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Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
381–390 of 818 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#382Prisma ORM. It's an ORM done right and makes storing in an RDBMS fun and convenient
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#383Earlier 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.
To me, the value proposition is still tabs. I have hundreds open at a time. Once or twice a month I will cleanup hundreds of windows and tabs. I've created habits to open up most everything in new tabs and new "projects" in new windows.
I think I do this as a self-remedy for my ADHD, I am likely to allow an interruption to disrupt me but I do need to close the loop on whatever I was working on before an interruption. A window or set of open tabs is enough of a reminder to help me close the loop.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#384Stackoverflow. 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".
I think poor therapists suffered most from the curious nature of how domain name are. Like http://www.therapist.com/ still exists but redirects. ...
Let's not even mention the plant nursery on the Mole River which ended up with www.molestationnursery.com ...
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#385* Any Smalltalk IDE (VW, Vast): it’s hard at the beginning, but once that you get used to evaluate expressions everywhere it’s amazing. I don’t use St since a long time, but I haven’t seen that dev UX in any other editor or IDE.
* MS Word for Windows: today we are used to the spellchecking as you type, but IIRC Word was the first one to have that feature.
* VMWare.. being able to run a Windows VM from Linux in the 2000 was amazing. It also changed the QA processes for desktop apps.
* GMail... 1GB email for free, it was way beyond of any other web email at the time (that and also good IMAP support, and Pop3 with TLS, none of the competitors had that when it launched)
* Photoshop... if you used any image editor, PS was 10x better.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#386+ 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…
Heck, GMaps is slow and clunky for me, but it's still 10x better than anything else I've ever used. I'm pretty sure it'll be the last GOOG service I manage to get myself off. Is there even a single OSM-based alternative that offers competitive POI search?
Sadly, OpenStreetMap is weakest in POI coverage.
In typical area Google has simply much better data - and that is before interface optimised for selling ads about POIs and therefore displaying POIs quite well.
I map a lot in OSM, and POIs in my city are still light years behind Gmaps. And even with StreetComplete (an Android app that I recommend) that made adding and resurveying opening hours data easier, this info is often missing/outdated :/
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#387Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#388Firebug. 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).
Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar, and IEDevToolbar was superior to Firebug for years for debugging JavaScript. So not a very good example at all, in fact quite the opposite, it just happened to ride the back of the anti-M$ wave and wasn't at all innovative, copying its features from already existing products. Conversely, though it was free, IEDevToolbar was only really advertised to MSDN subscribers, so never got…
Do you realize that Firebug was the successor to the Venkman debugger and the original DOM Inspector for Mozilla/Netscape?
https://web.archive.org/web/20051223164847/https://www.mozil...>
https://web.archive.org/web/20050206082145/http://www.mozill...>
https://web.archive.org/web/20050206185242/http://www.mozill...>
(Joe Hewitt created DOM Inspector and checked it in to CVS while working at Netscape. Robert Ginda had separately created Venkman. Firebug used the XPCOM interfaces that had been created to allow for Venkman's debugging capabilities, but IMO was always inferior to the much more powerful Venkman, even if Firebug was slightly prettier to look at. PS: shame on Mozilla for breaking those links. Do you even know how to Web?)
> Firebug came out AFTER IEDevToolbar
I'm not sure that even if you focus purely on Firebug and ignore DOM Inspector and Venkman that this is even true. Do you have a source for that?
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#389Firebug. 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).
It's interesting that this is kind of a constant .1x * 10x = 1 cycle we repeatedly go through with new platforms. We rarely realize the cost of a new development platform in the fact that we often have to start from zero with documentation, tools, communities, etc. Tools are arguably the easiest to realize on day 1, when all of a sudden you can't set a breakpoint. So it's really .1x development in many ways until someone reimplements these standard utilities to "10x" us back to 1.
Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
#390+ 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…
> + 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…
I remember using Avant browser to have tabs back in the day before I discovered FF. I think it was just an IE wrapper