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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

These retrospectives make me upset about the software industry today. The PIM software today isn’t any better than it was 20-30 years ago, and in many respects it’s worse. Electron-based trash that doesn’t do half of what Lotus or even Outlook did years ago. (Quite literally—the new web based trash version of Outlook has blank spots in the user interface for missing features that were in the old version.) We are living in “Idiocracy” and don’t even realize it.

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Used by small law firms, Ecco Pro (built by 4 people in Bellevue, WA) was killed by Outlook, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro

> Ecco Pro was originally developed by Pete Polash, who had sold an early Macintosh based presentation program to Aldus and Bob Perez, a Harvard-trained lawyer hired by Apple as a programmer and Evangelist in the 1980s. It was first released in 1993 by Arabesque Software, Inc., based in Bellevue, Washington. PC Magazine awarded ECCO Pro their Editor's Choice award in 1996 and 1997.

> Development by NetManage ceased in 1997 after the July 1997 release of version 4.01. Andrew Brown wrote in The Guardian: "So what happened to the paragon of a program? The market killed it. First it was sold to a much larger company, Netmanage; presumably doing this made the original programmers a lot of money. Then Netmanage panicked when Microsoft Outlook came along as a "free" part of the Office suite, and killed development on the program." NetManage chief executive officer Zvi Alon noted that 'As soon as Microsoft decided to give away Outlook with Office, we started getting phone calls questioning the value of Ecco Pro'.

Ecco was so beloved that it was binary patched to enable Lua scripting, a decade after being killed. It was virtually bug free and continues to work today on Windows, Linux+Wine and macOS+Crossover. It was so well designed that even though it predated the internet, it could be trivially extended to support hyperlinks. The main limitations after 20 years of zero maintenance are max db size and lack of scalable fonts.

In 2023, an open-source PIM inspired by Ecco Pro reached v1.0 status after 14 years, built on Qt with binaries available for Win/Linux/Mac, https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine

  CrossLine is an outliner with sophisticated cross-link capabilities in the tradition of the well-respected Ecco Pro. It implements the concept of "Transclusion" proposed by Ted Nelson and - among others - implemented in the legendary Objectory SE tool by Ivar Jacobson. It is also a full text database with built-in search engine.

"Small law firms" seem to have a history of adopting and hanging on to specific software. IIRC they used Wordperfect for years after Word had taken over almost all other business and personal word processing, because there were so many legal templates for Wordperfect and they didn't want to abandon what was working for them.

If contracts are "code for human behavior", then legal templates are a well-tested code base. Wordperfect had great support for formatting codes. Looks like it's still a feature being developed for lawyers, https://www.wordperfect.com/en/licensing/legal/

> An all-time favorite feature just got even better! Reveal Codes window now displays codes for font attributes and text alignment features in table cells, rows, and columns. In addition, cell and row codes appear before table text in the Reveal Codes window, delivering a clearer picture of what font and alignment formatting has been applied.

Ecco Pro is great for manually linking items in multiple locations within a complex hierarchy, with one change reflected everywhere. Hard to walk away from a well organized database of research or writing.

Scrivener has been praised for complex writing projects, e.g. worldbuilding for novels and screenplays. Looks like lawyers use it too, https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

Oh, man, thanks for the CrossLine reference. As a formerly big user of Ecco Pro, I look forward to giving it a whirl this afternoon.

You mostly had me at "Transclusion" (an unfortunate terminology in retrospect come to think of it, I wish Ted Nelson would offer a substitute term. Hyperthogonal transaction? idk)

Regardless of the social changes in recent decades, I think it is silly to decide to reserve the root "trans-" for a certain group when it has historically had multiple meanings. Correct me if you had some other reason.

I've installed CrossLine and read CrossLineDemo.cldb, but can't find anything that might be described as transclusion. The "Transclusion" outline in CrossLineDemo.cldb is just a copy of a Wikipedia page and does not mention CrossLine. Because the outline named "Ecco Pro" says, "Data is stored as discrete objects, and can be dragged as dynamic links to multiple folders creating cross references," I tried in CrossLine to drag an item to a different folder or a different outline, but no joy.

Can someone explain how CrossLine enables transclusion?

Haven't installed CrossLine recently, maybe file a github issue for docs/faq? Drag-and-drop might have OS-specific quirks.

2018 comment by the developer suggests pasting, https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8438/0/crossli...

> if the outline is in the same repository, CrossLine supports live transclusion, i.e. the transcluded items immediately update when the source is changed; if the outline is in a different repository, the item is pasted as a static link, i.e. the text is pasted and doesn’t change unless you manually change it (CTRL+SHIFT+L). Live transclusion links have a blue background color while static links have normal background, blue font and are underlined.

> Note that there are two ways of transcluding: either as alias items or inlined items. You can create the former by selecting one or more items, then clicking on the handle of the item under which you want the alias, then CTRL+SHIFT+V; the latter are simply created instead by pasting into the text of another item.

Fascinating story! I’d love something like this with PDF integration (a file format that has become deeply embedded within all aspects of legal practice).

I appreciate the overall sentiment, but the Electron hate seems misplaced here. HTML/CSS/JS on desktop apps opens a whole world for UI/UX design. Not that this opportunity has been fully capitalized on, but it's a good thing nonetheless.

It's not a good thing. Desktop apps that don't adhere to the UI/UX conventions of the platform they run on almost universally suck.

No they don’t. They’re slow and bloated, defy platform conventions (like drag & drop), and enable a low skill class of web developers to create crappy desktop “apps.”

HTML/CSS/JS is less capable than native development. It limits, not expands, what desktop application designs can do.

Alarmingly, 1990 is 34 years ago. Though I still think of it as 20-30 as well.

I still think of 1990 as 10 years ago and refuse to believe otherwise

I never used Outlook back in the day. But indeed, now that I'm forced to use the web version, I find it hard to believe that they are pushing such trash on so many millions of users.

How can it lack such basic things as properly quoting the message you're replying to (be it with > symbols, a vertical line or whatever) or knowing what email address an incoming message is actually directed to (this can be achieved by going deep into the menus to show the raw email text, but come on).

All those things were common when I started using email, maybe around 25 years ago. They shouldn't be rocket sience.

And anyway, it's still not as annoying as that steaming pile of trash called Teams... it's sad how low Microsoft's QA has fallen.

it's sad how low Microsoft's QA has fallen.

Microsoft famously got rid of their QA teams, what, ten or fifteen years ago? Not that you’d notice…

It’s funny because their QA was already mocked for how bad it was back in the 1990s.

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