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Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#461

Post by AstroJetson »

frik wrote: post #142

* IBM ThinkPad T41p/60. Lenovo T410/X210 where still somewhat fine. But these newer ultrabooks nowadays have less powerful specs than 5 year old notebooks. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon isn't bad, but a far cry given it's ultrabook less powerful specs than an 5 year old high end notebook. And these shitty keyboard nowadays, give me back the old keyboard layout like grouped F1-F12 key, better placed Home/PgUp/PgDn/End…

You can get refurb T60/T61 systems. Buy them now, stick them in a box, pull one out every 18 months when your old one dies. There are some on EBAY for < $100. In most cases you can clone your existing drive and put the new one in the "new" laptop.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#462

Post by digi_owl »

sly010 wrote: post #435
brownbat wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubiquity was amazing. It was sort of like a launcher in a browser combined with IFTTT. You could use it to chain together APIs and reduce them to natural language commands. You could highlight "abogado," translate it, get a map to the nearest one, shorten the url to that map, and email that shortened url to a friend all with one nearly natural language command. I'm not that great at coding, but even I was able to wri…

Ubiquity was ppioneered by Aza Raskin (son of Jess Rasking, designer the original Mac interface). I always had the feeling that uqiquity never was a Mozilla project per say, it was more his personal project that he happened to do inside Mozilla. Perhaps he left or got promoted and the project stopped. I am only guessing.

The Mac interface has little to do with Ubiquity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQDfpw97Tz0

This is Aza demoing the beta version, and to me it seems to build more on Archy than anything WIMP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#463

Post by glomph »

skrebbel wrote: post #165

Jasc Paint Shop Pro. This tool had the useful half of Illustrator's features and the useful half of Photoshop's, it was blazing fast, and it combined them in a single program so you could mix vector and raster layers. This made it absolutely perfect for web-targeted graphics work. It was the first software I legally bought because it was so good and still affordable (a fraction of the price of Adobe's stuff - somethi…

I had a very similar love for Macromedia Fireworks.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#465

Post by hoof_marks »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #181
hoof_marks wrote: post #101

Windows XP and its search feature- Win7 above does not have it. Yahoo Geocities- simply miss it. and also Yahoo in general. My current yahoo mail is chock a block with spam mails. plus their ads. Xerox Ventura desktop publishing software- that was cool when book publishing was required. Motorola T90/91 basic mobile phone. superb and handiest phone used. Current Moto is smart but not unbeatable. Most importantly old B…

What's wrong with your tap water? Don't they have the same safety standards to meet? UK tap water is great (Well, outside of Greater London where it's basically limestone slurry). I've never bought bottled or filtered aside from the brief time I was in London. At least two brands of UK bottled water were bottling northern tap water and selling it. Business idea I wish I had thought of!

Indeed its India, Calcutta I'm talking about. True 20 years back (1996 and before.. vaguely) that's when we were children the Ganges water was clean. It is too polluted now to drink it straight away. And nobody really drinks it taking it straight from the tap. There were times when NGOs offered large earthen pots of cool water free on the streets. In my home we have a non-electric Ceramic water filter. But the current norm is electric RO +UV filters.

Arsenic is present in ground water in south Calcutta and is a health problem. Municipal water is arsenic free. It is treated with Chlorine.

Much/All of this pollution is self created by polluting the rivers. Individually, industrially and socially.

I believe that using bottled water should be an exception and availability of tap/filtered water at public places should be a norm. But bottled water has become a necessity and a fad today.

I do admire the places mentioned where you enjoy pure water still. I know that in New York the water comes from upstate reservoirs. I also think many places water fountain is available at public places/streets for drinking. If you know the cities you've seen this let me know I'll make a note of it.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#466

Post by Figs »

ishanr wrote: post #204

Web pages without javascript. Even now I try to use the web without it as much as I can. So smooth and nice everything is.

I use the JS Switch plugin in Firefox so that I can turn it on and off easily, and browse with it off by default until I need Javascript. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/js-switch/)

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#467

Post by jlgaddis »

Havoc wrote: post #362
anexprogrammer wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lenovo destroyed the Thinkpad legacy. I gave up on them a few years ago when they dropped the 7 row keyboard. The 7 row keyboard was leagues ahead of any other laptop keyboard, ever. The replacement keyboard is awful. I hate the loss of web forward/back keys too. I hate chicklet keys. I hate pgup/dn placed as though I'll almost never use them. I still prefer the trackpoint over any touchpad. I'd buy a retro Thinkpad,…

The Lenovo keyboards aren't bad? I actually like them. Well aside from the bottom left key being FN instead of Ctrl...that part is retarded. The trackpads on them are beyond redemption though. How that made it past well any kind of user testing is beyond me.

FWIW, on my W530, you can swap Fn and Ctrl in the BIOS. YMMV.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#468

Post by digi_owl »

avar wrote: post #116

A few things: Everything not being 4:3 screens. I found it better for programming than everything being cinematic screens. Back when monitor manufacturers were racing to make better / higher resolution monitors, instead of just leaving it at 1080p / 4k / whatever the current standard good enough for movies is. The GMail interface before it started auto-converting the textarea to HTML when edited externally. Console g…

Heh, i recall when Apple started shipping everything with 16:9. You could tell when a web dev was using Mac, as invariably the site layout would produce a scroll bar at the bottom of the screen on 4:3 screens.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#469

Post by hoof_marks »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #243
BjoernKW wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm not mistaken he's talking about India. It's common advice (for travellers at least) to only drink bottled water in India.

He mentions 2 decades ago it being fine, so I presume not India. The advice to only drink bottled in India was common 20 years ago too.

India, Calcutta. But now all over India hardly one will be drinking tap water straight away. Some filter process is always done at point of drinking.

These days its so sad to find every shop ordering a container of filtered drinking water. Earlier it was available through taps. Now no one trusts tap water.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#470

Post by Figs »

avar wrote: post #116

A few things: Everything not being 4:3 screens. I found it better for programming than everything being cinematic screens. Back when monitor manufacturers were racing to make better / higher resolution monitors, instead of just leaving it at 1080p / 4k / whatever the current standard good enough for movies is. The GMail interface before it started auto-converting the textarea to HTML when edited externally. Console g…

I've found that I actually really like using rotated 9:16 portrait mode monitors for writing code in a dual or triple monitor setup. It's very helpful to be able to see 80+ lines at a time.
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