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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?

#471

Post by GiveOver »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #194
Farbklex wrote: post #65

Steam 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…

> - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive Speaking of which, prior to Steam, I'd definitely consider "Making an ISO of your favorite game and mounting it as a virtual drive using DaemonTools" to be a 10x innovation.

Still have all my ISOs backed up somewhere, and a .txt file with the serial codes in. You never know!

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

#473

Post by blablabla123 »

_y5hn wrote: post #294
Ma8ee wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or you just reference things all the way through your program, so it's possible in every language.

Still, for the memory management related kind in C++ there are tools like valgrind.

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

#475

Post by elihu »

Moving to Linux from Dos/Windows 3.1 in the 90's. (An OS that's both free and comes with development tools? I don't have to shell out a hundred dollars for Borland Turbo C++? What an exciting time to be alive.)

The Internet / world wide web.

Also in the late 90's I had a summer job at HP and was able to use their cad tools (ME-30 and Solid Designer) which put Autocad, which I was familiar with, to shame. Unfortunately, they were very expensive programs that ran on very expensive computers.

Switching to ML-style functional programming (Ocaml and later Haskell) over C and Perl.

Switching to Wikipedia over the top Google results for a search query as a source of basic information. (These quickly converged to be the same thing.)

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

#476

Post by hvis »

wackget wrote: post #426
scubbo wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Personally I hate that you can no longer copy an entire URL and its GET/POST data in a single click like you previously could. Now you can "copy URL" or "copy URL parameters" but there's no way to copy them all in one go. You need to manually combine them in an external text editor which is annoying.

"Copy as cURL" or "Copy as Fetch" don't suit your use case?

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

#477

Post by grumple »

dimal wrote: post #263

USB. It's hard to imagine, but we used to have a thing called SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy", and that's how it felt) which allowed you to connect to exactly one serial device. The plug was huge. And cables cost $50. Mice used an entirely separate interface that was different on Macs and PCs, and since Apple was dying at the time, it was a struggle to get Mac mice for a reasonable price. With USB, you could suddenly attac…

I remember when plug-and-play was a big deal, good one.

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

#478

Post by paulryanrogers »

xeromal wrote: post #390
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…

I remember using Avant browser to have tabs back in the day before I discovered FF. I think it was just an IE wrapper

Wasn't Avant a reference browser to check standards compliance? I recall toying with it. Then switched to a Firefox plugin which used an HTML linter.

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

#479

Post by toyg »

pwdisswordfish0 wrote: post #388
mattmanser wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Venkman was hard to use, and mostly focused on the internals of Mozilla. Firebug wasn't just prettier; it was much more usable, and it focused on actual website code. Hence the difference in popularity.

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

#480

Post by hadrien01 »

sangnoir wrote: post #326
namrog84 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are correct - Opera had tabs way before Firefox, and Opera had a full mail client as well without feeling bloated or slow.

The free version of Opera also had ads at the time: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c6/Opera_6...
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