As a mac user: Cleanshot and Alfred.
Very well thought out products, am a happily paying customer.
Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
61–70 of 818 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#62Configuration management.
A few years ago, I timed myself doing a full reinstall on my private notebook to switch to a different partition layout. I was done in 30 minutes, of which most of the time was spent waiting for packages to download and install and for the /home backup to restore. Without configuration management, this would have been a full day of work just installing stuff and figuring out things like "how do you enable palm detection on that touchpad model again".
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#63Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear. And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. An…
Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?
Gmail was 100x Hotmail, if not even more than that. I think anybody who was on Yahoo Mail/Hotmail (or even something like Roundcube) who switched to Gmail probably realized how much these other companies had been holding stuff back.
I've never cared for invite only stuff, but Gmail really was a total revolution when it came out.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#64- Amazon Prime
- VLC
- Netflix
- Slack
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#65Steam for PC Gaming.
At first, it was just annoying DRM. But it was convenient.
- Before that, you had to manually update your games in order to play the latest version
- Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive
- with the addition of steam workshops, installing mods for certain games became easier. You didn't have to manually copy paste files.
- you have one central friend list, and invite system which many PC games use. It took some time until more companies launched own launchers and fragmented this ecosystem again.
- save game cloud backups became the norm. No need to manually backup a savegame folder if you want to ever reinstall a game.
- the refund system is user friendly (refund if you haven't played for more than 2 hours)
- steam link allows you to stream your games from a PC to other clients locally or through the internet
- steam remote play together allows you to stream a game to a friend for remote couch-coop. Other player doesn't need to own the game and since a recent update, doesn't require a Steam account.
- family sharing lets users easily share a whole game library with friends and family
- big picture mode offers a great gamepad focused UI which is ideal for living room gaming PCs on the TV
- enchanced Steam controller settings which let you configure the Steam Controller and after some updates also other controllers for each game. This even works if the game doesn't have official controller support.
- compared to other launchers it is really fast…looking at you "Xbox Game Pass for PC Launcher" thing
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#66Yes, the thing in iOS that automatically clips SMS verification codes sent to you. It saves me from going to my messages and finding the code.
Yeah, this was phenomenal the first time I experienced it. I wish it also came with a "don't use SMS for 2-factor authentication" warning though. ;)
What 2FA method is preferred instead of SMS these days?
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes me mad every time. And every single thing has a different shortcut for "Paste without style", if they even have one.
On MacOS there’s a native shortcut for pasting as plain text: Option+Shift+Command+V to paste text without any formatting. https://superuser.com/a/512502
This is the same on Windows and Linux afaik you have Ctrl + Shift + V. Still makes me angry because it's a stupid default.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#68Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear. And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. An…
Gmail was amazing when it launched...I was so excited to get an invite from a friend during the beta period. It made the crappy POP sync for my ISP email account look like a joke. Funny thing is–closing in on 20 years later–I dislike the latest generation of Gmail's web interface so much that I'm back to using a desktop email client.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#69Configuration management. A few years ago, I timed myself doing a full reinstall on my private notebook to switch to a different partition layout. I was done in 30 minutes, of which most of the time was spent waiting for packages to download and install and for the /home backup to restore. Without configuration management, this would have been a full day of work just installing stuff and figuring out things like "how…
Which specific software do you use for configuration management?