MS Paint: I've yet to find a photo tool that'll load instantly and let me crop or resize with the most minimal clicks.
Really saddened that this was the lowest ranked comment, as I have an affection for classic MS Paint.
Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
781–790 of 891 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#782Yahoo Pipes. Meticulously remixed, filtered, etc RSS feeds rendered useless with no viable alternative to date. Curses to Yahoo, especially whoever made the decision to kill it.
+1 wish they would opensource it.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#783Macromedia Freehand, in particular deleting bezier points but keeping the shape intact (ie simplifying). Illustrator still hasn't quite caught up. For any illustration, it's useful to have as few control points as possible. This is particularly useful when making SVGs for the web; it renders faster, and an ability to hand edit the SVG is useful for animation etc. Every font design package has this feature; Illustrato…
Have you tried Inkscape? I find it does a good job of this.
I've played around with it; problem is, I've used Adobe products for ~18 years, and use almost every piece of Creative Suite. I don't think the context shifting is worth it, unfortunately. I'm using SVG on every new project now, so that might change
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#784Jasc 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 still use Paint Shop Pro 6.0 every single day. It runs flawlessly in Windows 7 if you set compatability mode on the EXE to "Windows 2000". Version 6 was the last good version before Corel muddled up the interface and made it bloated. I can still do some things in 2 clicks that my coworker needs 5-15 clicks to get done in Photoshop. It surprises me to know some things are still so "complicated" in photoshop, just by…
Thanks! I just tried it and it works fantastically on my Win10 :-)
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#785Livejournal. Now completely unusable, servers being down for days, political propaganda ads covering half of screen, and almost no real people using it (only spammers and political scam).
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#786Earlier quoted context omitted.
SMS+Messages or SMS+Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, WeChat, Viber, LINE, BBM, Telegram, Signal, Sicher, and I'm sure I'm missing some. Used to just install a multi-protocol chat client and be done with it, but now everything's a fancy service with special clients to sync state across devices and whatever else they do.
> and I'm sure I'm missing some Skype?
Do people use it for messaging? I know it has it, but it's always seemed secondary to the voice/video.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thunderbird also cannot magically backfill a new subscription. Google Reader could, because pretty much guaranteed, someone else was subscribed already so Google had the history.
Thunderbird can't, but Feedly can
I used Feedly for a while and found it to be flaky, in pretty much the same ways as Digg reader.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#788Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thunderbird can't, but Feedly can
I used Feedly for a while and found it to be flaky, in pretty much the same ways as Digg reader.
Which ways? (I haven't tried Digg Reader.)
I feel like Feedly is okay. Free native apps and sync is nice. I wish it didn't auto mark read after 30 days though. I tend to do my rss processing in huge batches and miss stuff because of that.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 for Google reader. Never found anything like it.
I use Newsblur now, and it is really good.
Yeah, Newsblur rocks. I also find it a great watching a single committed developer (Samuel Clay[0]), build a small business with an Open Source code-base [1].
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Thunderbolt adapter is $30. USB adapters are even cheaper. Given how rarely I find myself actually using Ethernet on my MBP, I'm perfectly happy to trade off the need for a dongle for a laptop half as thick as it would have to be to fit an internal Ethernet port.
So what's the distinction between a "Pro" model and the normal model then? I thought that was the point of having a "pro" lineup, was so serious work could be done and normal consumers would be steered towards the Air or MacBook line....
A lot of folks can do serious work without a built in Ethernet port.