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Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#211

Post by aerovistae »

zachruss92 wrote: post #165
deckard1 wrote: post #141

Firebug. Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about. Debugging JS in IE6 was like trying to build a house blindfolded with both arms tied behind your back. Firebug is when JS went from just a web augmentation toy that could silently fail and your web page would still mostly function to becoming a critical function for a web page (many will see this as all a big mistake).

I miss Firebug. Simpler times...

I don't. We have chrome dev tools and firefox dev tools which are both literally the same thing as firebug but with a decade of refinement. There are so many great aspects to those tools that firebug didn't have back then because it was the first version basically.

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#214

Post by scubbo »

zachruss92 wrote: post #165
deckard1 wrote: post #141

Firebug. Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about. Debugging JS in IE6 was like trying to build a house blindfolded with both arms tied behind your back. Firebug is when JS went from just a web augmentation toy that could silently fail and your web page would still mostly function to becoming a critical function for a web page (many will see this as all a big mistake).

I miss Firebug. Simpler times...

What do you miss from Firebug that's missing from the built-in tools in any major browser?

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#215

Post by robotresearcher »

murph-almighty wrote: post #187
jasode wrote: post #48

+ using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search. + Google Maps in 2004 and dragging the map interactively around. This was a quantum leap beyond Mapquest's page reload and reset with cumbersome arrow buttons. This was a paradigm shift that let me explore a geography better than any book atlas. I gave away all my atlases + MS Window Media Player's…

I cannot imagine a period of time where the STL didn't exist, which perhaps outs me as a younger dev

There was arguably a worse period than non-existence, which was when it existed but didn't work very well.

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#216

Post by Minor49er »

passivate wrote: post #167

Reaper. Its simple, fast, and no licensing bull. Steam. Just works, simple and easy to use. Copy-Paste the Steam folder to your new system to move your entire game library. ZoomIt by Sysinternals - excellent, excellent tool that has improved all my presentations/screen-share sessions. Everything by David Carpenter - super fast system wide search for files that has bookmarks and other features like match using file na…

I've never used a more stable, feature-filled, and affordable DAW than Reaper. Making music with it is a lot of fun

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#217

Post by jldl805 »

anderspitman wrote: post #179
jakevoytko wrote: post #17

Gmail. 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…

Not just a GB. It was also constantly increasing in size, with a live counter to show how much storage you had available. Super gimmicky, but fun. I guess there are probably a lot of people here who are too young to have ever used those early versions. You also had to scrounge forums for an invite code.

I made my account(s) off invite codes and have "just my last name" at gmail dot com as an address... it's one of my most prized possessions, to this day!

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#218

Post by ihnorton »

The rr debugger [1]. I desperately missed it after switching to a mac laptop -- to the point that I now have an older linux system which exists primarily to run rr.

(I've heard that Pernosco [2] - partly built on rr, AFAIK - is even more revolutionary, but haven't yet tried it myself)

[1] https://rr-project.org/ [2] https://pernos.co/

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#219

Post by scubbo »

dopeboy wrote: post #192

Stackoverflow. Its closest competitor, experts exchange, was a slow website that required you sign up to see an answer that was rarely useful. There's a direct correlation to SO and dollars of revenue I've driven.

TIL that Experts Exchange actually existed, rather than being a meme of "why you should consider how your business name will look as a domain".

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#220

Post by domano »

omosubi wrote: post #148

A couple i havent seen listed: Tivo - pretty cool when it came out - you didn't have to run to the bathroom/kitchen during commercial breaks and hope you made it back in time. Of course it's obsolete now but a significant improvement over the standard at the time Streaming music services - i spent an embarrassing amount of time as a kid/early teenager collecting cds and ripping them to my hard drive - if only I could…

I have never witnessed somebody tripping over a laptop charging cable - does that happen a lot for others?
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