Ask HN: What old or outdated software have you never found a replacement for?

22 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by prisenco

Item id: 44479519

47 Comments

prisenco

32 minutes ago

Google Wave. One of the best "collaborative thinking" tools ever. It would even integrate well with LLMs.

burnt-resistor

an hour ago

A Bodega Mac app, for a defunct app store, that checks every Sparkle framework enabled app for updates and can optionally install them. It's x86 only so it won't work whenever Apple decides in its infinite wisdom to break everyone's investment in x86 software when Rosetta 2 is purposefully obliterated.

dradra67

9 hours ago

Apple Aperture.

Never liked Lightroom and it is subscription-only now.

I use DarkTable here and there but never recreated all the albums and metadata I had in Aperture.

Apple pulling the plug was a major punch in the gut and I'll never invest so much effort again in curating a digital collection with proprietary software.

pulvinar

7 hours ago

Absolutely. I'm taking good care of the last hardware that still runs it.

Wonder what it would take to convince Apple to bring it back. It's not like there's a shortage of talent and money to do this now. And it would be immensely appreciated, unlike some of their other projects.

kingkongjaffa

9 hours ago

Command and conquer games, especially 3 tiberium wars,

There’s really no modern equivalent of build a base, gather ore in ore trucks, make base defenses and units, and fight in formations and garrisonned in buildings

seuraughty

8 hours ago

Have you tried Tempest Rising?

FerkiHN

10 hours ago

Open Office. I don't know why, but I make presentations there despite the alternatives, it's like native, without ads, subscriptions, etc. I like the primitiveness and in general I'm already used to it.

duffyjp

6 hours ago

Have you given Libre Office a try? I use their spreadsheet all the time. You can paste in data and actually get it into cells the way you want. Excel is terrible at this.

Development Comparison: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffi...

FerkiHN

4 hours ago

Unfortunately, I have a Windows 8.1 PC and I downloaded the update for it from the official website, but unfortunately the installation LibreOfice failed , so I stayed with OpenOffice.

alok-g

6 hours ago

WinSplit Revolution. It's a minimalistic but powerful Window manager for Windows. Some forks exist but all seem stalled. https://github.com/dozius/winsplit-revolution There are many alternatives, but none as good. WinSplit used to work fine until a few years back.

Microsoft Money. I moved to GNUCash, but still miss Money.

Winamp, as another comment here noted, cannot be considered outdated. I have tried many alternatives but find none to be as good. Sonique was a good alternative which stalled a long time back. Thankfully Winamp still works.

mikewarot

8 hours ago

Picassa - Google took it over, and left a bug in it that renders it unusable. It randomly swaps face tags, so I can't use it. 8(

bjourne

5 hours ago

Logisim Evolution. And I'm telling you, whoever can make a replacement addressing all its pain points, while being easy to use for students and grading teachers can become very very rich.

duffyjp

6 hours ago

Image Composite Editor. It's a panorama maker from Microsoft Research. I'm a hobbyist photographer and nothing I've tried can come close.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/image-compo...

alok-g

5 hours ago

Have you tried Serif Panaroma Plus? It's an outdated product, but worked the best for me, better than ICE as far as I recall.

EdwardCoffin

10 hours ago

Inception the App [1], a movie tie-in app for the iPhone which played theme music from the movie selected based on your accelerometer data and the ambient sounds it could sense.

[1] http://inception-app.com

austin-cheney

8 hours ago

I stopped maintaining one of my personal applications 6 years ago and people still use it in the browser almost 5,000 times a month and download it more than 4,000 times a month. It’s called Pretty Diff.

browningstreet

8 hours ago

Neat — I used to use that.

Out of curiosity, why did you stop maintaining it? Have you considered giving it to someone to keep up? Apologies if this is addressed in a blog somewhere.

austin-cheney

5 hours ago

I stopped maintaining it because it required a stupendous amount of time. That's fine except I had mostly stopped using it myself for the last 2 or 3 years I was maintaining it and I wanted the freedom to use that time to explore other unrelated projects.

Simultaneously the visibility around that project got me hired more than once, but my interest in doing JavaScript for employment was fading as well. I still write JavaScript/TypeScript in personal projects to this day, but I do completely unrelated work now for employment.

aleksjess

11 hours ago

Good question. There's a ton of libraries that do what I want to do, but not updated anymore.

FrojoS

11 hours ago

Skype’s international VoIP phone calls for dirt cheap.

greatgib

10 hours ago

Try Viber out, I'm not that fan of Viber as a messaging app but for phone calls it was great value for the price.

I was looking for a solution when in Asia trying to call locally lines in Europe. I tried Skype first but the quality of phone calls was really deep shit. I was saved by Viber.

pesoneto

7 hours ago

MacFlow by MainStay. The only flowcharting software with an intuitive user interface. Only works on original Mac OS. Don't try it, you will never be happy current products ever again.

lobsterthief

6 hours ago

Have you tried Whimsical? It’s the only one that’s ever made sense to me. It’s web-based though.

delduca

8 hours ago

Turbo C with conio.h

dogman1050

11 hours ago

Winamp with the classic skin. Old but not outdated.

j-krieger

11 hours ago

Anything that lets me manipulate the volume of different apps on MacOS feels outdated or doesn't work properly.

goodthink

10 hours ago

Graffiti

devilbunny

9 hours ago

I’ll see your Graffiti and raise you Swype.

lproven

11 hours ago

Outliners, in general.

The single most powerful tool available for a long-form writer (in any (human) language.) Equally useful for fact, fiction, academia, documentation, anything. Technologically simple, was done well on MS-DOS in a few hundred kB of code and data.

Maps very well onto HTML, XML, etc. As such, maps onto AsciiDoc etc.

But forgotten. Almost no modern versions and what exist are almost unbelievably primitive, far far below the capabilities of the mid-1980s -- for example, Emacs OrgMode or LogSeq. Almost too braindead to use.

I keep copies of 20-30Y old MS Word binaries around on my 64-bit Linux boxes, just for this.

cagey

6 hours ago

> Technologically simple, was done well on MS-DOS in a few hundred kB of code and data.

Exactly. The outliner feature in Borland's Sidekick Plus was my all-time favorite, but its lifetime was brief (due to the entire product being a TSR), so I used Symantec's Grandview 2.0 sporadically over the decades, even in DOSbox out of desperation (as recently as 5-6 years ago!).

john-tells-all

5 hours ago

I've had good luck with (service) Workflowy -- https://workflowy.com/

Type to create items at different levels. Drag and drop to rearrange. Click triangle to fold.

AstroJetson

10 hours ago

Can you say more about outlines in older versions of word? I use Word2019 (local install) and it works for me. What am I missing?

dialup_sounds

9 hours ago

Second!

Outliners are a very underserved space, eclipsed by overwrought note apps that treat outlining as formatting rather than a fundamental tool for organizing thought and communication.

Indigrid (https://innovationdilation.com/) was extremely promising but is presumed dead.

Bike on Mac (https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/) is probably the best living example.

...and there's not much else.

treetalker

7 hours ago

I broke down and bought Bike. I use it almost exclusively for drafting complex legal briefs: I like that it makes it easy to make any node at any level a heading. Its system of changing the format of nodes (to heading, body text, checkbox, unordered or ordered list, etc.) is fast, easy, and unique in the space. But printing leaves much to be desired.

Otherwise I end up using OmniOutliner. The filtering can be useful (and it's a feature not really available elsewhere) but often OmniOutliner can feel slow and overly feature-heavy. Printing is also not great.

user

6 hours ago

[deleted]

ok1984

10 hours ago

Total commander

6mian

10 hours ago

Why is it outdated? Still perfectly functional on my gaming PC.

ok1984

9 hours ago

Question was about old or outdated, total commander is old ;)

Don’t get me wrong, I love it! and I don’t think there is anything close to it.

6mian

4 hours ago

Oh, you're right! We're definitely on the same page :)

fat_cantor

8 hours ago

Dark Sky

nocoiner

5 hours ago

I cannot believe they didn’t replicate the Dark Sky functionality 1:1 in the Weather app.