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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?

#571

Post by copperx »

lillesvin wrote: post #250
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…

> E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war. Keep fighting the good fight. I still use Mutt and haven't gotten around to finding a way to handle Office365 meeting invites and such. I'm also the only one in the company that connects to Slack via an IRC client (irssi).

Programmers ought to get together and create CLI versions of clients of popular protocols (Exchange, for one).

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

#572

Post by Turing_Machine »

an_account_name wrote: post #105
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…

Per-call billing sounds crazy - there should never have been a time in circuit switched or packet switched networks when that would have correctly captured costs.

I don't know about the OP's situation, but at one time most phone calls were completed by a human operator looking up circuit numbers and physically connecting the two customers using a patch cord.

I suspect that under that model, the operator's time was the dominant cost involved in placing the call.

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

#574

Post by Teckla »

qw wrote: post #306
kome wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war. I am still fighting, and the war is not over.

The main problem In the business world is Outlook. For some reason they decided to ignore line breaks in plain text by default, which makes plain text a broken mess

The main problem In the business world is Outlook. For some reason they decided to ignore line breaks in plain text by default, which makes plain text a broken mess

There's an option in Outlook to turn that "feature" off, but of course, nobody does.

It's a horrible, terrible default feature of Outlook.

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

#575

Post by msbarnett »

kevsim wrote: post #89
fishanz wrote: post #76

CodeWarrior

Didn't expect to see this one here. I worked for Nokia at the time that they bought some of the CodeWarrior assets from Metroworks. Coming from Visual Studio, CodeWarrior felt like a big step down. What do you miss about it?

Some of it is nostalgia. Some things it genuinely did better -- CodeWarrior's inline ASM syntax kicked the shit out of the GCC equivalent we're stuck with today.

And some of it is highly subjective: there was a simplicity to the old CodeWarrior UI in pre-OS X MacOS. You had a separate project window and a text editor window for every file you were editing. It was clean. It was uncluttered. It wasn't 300 tabs, sidebars, and top bars jammed into one God Window to Rule Them All.

It kept out of your way and did its job quietly.

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

#576

Post by kps »

rlonstein wrote: post #510
mondoshawan wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I use a Kensington trackball nowadays as a replacement and hope to never go back to a mouse again. Putting the ball under the least accurate fingers was so weird.

+1 for the Kensington Expert Mouse, I have 3. The quality of the scroll ring is up for debate but the device overall is much better than anything else I've used. I also miss the Logitech Trackman Wheel optical. It was cheap, light, and worked very well. I still have one for occasional use.

Kensington Slimblade. Scrolls by turning the ball around the Z axis; it sounds strange and error-prone but actually works perfectly. I now keep a spare in a box on a shelf beside my spare Kinesis keyboard.

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

#577

Post by InclinedPlane »

zevv wrote: post #507

A phone with a proper SSH client and a real keyboard; I have owned and loved (in this order) the Nokia E71 and N900, HTC Desire Z, Motorola Droid 4 and Photon Q. But now I am out of options, as there are no worthy successors to any of these devices. Modern phones and tablets are not about production, but only about consuming. A lot of thought goes into the output devices, but the only input device - the touchscreen -…

I use JuiceSSH which works pretty well, but there's definitely no getting around not having a physical keyboard.

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

#578

Post by spdegabrielle »

new299 wrote: post #408
mattbee wrote: post #309

Zap, the text editor for RISC OS - http://zap.tartarus.org/ (not that it's not still available, just that I can't justify working on a RISC OS system for the last ... 16 years :) ).

Oh my goodness yes. So much to love about !Zap. My first ARM assembly programs were written using the Zap disassembler/assembler extension. I also really miss the way it displayed search results, not seen another editor that does it quite like that.

How did it display search results?

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

#579

Post by MichaelGG »

qw wrote: post #306
kome wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war. I am still fighting, and the war is not over.

The main problem In the business world is Outlook. For some reason they decided to ignore line breaks in plain text by default, which makes plain text a broken mess

That reason probably is good. Some mail clients wrap at 78 chars. Result is that the text doesn't flow. Larger window and text doesn't fill, smaller and you get staggered lines. For most Outlook users, it makes sense to convert this into something more readable.

I think there is an option to change its behaviour.

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

#580

Post by figushki »

Free time. I used to use it to sleep, read books, listen to music, watch movies, play video games, do laundry, exercise, talk to my family, and cook my own food. I can do some of those things on the commute to and from work with apps, but it's not the same as when I had free time. I think google or facebook bought it and quietly obsoleted it in 2006. I'm still looking for a replacement. Someone suggested Activity Blocks or HabitRPG, but they don't work the same.
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