It's sad that a lot of things have been orphaned and obsoleted or were web-based and no longer work... What's something that you used to use that isn't around these days?
Fuji Neopan 1600. Fuji Fortia. Kodak Aerochrome. Hasselblad V system (OK, they do exist but are discontinued and becoming increasingly more expensive to maintain).
Yeah, I'd love to see an OS/2 comeback on one level. Although since my old OS/2 days, I've become such an F/OSS ideologue, that I probably wouldn't use a modern OS/2 unless it were F/OSS.
At this point, I'd settle for a really good implementation of the WPS on Linux. I don't care that much about the OS/2 API or SOM or any of that stuff. But the UI experience hit a sweet spot for me.
Springnote was like evernote but automatically categorized things in a smarter way from the browser. I could add a page with an isbn and it would let me add it as a book with all the details looked up, not as a webpage.
I also used Springboard, not as an Evernote replacement but I would use to do inventory of my physical belongings, movie and book queue, recipes, and wish list, because it recognized almost any type of product you threw at it.
Sadly, haven't found any other app as smart as this.
and my ability to stay up late at night and work. I pass out no matter what. This is what family and responsibilities do to you. I don't regret having a family but it did impact my ability to work substantially.
ReplayTV. I was able to record TV, and easily transfer shows to my networked computer for later consumption. I still have all the Good Eats episodes from 15 years ago.
It would surprise me greatly if HyperCard didn't influence the early web. HyperCard Cards and the way that buttons transition to different cards in the stack is not that different at a high level from the way pages work and hyperlinks transition to a new page on the site.
Have you tried any alternative windows shells yet? (as in full desktop replacements) I remember being quite happy running bluebox around the win2k era, but it seems there's still a few that work with recent versions.
Projects like http://litestep.info/ for example (it can be reskinned so it doesn't look like early 2000s unix)
enjoyed gnome 3? either you waited several months with an outdated distro, or you never had to do basic things like shutdown/restart your computer, change volume, etc, etc... I know I waited months for those luxury. with the added insult of having contributed lots of accessibility code to gnome 2 settings that just got under the rug
Ubuntu 16.04 with Gnome Flashback Compiz can be made to look almost indistinguishable from Ubuntu Gnome 10.04, desktop cube included. Very few tweaks are needed. The only missing parts are the File, Edit menus on some applications, most notably Nautilus (they're working on it) but I don't really use the Gnome applications, except Nautilus and the menus are not that useful (I setup my preferences in Unity and it remembers them). The Gnome default apps look like the vanilla featureless versions of what one actually needs. Only the general DE is good.
fwiw i switched from Google Reader to https://bazqux.com/ - The UX is very similar, has no problem dealing with a lot of feeds and is fast enough to keep up with my ~1000 item/day habit.
I second this. I tried an awefull lot of feed readers when Google announced the end of Reader, and Newsblur is by far the most usable one, and it is actually pretty good. I would stay on Newsblur rather than returning to Google Reader would it come back to life.
https://www.inoreader.com/ - I might be mentioning it too often, but it's a great replacement that mirrors the Google Reader UI closely while adding a lot of enhancements. It also doesn't throw away old cached posts.
The xBase family of languages/development environments. They are still around - Harbour (open-source multi-platform Clipper implementation) and Ashton-Tate dBase which changed many hands and is now dBase LLC.
They were one of the fastest environments to build business software in till the early 90s. Then Client/Server and Windows happened. Visual Basic and Delphi occupied the niche with support for SQL based databases. xBase tried playing catch-up but by the time they caught up clunkily to GUI programming, the effort was wasted and the Web came around.
This is how xBase was loved:
This isn't a question or a bug or a complaint. This is just to say
that using your prg files from Foxapp, modifying the startup,
creating a database, compiling and debugging I created an
beautiful working application in 45 minutes today, including the
time it took for the client to explain what they wanted in the
database. The client was duly impressed, and I marvelled at just
how much 2.0 had made programming fun and had increased my
potential income. I am now taking on programming jobs that would
have been painful in the past, and find that I can afford to do
some pro bono work knowing that with Foxpro 2.0 and my
distribution package I can whip up a quick database for the church
or the school or anybody who just can't afford custom programming.
I've been hacking PCs since I bought an Apple at Homebrew Computer
Club in Palo Alto from a couple of kids who were building them in
a garage. (In those days they were talking about marketing them as
a multilevel, like Amway). I've played with a lot of software,
ranging from user-hostile to stuff that curls up on your lap and
talks dirty in your ear.
But Foxpro 2.0 is something special. What you folks have created
is an elegant solution. When you finaly go public, may you all
cash out as rich as Bill Gates.
Please thank all the Fox folks for me.
Charles
-- "Letter from a FoxPro admirer". FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software, Kerry Nietz.
There is an awesome FreePascal [1]. Along with TurboPascal-like console IDE called FPIDE, it has Delphi-like GUI IDE - Lazarus. And it very actively developed, cross-platform and supports modern technologies.
Syser claimed to be that replacement. But in fact it's too old, unstable and nobody using it. Now everyone is using WinDbg for kernel/drivers debugging. It has terrible command syntax, but with PyKD extension and some customisation it's usable. See those slides[1] on how to do that. Also, there is another way to work with WinDbg protocol - using radare2[2]. Beware this support is in early development and may be unstable. But, unlike original WinDbg, it is cross-platform tool without external dependencies and completely free and open source.
I constantly miss SoftICE. Rasta Ring 0 Debugger was looking like a promising replacement for a while, but it just seemed to fizzle out and never got where it should've been. WinDbg isn't awful these days, but that's about the most praise I can give it.
I really want to build a decent wrapper around the WinDbg protocol and run it on a Raspberry Pi+display that sits on top of my desktop case. That way I can just grab that and break in any time I need to debug something.
You can easily do that with radare2 already. As I mentioned already it does have WinDbg protocol support and is very portable by itself. Along with WinDbg it has support for GDB protocol. So you can run r2 on your Raspberry Pi and connect to WinDbg on your desktop and perform debugging from Raspberry Pi.
It would even backup my SMSes and let me search through them in an online interface. But then MS decided to shut it down within few months of me buying a phone because of this particular feature.
Probably more about its dwindling presence, and even when it's still used in some industries it's nowhere near the spotlight levels it had before I think.
Have you ever used Lazarus? I'm curious how it compares to Delphi specifically for GUI development. From a rapid GUI development standpoint, they seem to be the only game in town aside from VisualBasic.
I used it for a small project where I needed a quick way to plot some lab data. I chose Lazarus because these data needed to be displayed on all the computers in our lab, including a few Windows machines.
I was amazed when the program I developed on Linux compiled and ran flawlessly on Windows at the first attempt!
I miss Delphi as well even though I never got to use it for anything professional as I was very young at the time.
However I do remember very fondly how I came to know about Delphi 2 (or 3?).
Somehow I met this guy in ICQ and started talking about programming and about these (back then) very popular programs for "hacking" your friends: Back Orifice, Netbus, Sub7, etc. when he then says that he's actually developing his very own trojan tool called "Hacker's Paradise".
Long story short, at some point he sends me the source code and starts to explain to me how it works.
Some time later time he realizes that there's much more future in actually developing a tool for sysadmins so he renames the tool "Master's Paradise"[1] and starts trying to sell it.
Sadly, I never knew or heard from him again, but I love that story because I was around 10 or 12 at the time and it seemed like magic to me be able to open the Delphi editor, drag and drop some buttons and have a fully functional Windows program at my fingertips. Just beautiful.
Also, the fact that I was getting source code from a stranger over the internet for a tool that would do such "magical" things as opening and closing the cd-rom tray of whoever you had the chance to infect, made me feel like part of the super elite hacker world (ha!).
Borland Turbo C++ was my first "real" programming language after GW-BASIC. Had some extremely heavy Tandy laptop ('portable computer' might be a better moniker) with a CGA monitor. Those were the days.
Also, if you broke something the runtime error messages were useful, not like the stack trace we have today. There is beauty in having just a single line runtime error.
I wish something better than yahoo pipes existed in the first place. I mean, I love the idea, but every time I tried to use it for something more than a toy, I ran into the same issue - I need to unpack one item into several items and switch to processing those. I never found a good solution for that and ended up writing own python/requests/lxml processor instead.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadAt the very worst they already have a bunch of drivers for relatively-modern hardware: https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/os2-ecs-drivers-software-packa...
However, if their promises to release a semi-modernized OS/2 actually come to fruition I'll be really happy. :D
At this point, I'd settle for a really good implementation of the WPS on Linux. I don't care that much about the OS/2 API or SOM or any of that stuff. But the UI experience hit a sweet spot for me.
Sadly, haven't found any other app as smart as this.
Only kidding. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
HyperCard somehow managed to be almost as captivating as the web, with barely any resources.
Projects like http://litestep.info/ for example (it can be reskinned so it doesn't look like early 2000s unix)
Although the original wasn't around in 96
https://digg.com/reader
They were one of the fastest environments to build business software in till the early 90s. Then Client/Server and Windows happened. Visual Basic and Delphi occupied the niche with support for SQL based databases. xBase tried playing catch-up but by the time they caught up clunkily to GUI programming, the effort was wasted and the Web came around.
This is how xBase was loved:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_rCtxf1zBo
Always felt FoxPro's concept was light years ahead of XAML's ito clarity of implementation.
http://amzn.com/dp/B005KUH4GI
It had an awesome IDE, debugger, and help.
[1] https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Seth-Juarez/Anders-Hejlsberg...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11685317
[1] http://www.freepascal.org/
[2] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/
I could've also mentioned Turbo C(++), which was almost equally nice.
Here is the list of all the alternatives:
https://www.curabase.com/a/b86eefdd-5f52-4455-9a1e-25ad0b0e9...
[1] - https://www.curabase.com
[1] https://www.botconf.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-2.1-W...
[2] https://github.com/radare/radare2/blob/master/doc/windbg
I really want to build a decent wrapper around the WinDbg protocol and run it on a Raspberry Pi+display that sits on top of my desktop case. That way I can just grab that and break in any time I need to debug something.
It would even backup my SMSes and let me search through them in an online interface. But then MS decided to shut it down within few months of me buying a phone because of this particular feature.
Well, MS does it often.
Though both are still available, not in use.
Shouldn't be on the list anymore than any new JS framework flavour du jour.
I was amazed when the program I developed on Linux compiled and ran flawlessly on Windows at the first attempt!
However I do remember very fondly how I came to know about Delphi 2 (or 3?).
Somehow I met this guy in ICQ and started talking about programming and about these (back then) very popular programs for "hacking" your friends: Back Orifice, Netbus, Sub7, etc. when he then says that he's actually developing his very own trojan tool called "Hacker's Paradise".
Long story short, at some point he sends me the source code and starts to explain to me how it works.
Some time later time he realizes that there's much more future in actually developing a tool for sysadmins so he renames the tool "Master's Paradise"[1] and starts trying to sell it.
Sadly, I never knew or heard from him again, but I love that story because I was around 10 or 12 at the time and it seemed like magic to me be able to open the Delphi editor, drag and drop some buttons and have a fully functional Windows program at my fingertips. Just beautiful.
Also, the fact that I was getting source code from a stranger over the internet for a tool that would do such "magical" things as opening and closing the cd-rom tray of whoever you had the chance to infect, made me feel like part of the super elite hacker world (ha!).
[1]Now classified by antivirus programs not as a virus but as a backdoor tool: https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/paradise.shtml
Also, if you broke something the runtime error messages were useful, not like the stack trace we have today. There is beauty in having just a single line runtime error.