Kernel is my new home
Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
851–860 of 891 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#852Google Picasa - not fully gone yet, but abandoned. It's not fancy, but for importing and storing your photos locally it did a great job.
VB 6 or earlier, before it got .net-ed.
I was never a user myself, but surprised someone hasn't mentioned Lotus Agenda...
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#853Earlier 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....
The Pro line offers considerably beefier processors and graphics chipsets, and more memory, than the Air or just-plain-MacBook lines do.
I don't know what kind of very serious work you're talking about that can't be done at all with less than 150Mbps symmetric, not even for a minute - but in a decade and a half in this industry, I have yet to meet anyone who does it. So I'm willing to surmise that it's a very serious niche specialty, whatever it is.
You'll probably have to sink considerable money into whatever laptop you want to do this kind of very serious work on, but you'll be happy to know that Thunderbolt 2 can handily support 10Gbps, and such interfaces are readily available. Of course, they come at a premium price, but you're getting paid well enough for your very serious work that that doesn't pose you a major problem, I'm sure.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#854Nokia N900
FoxPro/Lotus Approach/Delphi
X24 Thinkpad
NeXTcube
AmiPro
Lotus Notes 3.x
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#855Chrome, the fast, stable, and lightweight alternative to Firefox. I don't know quite where it went off the rails...
Chrome's still fast, but other browsers caught up, and more importantly web developers took advantage of the increase in performance and started getting away with writing more bloated websites, resulting in much of the speed gains being nullified. Just try to use Chrome or Firefox to browse relatively lightweight websites (e.g. GNU.org), they're amazingly fast compared to what browsers used to be like before Chrome c…
firefox the lightweight alternative to mozilla
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#856Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#857OS X Snow Leopard.
So much this! I use a lot of audio programs, and this was the single most stable and solid version of MacOS X for my purposes.
I should have just stayed there. Now I'm contemplating whether I want to migrate my 8-year-old Mac Pro to El Capitan and wondering if it will break Aperture completely.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#858CodeWarrior
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?
I wrote a lot of code with CodeWarrior. One of the things I miss most is the PowerPlant framework. Such a nice "forest" design with mix-ins. (Yes, you can download it, but it isn't the same). I learned a lot about designing usable class libraries by reading PowerPlant.
I learned a lot about designing usable class libraries by reading Microsoft Foundation Class libraries, too, but in the sense of "whatever you do, don't design !@#$% like this..."
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#859ICQ
ICQ + the friendly/outgoing/carefree attitude of those times
Beseen chat as well, same era.
And Palace Chat, though it was horrible even back then the memories make me laugh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#860Bing Travel - specifically the price predictor tool.