Ask HN: A great software you liked, but not supported anymore | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A great software you liked, but not supported anymore

16 pointsvasergen28 comments

VB6. It was a horrible language but I've yet to see anything really come close to it in terms of quick-and-dirty getting shit done

Have you ever tried Delphi (and to a lesser extent/polish Lazarus?)

The problem with Delphi is the cost. I've tried it briefly but that was during a trial period and I didn't even get to use it much. Embarcadero's pricing on even the entry level products to use Delphi was way more than I was willing to spend in order to even see if I liked it.

Would you say it's significantly better than python for quick and dirty work? Or if not what still supported tool comes the closest for you.

Ship GitHub client https://www.realartists.com/blog/ship-20.html

Amazing piece of software. Was native, fast and made dealing with github issues across many repos a joy. Sad it got shut down.

Didn't know about this, it looks like you can still download a binary. Is it just not actively maintained or does it no longer work with Github at all?

Edit: Ah checked it out, it is indeed closed. Would people want to see a successor to something like this?

Java Applets. They were portable, they were in the www. Also i like the Java language.

I dunno how a company can fail with such a good product.

I assume the problem was Oracles security model: Allow the app todo everything? no?! then i won't start. Yes?! ok i can do everything!

smile

applets were long dead before oracle came into the picture

There was a point in time they were acceptable, but that was too long after DHTML/AJAX was good enough for the simple things, and Flash for the flashy things.

The first iterations were so incredibly slow, bloated and foreign that I would usually close the page after 10 secs or so when the applet was still initializing.

It’s ok to like them and miss them - they did give us Minecraft and stuff. But they were dead long before oracle and long before they were acceptable.

AmigaOS. Mostly because of the underlying hardware and ecosystem. Simple things were simple, and complex things were complicated but possible.

Today everything is complex and complicated for little reason.

(Compare e.g. the elegance of Amiga Message and signal ports to named pipes / shared memory / tcp / whatever. Of course it can be emulated - but the fact it’s standard on the Amiga means every program uses it and it makes a huge difference in interoperability. Similarly, IFF was good enough; there weren’t billions of framing formats on the Amiga, because there was an acceptable standard from day 1)

FoxBase+/Mac Very compact and very flexible. dBase with built-in programmatic UI/graphics capabilities. (though I am glad I transitioned to LAMP stack before such web tech this really rocked though)

ClarisWorks/AppleWorks - integrated Word Processor, Database Spreadsheet and Graphics in one, where the graphics capabilities could be used in the reporting for the DB. Apple stripped it down into Pages and Numers for iWork, not as dynamic as it once was.

KDE 3.5 - was a pretty complete desktop for Linux, with some awesome tools and apps (Quanta Plus IDE, Kooka OCR)

Picasa - Was one of the best photo managers especially on Linux.

Google inbox. Like Gmail but better

I loved the app

Turbo C. I liked how it came with support libraries to develop programs with audio, graphics and normal text. It is really what got me into game programming. It was a much simpler world. No analysis paralysis about what which game ask to use. Can draw a point on a screen. Can draw a line. Can play a tone. After that it was all the programmer's imagination and creativity.

Pullreminders, apparently it was integrated on Github scheduled reminders, but, it is not the same.

I liked to get notified on PR updates on my slack workspace, same way as my peers, now, everyone willing to get those needs admin access to a slack workspace which is tedious to setup.

Numerous App It was a way to track lots of different values on your own dashboard

https://youtu.be/c0A9hEUnAOM

One day I hope to rebuild it.

Screenhero. Best remote pairing tool I ever used. Then Slack bought and killed it. I'm not sure why, it was an incredible product and would have made a killing in the pandemic.

Mischief, it was a fantastic vector illustration software with an infinite canvas that let you just jump straight into drawing. I still use my copy but I wish it had continued support.

I still have my copy, I really liked that program and bought it early on, it's a bummer it can't be supported.

Final Cut Pro 7 and Aperture. Both discontinued by Apple in favour of dumbed down “consumer grade” replacements. Real shame.

Gnome 2.

Google Reader.

Python 2.

Macromedia Flash.

Windows XP.

(I may have been just kidding about the last 0 to 3 items).

Soon to be included to the list: Xorg the server (/usr/bin/Xorg).

Winamp. Took me 20 years to find a replacement (musicbee).

Deluxe Paint 2/3, the MED soundtracker, Turbo C++

Microsoft PhotoDraw

Windows Movie Maker

Oh man, I absolutely hate whatever the hell they replaced it with. A couple years ago I wanted to make a simple video using slide based animation and positioning some music in it. I had done this before with MovieMaker so I knew it was dead simple and easy to use. Unfortunately, it turned out that it was retired and replaced with some absolute garbage tier application, that on first site, didn’t have the capabilities the old one had. I ended up just finding a copy of the old Windows Essentials via some shady link.

Multimedia Fusion

counter strike

google reader

google wave

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