Eudora! Never got used to any other desktop email client after it.
Also: Google Reader and Google Buzz, the proto-Facebook for me
Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
291–300 of 891 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#292Google Desktop. For the single feature of 'hit Ctrl Ctrl and google search'.
So I kept the installer and I still have it running on my Windows 8 and 10 boxes.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#293RSS, Usenet newsgroups, netbooks, 4:3 CRT monitors, GNOME 2.x, non-BitTorrent file sharing networks.
Regarding that last one, there's still Usenet, eMule, and DC++ to consider. Many anime fansubbing groups use XDCC to distribute releases.
There's also Soulseek for music sharing, but let's not promote it too heavily, I don't want a repeat of what happened to Napster.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#294A 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…
4:3 screens: yes, but on laptops. Given an equally wide laptop 4:3 gives much more space to work on. I wonder if there would be space for large touchpads but the Thinkpad/stick fans won't care. My personal sweetspot on laptops was 16:10. For standalone monitors, nobody was making screens as wide (in cm) as the ones we have now, at a reasonable price. You could have two 4:3 monitors side by side which is 8:3 or 16:6,…
My sweet spot for laptops is 4:3 @ 14in, but 16:10 @ 15.6in is a reasonable choice as well.
16:9 on the other hand has no place in anything but very large desktop monitors (say 27in and above). Whenever I have to use someone's 13in notebook - inevitably 16:9, even expensive ones - it makes me want to scream. It's like peering through a mailbox slot.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#295Google Reader Fireworks ( a image editor for web designers ) Livemesh ( which was way better than one drive, it could sync your entire computer in the cloud ).
Fireworks was awesome. Such a strange decision to get rid of it, I've never managed to replace it really... Any ideas of an alternative.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#296Grooveshark
Fellow Grooveshark refugee here. Spotify doesn't quite come close: small library (only 'real' artists, and sometimes not even those), no way to put custom stuff in there and sync it at least with your own devices, Grooveshark not only had customer support but damn good customer service, and then there are broadcasts with the chat feature and song voting... Yeah, all the good bits are gone.
I had a paid subscription and now pay Spotify as the closest thing to it, but I feel as much a customer of Spotify as I feel a customer of Twitter: neither listen to me when something is shitty.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#297Jasc 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 have a working copy of PSP 7.04 on my Windows 10 machine and it's still my goto tool for tweaking images.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#298The Psion Series 3 handhelds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3 A (tiny, but) usable, physical keyboard on a device that lasted _ages_, fit into a suit pocket and was eminently practical. The age of the PDA is long gone (heck, I'm typing this on an iPad mini), but we still haven't caught up with some of its best bits.
I have a netbook. Sorry, a netBook. You, know, the one that coined the word 'netbook'. It's great! It has the trademark bizarre Psion hinging mechanism which gives it a full-size keyboard and a massive screen, it's got an eight hour battery, the OS is on a CF card (and so is trivially replaceable), and it has state-of-the art IrDA connectivity...
Yeah, that's the problem. Lovely hardware, completely useless in the modern world. It does have a PCMCIA type 1 slot in which you can attach a sufficiently old wifi card but finding such a card that supports WPA is practically impossible, and finding an EPOC driver for it even more so.
I did run Linux on it for a while, but Linux of a 32MB 190MHz ARM is not a happy experience.
(EPOC, while being a terrifying but hilarious disaster on the inside, manages to get an astonishing amount done in very little space. Even the 640x480 screen looks big. UI-wise it's a really nice bit of design.)
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#299PC Outline. It's a DOS-based outliner. In 1986, my manager said "Here, you're organised. You'll like this" and he was right - I did. So much so that I bought my own copy. I still use it every day in a DOSBox DOS emulator on Windows 7 and Linux. I use it for passwords, todo and done lists, keeping track of work done for clients, functional decomposition, shopping lists and the steps for configuring and compiling the L…
Have you tried http://orgmode.org? There are plenty of tutorials online and videos from conferences introducing it and showcasing its abilities.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#300Windows 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!
Tap water in the UK is heavily chlorinated. If you go to a country which doesn't chlorinate tap water it's like night and day.
(I live in Zurich. The water company here say that comparing Zurich tap water with bottled mineral water is unfair --- their tap water is considerably better.)