. That bit can't be reclaimed, no matter what, but is also a shame. Exploration and boundary pushing was a huge part of all of what made flash so amazing - people realized that it could do "anything" and so did. That pioneering spirit lasted for a very long time, considering - the indie game scene is still riding the wave that flash started - but for animations, that hump is past and not least of which because it ran into the brick wall of iOS Safari.
Excel for Mac before it became a cartoon
Google Reader so there would still be blogs to read
Eudora so e-mail wouldn't suck
a dozen or so iOS apps that stopped working after iOS 10
a dozen or so niche Windows apps that haven't been updated
Reddit's redesign is probably the most destructive redesign of anything I've ever seen, and that is saying a lot. But kudos to them for (so far) supporting the old version with a sticky setting you can choose.
For Google Reader, I am using BazQux and really like it. No ads, no smart "suggestions", just a very simple UI and reading experience.
The current TreeStyleTabs extension mostly works, although it occasionally exhibits weird behavior (dropped tabs ending up under other tabs instead, etc). Still, I can't live without it.
Indeed. I remember sitting there thinking about the ridiculousness of all of these 1 narrow-skinny column webpages on screens that were wider than they were high, and not having the tabs vertical. This was back when most regular users were browsing at 1024 x 768.
Now we're at 1920 x 1080 and it's even more ridiculous.
For what it's worth, I used an outdated version of Palemoon (27.9.4) which still (mostly) supports TreeStyleTabs.
Although these days you have Airtable [2] and Ninox [3] they are having different user base than good old FoxPro.
What's really missing is a better IDE with better type hinting, autocomplete, tabs, etc... VS Code would be a great base for an updated IDE. I know that Rick Strahl's West Wind has support for Visual Studio, but there's still some functionality missing.
There was 100+ screens so I had to do some bulk processing on those SPR's. But I used WebViews for any new stuff, and that was much better (though it was basically IE7).
Yeah I owe Rick Strahl so many beers for his blog.
Second time this has come up this morning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635799
I'm working in a spiritual replacement (http://tablam.org) but with first-class support for mobile.
I'm starting with a relational language, then a bridge to native UI Toolkits. Embed sqlite and good support for others RDBMS and as a larger hope, a custom RDBMS on top of LMDB or WiredTiger.
The cross platform email client bought and abandoned by Dropbox. To date, I have not found a cross platform (or really any single platform) app that's as fast as Mailbox. I don't know how they did it, but everything felt truly instant. All of my devices would simultaneously ring when an email arrived. Archiving/deleting/snoozing emails instantly synced across all platforms (including the web Gmail client).
The aesthetics of Mailbox remains unmatched by any email client available today.
Nothing since has ever made me feel so in control of my file system.
There have been a few clones, but never quite hit the spot.
If you want the gui version, there is double commander, available in both gtk and qt(how do they support 2 frameworks?)
We also used WordPerfect for DOS at my high school. In my opinion, VALDOCS > WordPerfect > Microsoft Word, but guess which one won out in the market - I've despised having to use Office software for that reason ever since.
Looking this up again caused me to find this very nice article about the people who made VALDOCS: https://www.electronicdesign.com/blog/rising-star
My brain is additionally confused by the appearance of one of Nino Rota's themes from “Amarcord.” For the circusey feel, you know.
I really miss the spatial desktop, the icons designed by Susan Kare, the way the whole system felt intuitive and understandable for a single person.
I don't think I would pay for it. I'd rather take a shot at developing it myself.
Everything about the operating system, application platform and tools were simultaneously rich in features and minimal in surface area without being dumbed down. It would have been great to have seen this evolve on its own rather than get rolled in with Apple. Xcode is so extra compared to the original Interface Builder.
Am currently porting some old school gamedev techniques used in classic Sega games such as Hang-On, Turbo Outrun and Space Harrier to modern WebGL. Specifically, super scaler "billboarding" of 2D sprites and pseudo-3D terrain projections. It will be interesting to see if accurate physical simulations are possible ;)
Internet Archive's Arcade is preserving a museum's worth of retro games via Emularity and Emscripten
https://archive.org/search.php?query=emulator%3A%2A+collecti...
Sprint was a powerful, capable word processor. It was lightning fast and darn near impossible to lose files.
Alas, it lost out to WordPerfect and was quickly dropped by Borland.
This is one of the few times I actually watched better technology fail. Crushed by a few poor business decisions.
It wouldve been perfect if they'd just added an API so that users can create and share ways to get the data from various banks.
And a refactor was necessary to a native library (or even electron)
But this cloud native follow-up version is just not an option.
I'm hoping they can add support for the EU's second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) open banking APIs when they open up to third parities sometime in 2019 too!
I've recently considered to refactor it into a AWS Lambda app, as the current setup with Django API, celery workers and markojs for frontend is ... Slightly overengineered
I ended up writing most of my school essays in it. You could start with a high-level outline and recursively flesh it out until you had a complete document. The tree structure made it really easy to reorder sections at any scale.
There is a successor called Opal - the last version of Acta was in 1993, and the last version of Opal was no later than 2007, so it's dead too.
Only big limitation is that it's Mac and iOS only. No web or Windows version (also, the Pro version is a bit expensive)
I still use it at works for notes, etc although under Windows is really needs a custom lnk file to setup a fixed window size. At some point i plan on rewriting the UI bits to use a GUI instead.
But... browser engines are no longer browsers like they were in Opera's prime. They are operating systems with all the complexity that brings. I don't think presto could fill that role. That said, it'd make a great actual browser.
I read an article saying there was an effort to get it open sourced after General Magic folded, but unfortunately all their IP fell into the Sarlacc-like maw of Intellectual Ventures.
While we’re on the topic of failed, over-ambitious mobile OS’s, Newton OS would be great too.
Not because it was great, but because I think we need more exploration into alternate ways to interact with computing devices.
I've seen plenty of people - even young people - doing things wrong because their mental model of how their devices are supposed to work is inadequate or incomplete.
I've seen more than one person with hundreds and hundreds of browser tabs open on their iPads and smartphones, because they just don't seem to be able to incorporate the "tab" concept into their model of how their web browser works. And so they're constantly clicking and opening new ones without realizing they can switch back to ones that were previously open.
This was a brilliant train game that vanished from the Earth. We used to have the paid version on an iPad, but I think it vanished after an iOS update. My dad has the limited free version on his old iPad that he doesn't update to preserve this game.
I think it's a shame that this game disappeared (also because I paid for it), and I've considered whether I might be able to make a clone of the game.
Also, for what it's worth, Railroads seems to be on Steam for $9.99. Pretty sure it'd work with more than 2 GB of RAM. There's also a bundle with Railroad Tycoon II and 3 for $14.99.
But all of those are pretty complex games. Great for me, but not so much for my kids. Choo Choo Steam Trains was aimed at a younger audience; still challenging, but soon perfect for my 4 year old train nut.
Before you fork out any money for Railroads, make sure you research the crashing [1]. This link is from 2015 with the latest update being two months ago with people still discussing crashing and (IMO) some sketchy ways to fix it. The game just flat out doesn't work well on newer systems. Being distributed by Steam doesn't mean it will actually run, my library is full of games that I've never gotten to open.
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/7600/discussions/0/6229540234...
Not really, except:
I was thinking the other day that massive communities like Facebook and Reddit suffer because EVERYONE's allowed in, to an unlimited degree. Everything reverts to the newbie state and every sh*t post can define the threads.
Remember dial-up? BBSes had limited lines and you'd have to set your (non-multi-tasking) computer to redial so you could visit your BBS. Moderators, paying members would get a smidge more time, but rarely unlimited.
Then you had 10/20/30 minutes and the BBS would hang up on you.
It might have been a civilizing force for communities, the sort we still could use in social...
BBSes also were not primarily fedgov privacy harvesting honeypots (mostly...) and that had interesting social interaction effects when the sysop was just some dude down the road instead of some NSA spook or marketing droid.
I also remember door games like TW2000 were a lot more fun than the modern "you must send us microtransactions of cash because your friends do" modern social games. Inherently slow empire building is also more social than spending money on a fake farm or the tired old FPS model.
In BBS and early Internet days (pre-95 or so), people who were using computers were highly intelligent. Certainly above average.
These days, everyone and their dog is on the Internet. The masses have moved in and thus the medium shifted to accommodate them, by dumbing itself down to the lowest common denominator. With the shift away from a knowledge repository to advertising and consumerism ("the spectacle") the SnR has dropped significantly.
In cybernetic terms, during the early years of the Internet, the space acted upon you, by programming you. Thus, if you lacked knowledge, you had to put in the time and educate yourself in order to explore and learn to use this new space efficiently. Cyberspace forced you to get better.
These days, the opposite happens. The masses act upon the space and dictate its evolution, downwards.
Looking back, I can't help but mourn what could have been but I also feel enormously lucky to have lived through it all.
I remember this software runs before the OS and allows you to revert the enter HDD in a different time. It can even fix the OS if it stopped working for some reason. I thought it was pretty cool. Anybody know if similar tools exists?
I have never had a more efficient handheld for doing what I need to do most, emali and chat/text messages.
The version with the thumbwheel, enabled me to race through messages. I would expect slack to do great on it as well.
It was not very good for web, apps, games, like my current smartphone is, but I think my current smartphone is clumsy and slow when it comes to message and email.
The problem ends up being you don't know where to touch without looking at it. Imagine having a touchscreen keyboard on your laptop. You'd have to look down to verify where you were.
The shortcut is slightly different (ctrl + shift + r), but function is the same
Megazeux, a spiritual sequel by another lot of people, I always found far too complicated. It's not that different to ZZT, it just manages to be fiddly without a good enough pay-off in my view.
And a friendly person emailed me this link: https://github.com/jdque/char
I never ever understood what the plan for Shake was supposed to be, did you? I remember hearing rumors it would turn into something bigger and better in a different Apple product, but it doensn’t seem like anything ever materialized.
* The old Winamp, with all the intricate shortcuts that I had memorized.
* Windows XP itself. I have been on Linux for years, and XP was the last Windows I used alongside it (for MSOffice). XP had reached the peak in terms of being able to control the desktop using the keyboard. And then the downslide started.
It wasn't until Vista came out before I could go back to Windows and not feel like I was taking a step backwards in time.
It is a problem with Windows that you have to take all of it or nothing. At least on Linux you can use whatever UI you want with the latest kernel.
Interix, the second POSIX subsystem for Windows NT, already had all of the things that the Windows Subsystem for Linux is gradually reinventing, and Microsoft already owns it.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17773681
Some of the softwares involved were in fact open-source. Unfortunately, the SUA Community disappeared years ago, and there is no trace of the software packages that it used to provide.
I haven't kept up to date with Blue Lion (ArcaOS) and eComstation; so it is tricky to nominate OS/2.
Any page you went to, it would show you the media of the page on the right hand side in a column and you could simply click and download it. It essentially kept a running tally of media elements on the right side.
I know what you mean, though. Elite: Dangerous is good, gorgeous looking, and utterly massive, but very light on RPG elements. EVE is/was too full of people whose enjoyment of the game was predicated on spoiling yours. I haven't played Star Citizen, really not sure if I ever will.
(Elite is something I will be going back to when I can afford a good VR headset. That game screams out for VR, and by all accounts looks and feels sublime with a headset.)
What I have found so far with SC Alpha, which has no RPG elements yet, is that by the time I run around the stores to get my character geared up, requested my ship from it's hangar, boarded and prepared it's loadout, got my destination waypointed, begun and completed the travel to my mission... I am out of time or no longer engaged in the game and I tap out.
I just want a BlackBerry Passport with modern internals and a business and developer friendly OS.
I can't stop fantasizing about a BlackBerry Passport with Pure OS / Postmarket OS and all the modern hardware specifications. That would make for an awesome portable developer computer.
Smart was the first system I saw that had the concept of different levels, i.e. you could set the system to be Basic, Standard or Advanced, which would change the menus and complexity of the package accordingly. It was also the first database system I saw that had the option of variable sized data records (remember, this was in the days of dBase III/IV).
But the killer feature of Smart for me was the absolutely powerful macro/scripting language, which let you customise the system to be almost anything you wanted it to be. I wrote a lot of custom 'apps' with it, with the crowning glory being a Constituent Management System for our local government which let member of parliament record data against their constituents and communicate with them (a bit like a CRM) plus plan walk lists when they went out doorknocking and campaigning.
I was sad that Smart never made the marketshare that other lesser featured competitors did, and eventually faded away. Would love to see such an integrated system online these days.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/301650/Battlezone_98_Redu...
Luckily I really enjoyed both games the first time around.
I find it hilarious that the main difference in experience over 30 years apart is the resolution is a bit higher and the game is un-necessarily over complicated.
Un-necessary overcomplication "because its possible" is a likely outcome of every suggestion in this entire discussion, unfortunately. "Lets do a cool new CP/M" turns into "Windows 11", unfortunately.
Cool Edit Pro (win-only audio editor with some interesting effects and processes.)
But even if it comes back now, I would have a hard time trusting it.
For a while there was a guy who was replacing the CPU on r5k O2 workstations. These days, pretty much everyone has a super fast MIPS cpu in their router/WAP. I’d love to see 4dwm running on that level of CPU.
Any new reader I’ve tried fails to understand this. They go for complexity and glamour. They need a mode for just simple long list of headlines and not waste any screen space.
Edit: context
I didn’t know about The Old Reader and I will give it a try.
How is this (random screenshot found via image search) not basically the same as Google Reader?
http://kingofgng.com/media/20150116_inoreader.png
And that's not even the densest display option.
And while I'm here, WordPerfect 4.2. That program was a high water mark in word processing for me. What I wouldn't give to hit Alt-F3 in Word to Reveal Codes [0].
But that theme builder was absolutely amazing. Literally just drag and drop design for the entire theme, not just pages or whatever. Plus control over the loop and just some awesome stuff that really let you build very very cool sites really really quickly.
Elementor Pro now does some of what Headway was doing and I think Beaver Builder is moving that way, but they aren't really anywhere close to as good. Headway had graphical theme design absolutely nailed.
It's a big shame it went under and I wish it came back.
Headway is literally like creating the theme without coding anything. You build it out of blocks still but you literally just drew boxes onto the page where you wanted boxes to go (based on column system but CSS grid/Flexbox would be better now) and it would output the theme files for you.
And I'm not talking the page, I'm talking the entire theme. So headers, footers, custom pages, custom loops with custom queries, custom blocks mixed in with content blocks on the same page template to allow users to output content in the right places, same with custom fields etc.
It was incredibly powerful and let you effectively WYSIWYG the function of the site as well as then being able to switch over to the design module and WYSIWYG the design too. Plus managing custom CSS was easy.
Later versions let you draw/build and design in the same step like Elementor and Pagelines do, but those don't give you the same control over the functionality of the theme like Headway did.
As I mentioned, you can get most of the same functions Headway provided through something like Elementor Pro and combining it with something like the Toolset plugins. But those rely on integrating and there are issues (dynamically showing content generated by shortcodes currently broken for instance) which make the whole process much more of a chore.
Headway really was great.
I just went and read the history, and hadn’t realized that FrameMaker used to be UNIX and Mac only. Windows support was the last platform to be added, and after that UNIX and Mac support faded out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker#History
* Paradox for DOS (with PAL = Paradox Application Language), but with SQL backends.
I love those, still. If you can get setedit or RHIDE working then you can revisit the experience on Linux.
The desktop experience was fantastic for its time.
(I'm the guy who was palmpowerups)
For anyone else interested:
I know there are modern vector/bezier-drawing alternatives, like OmniGraffle and Sketch and Affinity Designer. But both MacDraw and Freehand balanced functionality and simplicity and directness so well. In MacDraw, I could make technical drawings really quickly. In Freehand, I could do everything I could do in Illustrator, but with much better grid-snapping and typography. And I loved its 'morphing' tool (it wasn't called that), where you could take two objects (even type) and it would interpolate them and make these beautiful shapes.
I was going to say BlitzPlus but that's open source already.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/21/halo-online-retu...
I want to say I heard that a law passed about not closing server based games anymore but I can't remember the details.
Sparrow.
Aperture.
Picasa.
* Borland Sidekick Plus[1] (not to be confused with the earlier Sidekick) OUTLINER applet(?). I loved the features (and key-bindings) of this more than ...
* Grandview 2.0 by Symantec (before it became a purveyor of software I despise) [2]
The closest I have come to finding a replacement for the following is Outlook email (which isn't saying much). Seemingly viable alternatives fail to meet my needs most immediately due to ineffective key bindings.
A hardy soul did yeoman work using vDos to allow Grandview 2.0 to be run on any recent Windows version with more than expected amounts of integration with Windows (clipboard)[3]. I used this for a few months at work but the relative inability to share my work led to me discontinuing it's use, though I never found a satisfactory replacement; I use plain text files today.
[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/sidekick/Sidekick_Plus_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandView_(software) [3] https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291
I've only been working on it for a month, and I particularly don't have the data entry working well yet, but it's coming along.
DateBk has a linking feature that would be ideal for soups interoperating with other applications on the device, without explicit coordination between different app developers. DateBk is the result of a responsive developer listening to lots of users [3], and the kind of PIM that I've yet to find in modern phone OS's. The massive 130-page user manual [4] covers a UI that is relatively discoverable for new users and highly customizable for expert users. Some teams have tried to reproduce the functionality on iOS, but no one has yet to come even faintly close to the smooth workflow I experienced on it. It seems PIMs in general are still stuck in some innovation black hole; there is still so much left unimplemented.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple)
[2] http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6.htm
Features to add: I wouldn’t really add anything more than what they had.
Pay for resurrection: Yes, I’d certainly be willing to pay for their resurrection. But EA is a lousy company for games. So I have no hopes of this happening.
As far as I’m concerned, this version might not as well exist.
These days I get by just fine with Emacs + org-mode, but Ecco had some amazing usability features that I've never seen matched in another product.
I believe it was eventually absorbed by Encarta.
It shouldn’t be difficult to create similar software, but assembling quality samples would take a fair bit of work.
> The new version of TEX differs from the old only with respect to the “null control sequence” \csname\endcsname, which has been a legal construct since version 0.8 (November 1982) although almost nobody uses it.
Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy features including the capacity to send emails?
Also, what about books series like Harry Potter?
I think the point was not that updates are required, but that it is unlikely that they're a major source of revenue for the authors if they haven't been touched for so long.
I can draw it! Now, all sequencers (rather: DAWs) paints MIDI this way:
ch [======] [===========]
- bar may contain empty regions, so the bar does not really represents notes
- if you want to copy only one beat, you have to split the beginning of the beat, split at the end of the beat, copy the beat, and paste as many time as you want, then you probably want to join them together
- it even worse, when you want to copy more than one track (channel)
Cakewalk 3.x style grid:
OOOOO...OOOOOOOOOOO...
You can select notes on beat boundaries, even more tracks. Then paste it to anywhere: there are merge-paste (pasted notes will be added to existing ones) and replace-paste (affected beats will contain only pasted notes).
Anyway, handling upbeats in this grid-style editing is not comfortable, but still better than using bars.
Yes, it is still a thing.
It is amazing software yet also amazingly expensive [1] for those trying to get into the field, or not from a first world country.
I loved the way it handled multiple accounts, filtering, and auto-replies. Worked with POP3 and IMAP and had features that other clients lack such as blind send, configurable notifications per account, and export (which put any emails selected into a single text file, and dumped attachments to the file system and foldered them according to email ID.) Also, all account settings, filters, etc. and emails were stored in a ".box" file, so you could move or copy that single file from system to system.
It lacked SSL/TLS which was the final death knell for it I think, as most email providers started requiring it.
Would love to port this to Steam.
http://tacwarrior.wikia.com/wiki/Tacwarrior_Wiki
It was so well balanced and just hard enough to keep you hooked. Also, so much variety in ways you can win, by having different warrior types. Also, various weapons. IMHO a masterpiece.
[0] https://fman.io
Mind you, not all of them are officially abandoned.
Small tool with all you needed to manage your LDAP servers.
Much better than the bloated GUI from Sun, Netscape, Redhat...
Now it is almost unusable on a high DPI screen :-(
Another one is QBasic/QuickBasic. I have yet to see a modern programming language that lets you get started that easy.
That's the "most official" page for the product. No source, but updated for 32bit/64bit environments.
Trying to teach kids simple html site design with core principles (you own the html, you put it where you want) is harder because you have to plunge them into code and file transfer and what not.
Earlier kid had a much easier way with iWeb basically making word docs and pushing them out to any web server.
The web based kits are great if you want a web site, but terrible for learning how to build web sites.
That was the last good word processor before it all went to hell.
For development environments I am deeply sorry that smalltalks are not a thing anymore. I know we have pharo, and that's great, but nothing with traction like let's say Lua or ruby or scala.
Next thing I miss would be Dylan as it was planned for the Newton. We have opendylan now, but I would like to have it at the heart of a OS/platform.
https://proandroiddev.com/how-to-flare-a-flutter-app-part-1-...
http://www.riccisoft.com/soundeffects
Every audio editor I've used since then makes the user click too many times when dealing with multiple tracks.
As far as being full featured, it wasn't. I still miss it.
I wish they had open sourced it and gave it to the community instead of just shutting down and doing nothing with it.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Planet+Compu...
They're designed for use with the Planet Gemini and/or Cosmo, the spiritual successors to the Psion, but I think they work with any Android device.
also, why not Apple?
https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-wind...
I'd love to resurrect it and make it open source.
It can’t expand strokes correctly; it’s imprecise as hell when using boolean operations; it can’t do vector patterns (nor are they planned); it can’t even correctly join two specific points from different shapes!
I stick with it for the price point and because I ethically dislike Adobe, but the software as is is utter junk if you care about precision in your work.
* NuMega SoftICE. Those that used it know.
* Nextstep as it was before Rhapsody. Revolutionary.
* Lost Treasures of Infocom for IOS. Abandoned since Activision won't recompile it for 64bit.
They released it in 2012 as a 32-bit iOS app. By the time 64-bit became a requirement for iOS apps, the publisher abandoned it and it never got updated. :(
I had a blast making cartoons as a kid with this program.
The amazing thing about it was that even in pure DOS, with no Win 3.1 running, it lets you use your mouse too in the editor (provided that you have drivers set up right in config.sys etc.), I guess in a similar way as how DOS games use the mouse.
It was a simple, but working and well-done "focus follows mouse" add-on for OSX. It is not maintained and will not work on modern versions of OSX, unfortunately.
AFAICT, there is no option for focus follows mouse on recent OSX, such as El Cap, which I am running.
It appears, however, that High Sierra has an interesting option hidden deep in the accessibility preferences pane that achieves FFM, but I am not running High Sierra anywhere and cannot test that out ...
Jagged Alliance 2
Settlers 2
Heroes of Might and Magic
I think Adobe DX is supposed to be the replacement for it.
https://store.ubi.com/eu/the-settlers-history-collection/5b6...
You can buy on its own too
https://store.ubi.com/eu/the-settlers-ii-veni%2C-vidi%2C-vic...
(Oh, and yeah, Settlers 2 was amazing.)
https://www.inquisitr.com/5163752/ea-to-remake-the-first-two...
https://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/warcraft/277402/warcraft-...
https://www.gog.com/game/heroes_of_might_and_magic_3_complet...
The only OS and language (Sing#) for the future. Everything else is severely limited and broken, and not scalable. Pony took over some features, Distributed Pascal was also nice, but Singularity had so much more.
Being able to pretty seamlessly synchronise bookmarks across browsers was awesome.
Its shuttering was the final impetus that made me move away from the decaying mess that is Lastpass. (Hello BitWarden!)
Optionally you can host your own server.
Thanks.
IBM Lotus Symphony (pleasant and convenient GUI)
and ofc Google Reader
I think it's due to the capital S
Its a kind of portable application provider that gives all sorts of small/big apps to your catalog.
OneNote is ok. Windows is a terrible touch OS.
android and iOS are ok touch OSs but terrible with a stylus.
Newton was the only OS that was handwriting and touch from the ground up
Here's what has changed since 2010:
– Apple introduced FileVault 2 in late 2010, making full disk encryption of both internal and external drives simple and straightforward. Knox was always about convenience over the built-in tools in the OS, and for the simplest cases, the OS finally caught up.
- It was a time when a small menu bar utility could go for $34.99…
Before the AgileBits sale we were exploring some cool new stuff for Knox:
- App Vaults: swizzle some NSFileManager calls and have apps such as Mail or Safari direct all their reads and writes (including for preferences and Keychain access) to a vault. Multiple independent, encrypted, secret app instances.
- Online Backups: Knox Vaults were already encrypted and block-based, so many of the hard parts of backups were already taken care of. Backing up incremental Vault changes to an online block storage seemed straightforward enough, but in 2010 we just couldn't make the math work. (for example, in early 2010, S3 was $0.15/GB/mo and AWS still charged for inbound data transfer at $0.10/GB.)
In the end, it just wasn't sustainable. 2010 saw the launch of iPad and iPhone 4, and demand for Cocoa devs was becoming red hot. The opportunity cost of working on a niche Mac product like Knox was just too high.
At Matasano, standard operating procedure was just to have the whole Mail.app library directory inside a Knox vault, "locking" mail cryptographically until you explicitly unlocked it.
Apple's existing tooling for encrypted DMGs is very cumbersome. I script around it, and that's OK, but Knox had a much better UX.
They were going to put a standalone version up as open source but never did.
Awesome before yahoo bought it and added their drm like stuff to it and it disappeared later.
nothing quicker for prototyping GUIs
* Adobe Illustrator without Creative Cloud subscription.
Occasional use just too expensive now
This looks selfhosted. I need to convince a like minded friend to host it for a split of the fee.
Edit: found this https://civihosting.com/collabora-online-hosting/
Vector drawing package that was neat, clean, fast, versatile, user-friendly, and powerful.
gmail is yuck these days - such a shame after all these years.
EDIT: unless you meant the video game, which someone just told me is a thing… oops.
All features added on Mac since it's cancellation on PC.
The Ambrosia Software games (Handsome Harry, the Escape Velocity series, ...).
I think Windows 10 needs to have a standard text editor in the console.
Was way more advanced then any of the editors available now. Could handle GB sized files easily. Had macro that can record your operations and playback. Was very nifty and virtually consumed no memory and was simply superb. I still use it though as it is available in 32 Bit version.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles....
Would love to see a 64 bit version and with some more advanced features.
Still loving it and it's one of my main stream editor which just works with just one executable and part of my big list of portable apps collection which mostly consists of single executable based tools for almost any task!!!
Dungeon Keeper
- trueSpace
Harpoon (game)
Drop.io
Quickkeys
I first started using the Internet just after these weren't in use anymore but I worked for a local ISP/web host (remember those), and the boss and others had used things like Archie.
The ISP still ran a BBS at the time I started working there (and people were quickly switching to the Internet). We offered dial-up Internet access for people with Mac, Windows, and NT who wanted to use a Netscape, Eudora, Pegasus, et al. :-)
There was a service called Unix Internet where you could get an inexpensive account to dial in and explore the Internet from the command prompt, which was surprisingly fun.
These were the services I recall: BBS, dial-up Internet, dial-up Unix Internet, web hosting, co-location (i.e., we'd put your server in the basement/server room), ISDN, and T1.
Was intrigued by the caligari ads though.
- Garageband
- iPhoto
- iTunes
- Microsoft Expression Design
Then once workflow is completed, upload it to cloud and run N instances of this workflow.
There was a software called SpiderClimber for this. Unfortunately, the author disappeared and software too.
Edit: i want to extract ad banners from websites, think Google ads or any other ad network ads. Pop ads etc... Including redirect sequence and page's screenshot and source.
This task is not simple as extracting a table as CSV from a webpage.
I've struggled to find anything which is flexible enough to:
1. Visit porn/torrent and other shady websites
2. Save the banner image
3. Click the banner link and save the redirect sequence
4. Screenshot the page which appears after clicking the banner and save its HTML source.
Why i want to do this? To extract scam ads run by scammers. I want to create a directory of all ads which can be queried to see what ads are running. If anyone is running fake news ads or spreading hate speech, they'll caught using this method.
Not for adfraud.
My profile contains my email, if you want to discuss, just email me.
I used it to auto-renew craigslist ads at a company I used to work for.
Kimono was the best for this until it went through a quiet exit to Palantir.
Also, it didn't handle popup windows. And you couldn't select which popup window to switch to.
Alternatively, other Selenium-like ‘headless browsers’ may also have visual tools for creating workflows—e.g. PhantomJS and such. See https://alternativeto.net/software/selenium/
Maybe there's even something for Scrapy, which is made for scraping in the first place, as the name indicates.
Borland Sidekick, a pop-up TSR productivity utility.
Turbo C 2.x
MS QuickC
Probably a few others I need to remember.
[1] I call Free Pascal FPC for short (for Free Pascal Compiler) to distinguish it from the common use of FP to mean Functional Programming).
Here's a digital clock I created with Lazarus:
Digital Clock created in FreePascal / Lazarus:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/04/digital-clock-created-in...
Also feel free to check out these other clocks I created earlier, both in Python:
A simple alarm clock in Python (command-line) - this one has a good real-life use, see the post for details:
https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/11/a-simple-alarm-clock-in-p...
Jal-Tarang, and a musical alarm clock in Python:
https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/12/jal-tarang-and-musical-al...
Here are two more I created earlier:
Digital Clock v1.0 - in 3 lines of Delphi code:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/08/digital-clock-v10-in-3-l...
A digital clock for Windows:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-digital-clock-for-wind...
Okay, I must have got that wrong. Thanks for the correction. I must have mixed up 6 and 2006, likely, since that Delphi Digital Clock v1.0 I mentioned elsewhere in this thread was written by me in 2010.
>TBH i think it made more harm than good overall since it disallowed installing custom components (which defeated a big reason for using Delphi)
Could be so. Yes, even the current Starter editions of Delphi 10.x (code named Berlin, Tokyo etc.) disallow that, IIRC. Or don't have the DB-bound controls (I forget which of the two it is, or whether both). I get your point about not being able to install custom components, which was/is one of the big plus points of Delphi, like VB before it (VBX and then OLE controls).
It hugely increases the ecosystem and potential, and was one or the main reason for the runaway success of VB (the other reason being the drag-and-drop GUI creation and ability to hook up procedures to events by clicking on an event in the event list of a control, and writing a snippet of code that reacts to the event, in the window that popped up, so I've read (I did some VB projects earlier too)).
But I do think that even the limited versions of Delphi are useful, to let beginners get entry to such a good RAD tool. Price is an issue for the full tool, I know.
Of course, I'm somewhat aware of the meanderings and corporate missteps that have troubled the product over the years, every now and then, as it transitioned from Borland to Inprise to Codegear to Embarcadero to ...
>and it was based on perhaps the buggiest and slowest versions of Delphi ever released with a convoluted setup procedure (that among others required an obsolete version of .NET).
Didn't know that stuff. (Heard about the varying bugginess of different Delphi versions over the years, though.) IIRC, I installed and used the Win32 version of Turbo Delphi Explorer, since I prefer non-managed EXEs in general, having a background in compiled languages like C and Pascal from earlier.
I can still buy a copy ... for WinXP... http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Macsyma-1.htm
For a while you couldn't even get that. Macsyma was one of those things where proprietary software can end tragically.
Otherwise, I'd pay for a J compiler that could make fast tree structures, but that never existed, and the market is probably 1.
That being said, the VB6 runtime is STILL in Windows 10, and therefore will be officially supported to a degree for at least 5-8 more years. How’s that for backwards compatibility.
https://anvil.works is VB6, but for the Web, and in Python. No JS frameworks required! We've had data scientists with no Web experience produce MVPs with it in a couple of weeks.
Airfix dogfighter
Sure, today's software capabilities are much more advanced, but you no longer get a physical disk that you can load on you computer and be confident it'll just keep working for years on end without any external dependencies etc.
So maybe it isn't fair to say the user for a bad deal.
Imagine a pre-SaaS Google: You get a few of LTO tapes delivered to your doorstep. They include an index of every website in existence, it's owner/creator, a short description of what it is, and a number of semantic flags.
Moreover, you'd probably get a list of all identified businesses there are in every country, region and industry with their contact information and website addresses.
Imagine what you could do with that...
That's interesting. Can you share more about this ?
As for your pre-sass search engine idea:it's great. Very useful indeed.
But how do I get from that , to finding the bunch of separate webpages that describe how to solve my personal, niche problem( in a really good way ? Most problems are like that. Context is always different.
And yes Google is far from ideal. And SEO sucks.
But still, that problem solving capability is now available to many.