Ask HN: Which discontinued app or tool would you still like to use today? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which discontinued app or tool would you still like to use today?

Hi HN,

I asked a similar question a couple of days ago, but for some reason it didn't manage to get to 'Ask HN'. However, before it sunk into oblivion, I got some really interesting comments [1]. So I'd like to give my tiny research one last chance. ;-)

So the question is:

Which app or tool (if any!) that is no longer developed or supported — or perhaps so far from mainstream that it’s practically dead — you used to use a lot, like a lot and now miss a lot? Can be pro or personal.

Feel free to share more than one, if you like.

Thanks for any comment. :-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31425990

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Adobe Flash.

I don't care how many issues it has. It was the last tool that made creative web and game design possible without needing to be a full stack JS developer.

Part of the reason the web looks like a wasteland of responsive templates from 2012 is because the death of Flash changed how we wasted time on the Internet. Gone are the games and artistic experiences. In its place came content mills churning out GIF-laden quizzes, listicles and newsletters with a ton of ads littering every page. Buzzfeed is now a publicly traded company on the basis of how well it flattened Internet culture into it's one-size fits-all world.

Actionscript was the catalyst for me going from script kiddie to SWE. I made a decent living from 17-20 doing medical show kiosks and complex Flash sites for said medical providers. By the end of it I had a nice little data loading and UI component library akin to what you would see in Qt or GTK.

I really wish I still had the HDD with the files on it to reminisce.

When you feel nostalgic: check out Chrome extension Ruffle. It reanimate those dead flash web app/game

Been there, done (with Flash) that! ;-) Macromedia will always have this special place in our hearts, I guess.

Thank you for the comment!

Isn't OpenFL[0] a substitute for Flash?

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

Picassa, the offline photo management tool with pretty good face recognition

Google Reader - RSS reader via the web

FTP - the protocol - why can't I download files from gnu's FTP site in Chrome?

Flash - if they just sandboxed it, and allowed no local file access, it would be ok.

Delicio.us - the social bookmark service

Edwin - Turbo Power Software - a nice macro recording text editor for DOS

Microsoft Office 2000 Professional, with Access

Visual Basic 6.0

There’s a Windows game called Argentum Online which is still actively developed in VB 6.0 under various forks. So at least that isn’t dead dead.

It's an MMO, holy shit.

This makes me really happy. VB6 was my start into programming.

I got my first computer at 16 (we were poor). I immediately found out how to download pirated VB6 (sorry Microsoft). It was almost the exact size of the available space on my 2GB HDD, which had nothing more than the bare windows install, AOL, and a download manager. It took like four weeks to download the ~1GB, because I could only run it surreptitiously overnight to keep my father happy, and it was dial-up 56k. It was difficult to write to cd because of buffer issues.

When I finally got it installed, I think I had something like 8mb of free space on the disk. I could work on one VB6 project and have like 2 mp3 files.

Eventually I got an ELN account and I was able to uninstall AOL, freeing up a lot of space.

Those were really good times.

<3 VB6

Thank you!

Visual Basic 6.0

In the 20+ years since it came out, I still haven’t found an easier and more productive way to create a CRUD app, or to quickly put together a simple GUI.

Lazarus, based on Free Pascal, is close to that easy. The documentation isn't as good. It is cross platform, which is a big plus.

The Lazarus/Delphi style IDEs are what many languages want to have something similar to. I see a lot of Golang users wishing they had such.

I feel the same about C++ Builder 4. It's a little weird that 20+ years later on a new Mac I don't know how to do most of the things with GUIs I was doing effortlessly back then on Windows ME.

Gambas is the best I have seen for something that feels like VB6. It's Linux only, but it has JIT.

Microsoft Money.

Whilst other products do similar things in terms of tracking accounts, I miss the forecast graph that would model how your money would perform over time.

Google Reader. I can't stand video or audio, and strongly prefer written materials so email subscriptions and RSS are how I keept up.

I use kMyMoney as a replacement, it's not exactly the same but it gets the job done for me.

Wunderlist

It was such a well made, beautiful app. Microsoft bought it and shut it down. They asked existing users to export their data over to MS Todo. The export and MS account creation didn't work for me even after multiple tries. Plus, Microsoft ToDo just didn't have the same feature set and aesthetics as Wunderlist, so I just moved on to another app.

What would keep me from recreating Wunderlist?

I can imagine the costs of supporting users and data sync over web, desktop apps, mobile apps on all platforms. Wunderlist had paid accounts which allowed more themes, but I remember most of the other features were on-par with free accounts.

Other list apps have become more of a todo list app. Wunderlist encouraged all kinds of lists. - movies to watch. - packing list for weekend trip. - shopping list. - yardsale items.

Some of the people who worked on Wunderlist are working on a new todo app, Superlist. https://superlistapp.com

SpinRite

I really miss the super-obvious read-read-read-read-read, map bad sectors and move data to good sectors process. With modern data recovery software, I can't always tell what it's doing (with mechanical drives).

-- Okay so after looking up Spinrite on Wikipedia, I'm confused. I thought it was long discontinued. It was last updated in 2014 but Steve Gibson still has it as a current product.

Either way, I'm skeptical it'll recreate the recovery experience of my MFM days.

Spin rite is only designed to work with spinning-rust drives.

SSDs, with their wear-levelling tech, prevents SpinRite from working correctly.

And unless you are dealing with large-volume, cool storage, or cold storage, who TF uses spinning-rust drives anymore?

Corel Rave - amazing tool for animations and simple, interactive stuff exported as Shockwave Flash.

Google Inbox - neat interface for email (however Spike is an excellent alternative)

Dzięki! ;-)

Apple's Cover Flow and Front Row. I miss them both so much that I am attempting to learn how to program to resurrect something like them. XBMC, Plex, and all of the skins for each don't come remotely close to what I'm looking for.

You just reminded me about the little remote controls iMacs used to come with that looked a bit like an iPod Shuffle - those things were great.

You can still buy the (current model) Apple remote separately from Apple TV; current Mac OS versions still have built in support for the basic media control buttons (pause/play, volume control, maybe a few others) and you can use tools like BetterTouchTool to implement custom actions.

I use mine (previous-gen Siri remote) to control volume, display brightness, display power on/off, and to switch between display inputs, the first using OSC[1] to the RME mixer app and the rest via a trivial Web service I wrote[2] that controls the LG TV I use as a display via RS-232 (which, for UI reasons, is noticeably faster than using the TV's bundled remote for the same tasks, and much faster than using the buttons and OSD to input-switch on my previous, non-TV display).

While I have keyboard hotkeys set up for the same operations on the Mac, I frequently USB switch my keyboard and mouse to other computers connected to the display, with HDMI audio routed via S/PDIF to the same audio interface (RME Babyface Pro), so having "always-on" copies of these controls is handy.

Before the Apple Remote, I considered using controls on a small MIDI digital piano I have within reach for the same purpose, but this way is slightly more convenient in that I don't have to toggle the controls off when playing the piano.

[1] https://archiv.rme-audio.de/download/osc_table_totalmix.zip

[2] https://github.com/jasminetroll/LgTvControl

I used to use AppViz 1 and 2 by Ideaswarm until I switched harddrives and forgot to back up that one particular program in 2020. Its gone forever now. There are no downloads anywhere and there is no alternative offline programs that work the same.

On the windows it is Keynote renamed Ketnote NF. It doesn't work on the mac very well under wine, nor on linux. There is nothing in the world as useful as an outliner with tabs.

https://github.com/dpradov/keynote-nf

The bricks called Nokia phones minus the software (except for the default ringtone) :)

When Nokia was struggling, the only bright spot for them was the Indian market. During that period they ran a series of Ads on Indian television with just some text and at the end of the Ad they use to play the ringtone. Every time that happened people use to search their pockets for their mobile phone :)

That was genius!

ECCO Pro PIM/Outliner.

I kept so much info on that app. Got a little tired of double-clicking to expand/collapse outline levels, tho.

Switched over to OmniOutliner until I missed an upgrade.

I still use https://github.com/nefarius/ScpToolkit to let me use my PS3 controller with my computer. It's the only way I've found but the driver has a bug that bluescreens my computer after it comes out of sleep, if the controller has been used before it went to sleep. If someone has an alternate driver please lmk!

The GitHub suggests using [DsHidMini](https://vigem.org/projects/DsHidMini/) for Windows 10 support, presuming that you aren’t running Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1, have you tried it?

Opera 12, with its insanely fast Presto engine and tab grouping that Chromium-based browsers only recently emulated.

Yes, I know about Vivaldi, but it's just not the same.

I tried Vivaldi a few times over the years, and the UI is always really slow; there's a noticeable lag with everything.

But yeah, I really miss Opera; still the best browser to date. I also really liked the Opera Dragonfly devtools.

Both are still technically available but on life-support:

Heroku- see ample discussions from recent weeks on HN

SourceTree- last time I tried it a year or so ago it was in a sorry state. Most problematically: it had runaway CPU usage on macOS. Had to kill the whole app whenever it was idle or the fans would go nuts. Eventually I gave up; the bug had been there for a long time and they showed no interest in fixing it.

+1 sourcetree

I’m still using SourceTree on a daily basis. No issues for me. Really surprised why it got mentioned here a couple of times.

Not sure what sourcetree has that others don't. I loved sourcetree right up until it started glitching out for no reason, refusing to commit and not telling me why. I switched to Gitkraken, which experienced the same for a while, giving some cryptic unrelated errors. Then I switched to Fork, which works perfectly fine so far, even with commit signing and all.

Ava Find - It was a Windows-only file indexing and search software. You could find any files instantly by name and pattern matching. It also had a window with recently changed files which it actively monitored to update indexes.

These days, Windows has good file indexing out of the box... but I still miss the "recently changed files" pane.

I use(d) ESP for this, keeping a binary around to install in any new machine. I miss it so much now that I’m on Mac. Alfred is good and does so much more but it is painfully inferior to ESP at finding files by name.

I never heard of Ava Find and will enjoy learning more about its features if I get the chance.

SawStudio. A DAW written in x86 assembly with 64 bit integer computations throughout and excellent but non-standard UX. It's not dead, but the community using it seems smaller everyday. It's an impressive technical achievement. Practically bug-free (the only bugs that I ever encountered were due to external plugins).

Have you tried Reaper?

Pokebook.

https://web.archive.org/web/20091125090955/http://pokebook.c...

The simplest, quickest, cleanest, and most efficient social networking site you've never used.

WinAMP

It's plugin system really made it the swiss army knife of one's multimedia ecosystem. My personal favorite was the iPod syncing, letting me bypass iTunes entirely.

Unfortunately it feels like streaming platforms, with their proprietary players and locked content, functionally kill any emergence of a phenomenon like winamp.

I still use WinAmp with Internet Radio, and pretty much only that. Works wonderfully, although you do have to hunt for those stations. And you need to bookmark them correctly, otherwise you’ve bookmarked an IP address that can suddenly go silent when the station hops to a different IP.

Try Pot player!

nvALT: https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

Ubuntu's Unity

Slackware (not technically dead at all, but it was so great, back in the day).

Google Reader

Gotta’ be one of the various Palm OS devices I used to carry. The OS and its apps were so simple, fast, and graceful. And it came from the era when devices tried to differentiate in weird and creative ways (My favorite: The CLIÉ NR70 and its successors).

could they at least open source the Graffiti interpretation library? stupid device made me change how I write for what, three or four years of use?

I got the Handera with the add on cards and for a glorious afternoon I had my phone's sim card installed. Why it had to use AAA batteries for that.. oh yeah, batteries still sucked back then.

BlackBerryOS, although really I think I miss the phones themselves. My last BB that ran BBOS was a Passport and that was a brilliant phone; using the keyboard to swipe around was genius.

RIM explicitly starved BBOS with its introduction. The company had oodles of cash, and yet, tried to encourage app devs to port their programs over with… a $100 incentive? Like, WTF?

They had more than enough cash to go to any top company and say that they would pay those companies the full price of the app for every single copy legitimately downloaded, and provide a $10k bonus for every app ported over as a native (not Android) app.

That would have had companies breaking down the door to get their apps onto the BBOS marketplace. Instead, you had… almost nothing except for Android ports and a handful of the biggest social media names port theirs over “just because”.

BBOS could have been a strong third contender, but RIM strangled it to death in the cradle.

With that said, anything running BBOS10 is still perfectly fine as a phone, and still runs all of the default apps that don’t depend on RIM’s online services. It ends up being a wonderfully focused platform - you pretty much have only calls, sms, and traditional eMail - now that you can only side load apps and there are almost none available.

I don't have much use for such a thing anymore, and I don't know what people use instead of Spyglass/Fortner Transform anymore, but it was really nice in its era.

High Noon. An iPhone game which uses the gyroscope to shoot cowboys.

Seriously, thank you for all your great, insightful comments! I appreciate it!

Google Reader

Aldus/Macromind Freehand, vector illustration app that was Illustrator's nemesis.

Why do you care?

Do you want to buy/remake it and seek VC funding and exit before getting customers?

Asking for a friend!

Ha! Good one! :-)

Perhaps some answers to the future questions may lie in the past. Is the current/new toolstack always better than the old one? I'm just curious. :-)

To some extent, true, it is an exercise in validating, say, business hypotheses. I guess it's quite normal for founders. However, I’m already VC backed, so I’m not sure if your friend is really onto something. ;-)

Thanks!

“Close tabs opened by this tab” in Chrome's tab context menu.

Flash

Picassa Image Viewer, Zune Music Player

Kodachrome 25

Pebble I so badly want one.

mailbox/astro ios/mac apps

sourcetree

hackpad

dropbox pre-enterprise pre-electron

one-drive pre-Files-on-Demand

Thanks! I liked pre-enterprise Dropbox too.

StumbleUpon

Google Wave

Lol, did you use this for something practical and useful? I remember it being kind of mind blowing tech wise at the time, but past that I can’t remember getting a ton of use out of it? Remind me of the highlights?

FWIW iirc it was continued for some time by apache (https://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html) but is also discontinued now. (I hope thats the correct project, but I'm pretty sure).

Also here: https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave

Google wave could have been amazing, had they not forced all those boxes into it, and just made things one big fluid document people could collaboratively edit.

I remember some people predicting Slack to be 'an email killer'. I never thought about it that way. However, with Google Wave, I was practically sure it will somehow replace emails.

One of the most surprising 'departures' imho. :-)

Comic chat

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