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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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Winamp, as another comment here noted, cannot be considered outdated.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!).
If you are happy with the ribbon UI, then you are fine.
Personally, I can't stand it. So I use either Word 97, which has everything I need and a nicely minimal UI, and uses the same file formats as Office into the 21st century, or Word 2003.
Note that in 97 I've turned off everything. No ribbon, no ruler, no toolbars, just menus and scroll bars, and I normally turn off the horizontal scrollbar too.
In Word 2003 I've left some of the clutter turned on so you can see the difference: the ruler and one toolbar.
Word 97 can't handle big portrait screens, for instance.
It was about 350 pages with lots of illustrations and diagrams.
The entire manual was a single giant Word outline. That meant all the headings, subheadings, sub-sub-headings etc. were automatically formatted for me, plus automatic generation of table of contents and index, all automatically linked to the structure of the steps in each chapter.
The first edition took me about 6-8 weeks, the second edition under a month.
Later on I spent 4 years working with DocBook XML and a professional documentation production system -- but I can state from personal experience that for a solo project, me and 1 engineer, Word in Outline Mode was vastly more productive and efficient.
To the client's amazement, the final stage of print-ready layout took part of one morning at the end. I took one of their leaflets, laid out in Word, removed all the text leaving only styles, and then merged that stylesheet with the manual.
Bingo, fully-formatted document, in corporate colours and fonts, with headers and footers and so on. Just a little layout tweaking, adding some page breaks and things.
The ability to collapse all the levels down to just headings is an amazing navigation tool: it's like zooming out to an overview, then zooming back in somewhere else, while the text remains readable throughout.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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(
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
Have you tried Tempest Rising?
Textpipe Pro because it's so far never made it over to Linux.
Smartdraw too.. Dia isn't quite as good.
Question could be rephrased to mean Windows software.
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
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.
Good question. There's a ton of libraries that do what I want to do, but not updated anymore.
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.
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.
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.
ClickRepair (https://archive.clickrepair.org/software_info/clickrepair.ht...)
Google Wave. One of the best "collaborative thinking" tools ever. It would even integrate well with LLMs.
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.
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...
My software of choice for this has always been Autopano Giga, still "outdated", but does its job very well:
https://hdrmaps.com/blog/autopano-giga-is-now-free/
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.
Skype’s international VoIP phone calls for dirt cheap.
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.
Winamp with the classic skin. Old but not outdated.
Reminds me of a Terminator Genesys quote: Old, not obsolete.
Napster was amazing. There's never been anything to help me discover and then buy new music faster since.
Beyond Compare. There is nothing like it, even on Linux. I use WinMerge on Windows and vscode on Linux, but Beyond Compare was something else.
X11
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.
Have you tried Whimsical? It’s the only one that’s ever made sense to me. It’s web-based though.
Turbo C with conio.h
Anything that lets me manipulate the volume of different apps on MacOS feels outdated or doesn't work properly.
Graffiti
I’ll see your Graffiti and raise you Swype.
IRC.
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.
> 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!).
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?
If you are happy with the ribbon UI, then you are fine.
Personally, I can't stand it. So I use either Word 97, which has everything I need and a nicely minimal UI, and uses the same file formats as Office into the 21st century, or Word 2003.
Example (old) screenshot:
https://imgur.com/gallery/word-97-word-2003-under-wine-on-ub...
Note that in 97 I've turned off everything. No ribbon, no ruler, no toolbars, just menus and scroll bars, and I normally turn off the horizontal scrollbar too.
In Word 2003 I've left some of the clutter turned on so you can see the difference: the ruler and one toolbar.
Word 97 can't handle big portrait screens, for instance.
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.
I am not a big fan of web apps, but this looks like it fits the org-mode use pattern of to-do lists and so on.
But there's no integration with formatting, stylesheets, or anything, right?
In 2017 or so I wrote the maintenance manual for an earlier version of this educational 3D printer:
https://www.ysoft.com/be3d
It was about 350 pages with lots of illustrations and diagrams.
The entire manual was a single giant Word outline. That meant all the headings, subheadings, sub-sub-headings etc. were automatically formatted for me, plus automatic generation of table of contents and index, all automatically linked to the structure of the steps in each chapter.
The first edition took me about 6-8 weeks, the second edition under a month.
Later on I spent 4 years working with DocBook XML and a professional documentation production system -- but I can state from personal experience that for a solo project, me and 1 engineer, Word in Outline Mode was vastly more productive and efficient.
To the client's amazement, the final stage of print-ready layout took part of one morning at the end. I took one of their leaflets, laid out in Word, removed all the text leaving only styles, and then merged that stylesheet with the manual.
Bingo, fully-formatted document, in corporate colours and fonts, with headers and footers and so on. Just a little layout tweaking, adding some page breaks and things.
The ability to collapse all the levels down to just headings is an amazing navigation tool: it's like zooming out to an overview, then zooming back in somewhere else, while the text remains readable throughout.
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.
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.
bluetooth
Total commander
Why is it outdated? Still perfectly functional on my gaming PC.
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.
Oh, you're right! We're definitely on the same page :)
XFig
Dark Sky
I cannot believe they didn’t replicate the Dark Sky functionality 1:1 in the Weather app.
[dead]