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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?

#291

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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

I know of the STL but don't know a damn thing about how to use it. They didn't teach STL at all in my university, even in the C/C++ classes.

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

#292

Post by bastawhiz »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #289
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).

> Debugging JS in IE6 Visual Studio (even back when it was called Visual Interdev) supported first-class script debugging with Internet Explorer going as far back as Internet Explorer 4. Ditto cscript/wscript. It just wasn't popular (and few people knew about it) because most people doing front-end web-work _back then_ weren't using Visual Studio, and in general most people weren't doing back-end web-work in Visual S…

This didn't really help with the DOM or CSS, though. The developer toolbar that worked with IE6 was sorely lacking.

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

#293

Post by danielrhodes »

A more recent one:

Retool

I just started using them, and it saved an ungodly amount of time setting up internal dashboards. Typically speaking internal dashboards are an afterthought, don't work well, accumulate a lot of tech debt, and yet are indispensable to running an online service. Retool isn't perfect, but what you get is way beyond anything you'd be willing to build for yourself early on.

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

#294

Post by _y5hn »

Ma8ee wrote: post #188
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java brought two things to the table compared to C++: garbage collection, and an enormous library. I don't think that garbage collection, by itself, was a 10x change. For it to be so, programmers would have to be spending 90% of their effort on freeing memory. Don't get me wrong, garbage collection is a big win when you can use it, but I don't think it's quite that big of a win. The library... that might almost be 10…

Not freeing memory, but tracking down memory leaks. We rarely even hear that term nowadays, but most large commercial programs used to have them.

Memory leak is a thing on JVM too. Tends to reoccur at times.

Java brought call stack dumps, security model and alot of standardisation across orgs.

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

#295

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

bombcar wrote: post #193
rudyfink wrote: post #154

Here are a few that I did not see listed by others: 1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation (e.g., with USB devices (also USB device categories, etc.)). Instead of trying to find a driver, things just worked. 2. Automatic updates. Keeping everything updated, largely, fell into the background. 3. Graphical integrated development environments (IDEs) for software development. I realize editors can be conte…

>1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation (e.g., with USB devices (also USB device categories, etc.)). Instead of trying to find a driver, things just worked. I remember well when installing Windows went from "make sure you have all the driver CDs before you start" to "just make sure you have the network card driver and the disk driver (if needed)" and then it went to "as long as you can connect to the i…

In my experience, you'll still want to go to the NVIDIA/AMD website to download the latest drivers. What you get from Windows Update is likely 6+ months out of date.

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

#296

Post by ace2358 »

When I started making music 10 years ago, I limited myself to using hardware only. Hardware synth, drum machine, mixer, effects etc. It was a great learning experience, which is why I did it. I wanted to understand the fundamentals.

5 years ago I finally took the dive into the digital realm with a mixer/soundcard combo and a DAW (logic X).

Forget 10x software, this was closer to 1000x faster.

I’m sure the early days of DAWs wasn’t like stepping into the game in 2015, but the software workflow was stupidly quicker than doing everything physically in real-time.

Now days we have heaps of choices for DAWs and soundcards and cross platform comparability. What an age to be a musician!

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

#297

Post by namrog84 »

2bitencryption wrote: post #222
aynsof wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> + Google Chrome in 2008 : 10x quality-of-life since misbehaving websites crashing don't bring down all the other tabs in my browsing session like Firefox/Opera. Adding to this: just browser tabs themselves were a 10x improvement for me. I had actually forgotten what the world was like before tabs - a whole lot of unsortable windows, and a lot of clicks of the back button. It was a godsend to be able to open new lin…

This was the entrypoint to Firefox for millions of people. Unlike today, back then Firefox had a clearly expressive value proposition: Use this! It has tabs! It will change how you browse the web! Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy privacy stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even if it's in their best interest.

I believe opera had tabs for a while before Firefox. It was one of the main reasons I think I used opera for a good long while.

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

#298

Post by [deleted] »

jldl805 wrote: post #217
anderspitman wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

[deleted]

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

#299

Post by CyanDeparture »

Macromedia Dreamweaver - It was 10x times better than Microsoft FrontPage (I was very young, please don't judge).

Mac OS X - Moving from Windows ME on my Packard Bell tower, to an iMac G3 with Mac OS X was quite a pivotal moment in my life - everything just felt smoother, it was actually nice to use an operating system, not a battle.

Heroku.com - The ease of getting a Rails site live was 10x better than setting up your own server.

Git - I was always messing up SVN systems, as soon as I switched to Git it just didn't seem possible to mess it up.

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