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

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401–410 of 891 posts

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

#401

Jasc 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…

was there a mac version?

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

#402

The internet when it was all web sites and I just learned about google. Just before everyone and their dog got a "blog" and way before Facebook and Twitter.

The way I look at it, that internet still exists. The stuff worth reading is still found on blogs. The rest - twitter, facebook, reddit, et al - is mostly noise. The biggest change is finding the good blogs is even easier these days, thanks to the many many link aggregators. I was surprised how quickly the signal to noise tightened up when I filtered out any link from social networks and "professional" news sites.

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

#403
post #151

Google 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…

Have you tried Bazqux as well? I've been extremely pleased with it and even signed up for a lifetime account. https://bazqux.com/

I second that, I signed up for a year and will likely sign up for lifetime at the end of it.

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

#405
post #157
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. I am still fighting, and the war is not over.

You're pretty much the equivalent of the Japanese soldier who got stranded in the Philippines and kept fighting WWII until the 1970s.

HTML mail won. If you work in an office they will use either Exchange or Google Apps; Exchange's default configuration is a fuck you to text-based mail clients.

 Hope you like all your email looking like this, because the only response you’ll get from your sysadmin should you decide to complain is a snippy remark along the lines of “try using an email client from this century”. Don’t worry, with enough practice you won’t even see the code — just blonde, brunette, redhead₀ J

The war is over, friend. Come on home.

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

#406

Jasc 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…

Ulead Photoimpact was very good like this too.

Eventually Corel bought it and now they sold it off again to some other company.

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

#408

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.

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

#410
Total Commander (yes it's still available and still great but I'm not using Windows anymore, now OS X). I even miss Windows Explorer... I will never get in love with Finder on OS X.. most horrible File Manager ever. Finder is like a punishment for everybody switching to OS X (I want copy&paste and folders first everywhere, gosh). Thunar on XFCE was also ok. At least ForkLift nowadays helps me not to be angry at my Mac ;)
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