Show HN: Reviving a 20 year old OS X App | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Reviving a 20 year old OS X App

andrewshaw.nl

73 pointsshawa_a_a32 comments

Their sketchy ad/malware era aside, I do appreciate sourceforge keeping all the old OSS websites and repos alive.

- and + denote instance and class methods respectively, not public and private.

Source: my first released Mac OS X app came out in 2003. https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/irooster

Yeah, and that's even more confusing than using it for public/private. It just shouldn't have been a thing. I think I stopped trying to seriously gain experience with Objective-C after noticing that.

I was even kinda okay with the [callee verbingTheSubject withFooValueBeing 7 andBarValueSetTo "good argument"] but that was just too much.

Since going down this rabbit hole, I gave Anki another fair shot and actually RTFM :) the blog post warrants an update

https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#learning-steps Details what _actually happens_ when you pick again/hard/good etc. I much prefer understanding this to the vibes-based approach of “did you pause before answering”.

Secondly turns out you can indeed very easily set up type-to-answer in a deck by editing the front template and adding

{type:Field}

where field is the answer part of the card’s data.

So… I’m actually using Anki again. I’m still very happy I did this, it was a fun little journey!

The author's discussion of Duolingo makes the app seem outright dangerous for naïve users. It's well known that it's a criminal offence in Germany to not talk to the apple on Tuesdays.

I understand the whole retro look of the website but it's very unreadable with the white text on bright stars background. Fortunately reader mode on Safari helped me read it.

On a similar note, a few months ago, I took over a 14 year old Objective-C iPhone app called Painteresque and brought it back to life. Discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43222099

If OP is interested, maybe I can help with the Sandbox issues or having it published on the Mac App Store?

I was very confused by your comment because for me the background is clouds with black text.

Turns out it changes based on light/dark mode.

It’s not the most accessible colour scheme - I’ll have a look and tweak it so dark mode is more readable.

I’d definitely be really grateful for help with that! I’m not planning to publish to the Mac App Store, but it would be great to have the build step a bit more compliant with current practises.

Email me (from my profile) and I can have a look with your sandbox issue.

Speaking of old OS X apps, I liked iWeb a lot when I was a kid. I must have been around 12 when I was messing around with it.

It was a really nifty visual website builder. I was sad when it went. Fantastic in the days when ISPs threw in a bit of webspace for customers to play with

Yeah, remember "Macromedia Dreamweaver" (specifically Macromedia Dreamweaver 4[1])? I remember having tried that as a kid. It did not work out for me well, but iWeb was perfect to me.

[1] Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 is the fourth major version of Dreamweaver that was released by Macromedia on November 27, 2000.

It's a bit sad it just won't run without modifications. I'm sure I could run a random exe from then in Windows?

Yeah, that’s the downside to swapping architectures. x86 goes to great pains to be backward-compatible at the instruction level, and then MS puts a lot of effort into keeping Windows backwards compatible.

A couple years back on Windows 10 I successfully installed and used a PCB layout tool from 1998. I was shocked at how smooth it went. I think it needed to run as administrator but otherwise zero issues.

Windows NT has run on multiple architectures since day one with x86/PowerPC/Alpha/MIPS flavours, however x86/AMD64 has won over them.

Trying to add ARM desktop to the mix hasn't indeed been easy, because of backwards compatibility efforts, most folks don't care about Windows ARM laptops.

Pocket PC/Windows CE also had ARM/MIPS variants.

From what I can tell, it may have taken MS a while, but it seems like on the Windows side of things, amd64 emulation seems to work pretty flawlessly. There are still issues (i.e. Qualcomm's drivers not being as good as Nvidia's/Intel's/AMD's) but at least on the Windows side of the equation everything seems to work now.

Because MS doesn't require special emulation hardware like Rosetta2 does, I expect amd64 emulation on Windows to last a lot longer than it will on macOS, too.

> ...but at least on the Windows side of the equation everything seems to work now.

Depends on how much you care about Khronos APIs for example.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/announcing-the-opencl...

No other updates since 2020.

> Windows NT has run on multiple architectures since day one with x86/PowerPC/Alpha/MIPS flavours, however x86/AMD64 has won over them.

True in theory, but in practice you're not going to take a Windows NT PPC .exe and run it anywhere today. Apple's done a decent job with Rosetta and Rosetta 2 doing CPU emulation when doing the transitions but I don't think they've ever targeted the same "You can run Windows 95 x86 .exes on Windows 11 x86-64" backwards-compatibility goal.

My experience with OSX and iOS backwards compatibility is similar to the post author's: things might break once in a while on a long timeframe but it's usually pretty easy to rebuild for a newer version. This works fine so long as the company that owns the source code actually still exists and is willing to build a new version.

My son is playing Reader Rabbit from 2001 on my Windows 10 laptop.

I had to clock "enable 640x480" compatibility mode and I need to directly run the EXE (the wrapper launcher doesn't work) but otherwise it works fine.

Not really, depends from what era as well, even though Windows is more backwards compatible.

Win16 is only supported up to Windows 10.

Win32 did not run in special variations of Windows 8, like Windows RT tablets, where only UWP was supported (guess why they didn't took off).

All Windows versions that descend from Windows NT, also support many architectures, only a few had x86 emulators.

The latest attempt to push Windows on ARM, only started taking off with Arm64EC binaries, which are the Windows version of fat binaries, and the emulator isn't as good as Rosetta.

Finally even Microsoft does indeed drop functions every now and then, even if that is a seldom event.

Then the random exe might appear run, but crash into issues like modern HDPi, new security model,...

Depends on your definition of 'run' - for example, old games (pre DirectX 9) now run through an emulated DirectX layer (they removed the native implementation in Windows 8), and it makes the games perform much worse on modern machines than they used to run on decent machines back in the day.

There are some reimplemetations like dgVoodoo2 and DXWrapper but they can be pretty buggy.

There's actually an excellent Dutch piece of software for this (Windows only though, but works fine in Wine on other platforms): Overhoor [1].

I used it under Windows 3.11 as a child, and kept using it for French and German into my late teens and Windows ME. It is simple, just as this tool. To this day, it's a piece of freeware that gives me good memories of a forgotten era.

Since the author describes learning Dutch, I though I might mention its existence.

[1] https://www.efkasoft.nl/overhoor-download/

I came here to say the same thing! I used an ancient (DOS) version of it to get me through high school French, German, Latin and so on. Fond memories.

Why ? Why flattening the icons and make everything grayish ?

Flat is just modern macOS, but I agree. I miss colour.

Agreed - updated with colour again

I have one c. 2010 Intel app that I am absolutely dependent on. Commercial, so no chance of recompiling the source code.

I am not looking forward to Rosetta going away.

Worst case, I guess you could set up an emulated VM running an Intel variant of macOS?

It's Genius.app, an old flashcard app for Macs.

Author discusses/compares Duolingo and Anki. Anki is disapproved for lack of precise right/wrong feedback.

Repository of updated code: https://github.com/shawa/genius

I think OP is confused about how Anki works. It can totally be used the same as this tool if you just hit '1' for things you got wrong and '3' for things you got right. '2' and '4' are more power user levels of control.

I love the early web feel of the site. The points around DuoLingo not working are informative. This could be turned into a PWA so it can run anywhere?

cool! but i won't be truly happy until we get a modern, native version of 'jared, the butcher of song' for macOS :)

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