Pathminder for DOS 1988 Finder is a joke compared to this tool
Agreed, but Finder is joke compared to everything.
Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
681–690 of 891 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#682I think Macromedia Fireworks is one of most underated software. Since Adobe bought them, they let the software slowly died.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#683Writing, with a pen. I never do it anymore, but it worked great until I got a PC, a Psion 5, and especially after my first Macbook. Since then I barely write with a pen, and if I do it's cramped.
I use it for productivity :) On a blank A4 page there are no notifications, popups, battery issues, constraints of input fields. I find it really useful to have the project outline beside my monitor. It's joy to physically cross out todo items :)
I do this too. The lack of interrupts and constraints were also my driver back to blank pages for project planning/outlines/tricky bits to work through. My coworkers do think it's strange that I write so much and then throw it away nearly immediately once whatever I was doing is transferred back to the hivemind.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#684Palm Pre. IMO in was the best mobile tool form factor and the best OS out of the bunch.
I had one of these. Everything using HTML/JS was a poor idea on hardware of the time (six+ years ago?) and probably still a bad idea today. The hardware keyboard was pretty crummy. Maybe better than a touchscreen keyboard.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#685A 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 -…
Let's see what becomes of https://neo900.org/. I hope by the time it comes out, it'll be good and in my price range :)
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote my first program in HyperCard.
"HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson following a LSD trip." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard HyperCard somehow managed to be almost as captivating as the web, with barely any resources.
It would surprise me greatly if HyperCard didn't influence the early web. HyperCard Cards and the way that buttons transition to different cards in the stack is not that different at a high level from the way pages work and hyperlinks transition to a new page on the site.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#687SGI Workstations like Indigo2 or Indy. They were heavy and noisy beasts but for me it was a flawless experience to work with.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#688Please read it from a consumer perspective about consumer topics: (of course B2B is very different, where other things matter) * products/software without DRM, always-online, analytics, tracking and spy "features" - bad for consumer personal privacy, and prevents second hand market, products cannot be owned anymore, try buying Windows 10, John Deer tractor, Tesla S without that crap * Cash money: those Davos attendee…
Like, you miss when you could configure a Cisco router without using the cloud sysadmin console? I miss when I owned my Mac OS X. I'd use Linux just for the sake of having a non-cloud system.
Concerning money, I don't understand why we wouldn't track criminals when using banknotes. There are only 15bn Euro banknotes, all numbered. You could track them easily in Postgres. 90% banknotes change hands only once before going through a bank again. It is certainly easy to watch the banknotes' travel patterns, and they'd be stupid not to do it: If a dealer cashes in banknotes which were withdrawn from your account, it's a big arrow pointing towards you. It's even worse in bulk: If a few dozen banknotes are withdrawn together, go unused for a few months, then all get exchanged in Moscow, it's a smoking trail. Cash management for mafias is certainly a a job, and banknotes don't always have the same value, depending on how clean they are (e.g. the 500EUR is worth 520€ on the legal second-hand market in Paris).
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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).
Davmail can get you most of the way there for Exchange. Definitely a product I would buy if it were commercialized.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#690Google Reader. There are no replacements that a) update fast enough, and b) allow search for free. I know, I tried all of them. Firefox had an amazing plugin called "Ubiquity", which was basically like command line for your browser and you could write custom scripts for it. It was seriously better than anything that exists today. They stopped developing it for some reason. Tab Groups is another feature that's now aba…
> Firefox had an amazing plugin called "Ubiquity", which was basically like command line for your browser and you could write custom scripts for it.
oh man, i was a core developer for ubiquity (i wasn't the best core developer out there, but i was trying to help)[0]. it was an amazing tool, great devs working on it, mozilla was helping... but all of sudden, everybody just stopped.
i really wish it would come back. it was one of the best developing experiences i had in my life.
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/ubiquity/commits?author=fernandot...