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Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
231–240 of 367 posts
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#232This is the sort of non-consensual change that is the hallmark of proprietary software and drives me towards using free and open-source software every chance I get. I love WordPad's simplicity, and I'll miss it.
It seems strange to call it "non-consensual" for them to not maintain a now-little-used application in perpetuity.
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not always is a misnomer. It rarely if ever is. Anyone remember PhantomJS? It took years before a replacement emerged and nobody was willing to take in the project, and this was a critical piece of tech at the time
> It rarely if ever is. You can always pay someone to maintain it. Not every thing has to be free.
Let's try and bring this back to the original example. If WordPad cost money who would use it and not one of the much more robust competitors?
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#234>and anyone can access the web versions of Word for free if needed There are texts I don't want to write in a browser
Then download one of the various word processors that are available for Windows.
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#235One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack. This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus.…
if only the OLE stack wasn't riddled with malware (think those activex toolbar addons you could download for IE), it would've been a great idea!
OLE isn't any more "malware riddled" than anything else you install on your PC, at its core it is just a fancy plugin system for embedding stuff in a document without the document editor knowing about it. OLE is as susceptible to malware as any other plugin system - in other words unless you somehow[0] install malware, you wont get malware.
[0] "somehow" here includes said malware taking advantage of unrelated security holes but this is true for everything, not just OLE
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#236This is the sort of non-consensual change that is the hallmark of proprietary software and drives me towards using free and open-source software every chance I get. I love WordPad's simplicity, and I'll miss it.
It seems strange to call it "non-consensual" for them to not maintain a now-little-used application in perpetuity.
[deleted]
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#237Old software is depreciated . To deprecate software would be to call it names.
Before the 19th Century "ignore" meant "to not know," in accordance with its Latin origins, if you're looking for other words to try and turn back the clock on against the overwhelming tide of modern usage.
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#238One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack. This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus.…
One neat OLE object (btw this works even in Windows 10 - i don't know about 11) is the "package" which allows you to embed any file as an OLE object. So basically you can drop an image file, PDF, video, program or anything else in WordPad and it'll put an icon representing it that if the user double clicks it'd be equivalent to them doubleclicking a file.
Of course most of the time it isn't very practical (and WordPad chokes at anything above a handful of MB) since you're making a bad archive file (using the default .rtf format will encode the binary data in hex which will actually increase file size), but i always liked how general the idea was.
(also it isn't limited to WordPad but to anything that uses OLE - e.g. you could do the same with Delphi which has a "OLE object" control that can embed any OLE object and the object becomes part of the executable - so you could, say, throw a PDF file in a package OLE object in a form and when the user doubleclicks it the control opens the default PDF viewer)
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
MS are the kings of legacy support, no joke here. It is astonishing really.
CARDFILE.EXE has been long gone though.
Ah man I totally forgot about this!
From Wikipedia: "The Windows 3.1 version of Cardfile was included with Windows 95, 98, and ME, but not installed by default. For the later two versions of Windows, the user would have to manually copy the Cardfile application from the Windows install CD in order to use the application."
Re: Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
why not use the notes app? you get in built folders and shari g options too
For me, Notes tries too hard. The auto-heading of the first line of text, all the editing and markup options, the sharing, etc. are all more than I want, and they end up being distracting and getting in the way. My mind will easily wander to “what if I make all subjects this font and this color and bold etc.”, and then I lose the context of whatever I wanted to write down. TextEdit, new .txt file, name it “{subject}…
P.S. Auto-heading is a setting (I turned it off).