Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 891 posts

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

#561

Post by mcculley »

avar wrote: 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.

It didn't work. To this day, if you begin a plain text email message with the word "From", you'll confuse mail programs because there wasn't a proper encoding of the body of the message separate from the headers.

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

#562

Post by lj3 »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #452
johnx123-up wrote: post #22

1. Delphi and its community 2. OptiPerl http://www.xarka.com/optiperl/features.html Though both are still available, not in use.

Delphi was awesome for rapid GUI development! It was so easy to get reasonable nice programs in a short amount of time. I really really miss it.

Have you ever used Lazarus? I'm curious how it compares to Delphi specifically for GUI development. From a rapid GUI development standpoint, they seem to be the only game in town aside from VisualBasic.

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

#563

Post by owenversteeg »

RobertKerans wrote: post #422

Macromedia 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.

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

#564

Post by falcolas »

hollander wrote: post #218

Writing, 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.

This will sound silly and non-sequetor, but bear with me: Get a fountain pen. A $2 Pilot Varsity will get you started.

A fountain pen is a joy to write with. It requires virtually no pressure, especially when compared with cheap ball point pens. The ink flow is regular and heavy, resulting in even crappy writing looking interesting. It makes it fun to write, which makes (me at least) more likely to write whenever I can.

Just be sure to also use heavier paper - the Varsity ink will bleed through the cheap stuff 2-3 pages deep.

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

#567

Post by oferzelig »

skrebbel wrote: post #165

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…

As others said, I'm using PSP 7.04; I think it's the last non-corel-bloated version. Loads fast and gets the job done.

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

#569

Post by ekr »

privong wrote: post #456
Havoc wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lenovo keyboards aren't bad? I actually like them. Well aside from the bottom left key being FN instead of Ctrl...that part is retarded. The trackpads on them are beyond redemption though. How that made it past well any kind of user testing is beyond me.

> Well aside from the bottom left key being FN instead of Ctrl...that part is retarded. There's a BIOS option to swap Fn and Ctrl, at least on the X250.

the option is there on my L520 as well.

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

#570

Post by programmarchy »

Apportable. Amazing tool that compiled Obj-C to Android targets, and had stubs to bridge iOS frameworks to Android. Sounds impossible but it actually worked, really well. They had limited support for UIKit, and it worked flawlessly with Cocos2d so was great for porting games. They were starting to integrate with SpriteBuilder, a nice open source scene editor for Cocos2d but once Apportable pulled their support that community disappeared overnight.

Pretty sure they got acquired by Google, who are taking engineering in a new direction with a new project named Flutter that uses Dart as the source language, which is totally useless for porting over existing Obj-C code bases. Too bad, so sad.

Post reply on HN