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Ask HN: What old or deprecated software do you wish was still updated?

by assemblylang on 4/6/22, 2:17 AM with 67 comments

• by mikewarot on 4/6/22, 5:57 AM

  Picasa - the photo management program, it had really good facial recognition, and ran locally. Unfortunately, the last version has a bug that swaps face tags in an image with more than one face. 8(

  Digikam is not an acceptable substitute, it's got lots of quirks, and tends to abend.

• by shakna on 4/6/22, 6:03 AM

  WordPerfect.

  Yes, technically it still exists in some form, but not really. The modern version shares little in common with the DOS port - apart from unicode incompatibility, and that's hardly desirable.

  Corel have even acknowledged how good the DOS version was by attempting to have a "Classic Mode" with a similar interface. But the macro system is completely incompatible, and all the menus are different. It's a skin-deep facelift, nothing more.

• by antifarben on 4/6/22, 5:28 AM

  Internet Explorer but hear me out before you cry:

  The current browser ecosystem has more or less two engines: WebKit based browsers and Firefox. We have basically WebKit monoculture. If you'd find a fundamental flaw in WebKit, you'd be able to break most browsers. If Internet Explorer would be open source we would have the chance to get a third engine running. Browser engines aren't trivial and IE also had some good sides after all these years.

  I guess if IE would become FOSS this would bring some fresh air to the ecosystem.

• by elviejo on 4/6/22, 3:39 AM

  Google cloud print. To share physical printers on the cloud.

  Google reader. For RSS with blazing speed.

• by musicale on 4/6/22, 5:20 AM

  Python (before Python 3 decided to abandon backward compatibility and burn billions of dollars in code)

  32-bit macOS and iOS (before Apple set fire to all the 32-bit games and other software)

  Backward compatibility with older versions of macOS and iOS in general

  Desktop software in general (before everything became a crappy web app)

  Non-subscription software

  Smartphone games without horrible monetization schemes

  Web sites without adtech

• by version_five on 4/6/22, 2:38 AM

  The short lived BlackBerry playbook

  It runs QNX and you could get a terminal emulator for it, through which you had a functional unix like environment with a text editor, compiler, python, etc. It's not updated and all the root certs (I think I'm using that correctly, not my area) are expired, so it doesn't connect with anything that needs https. Otherwise I think it could be an awesome terminal tablet (it needs a better keyboard too)

• by nenadpantelic on 4/6/22, 5:25 AM

  Marcomedia (Adobe) Fireworks - simply the most intuitive bitmap and vector graphics editor.

• by inglor_cz on 4/6/22, 5:07 AM

  Symbian OS was weird, but extremely efficient. It would run circles around Android, as far as performance goes. I miss it.

• by anthk on 4/6/22, 3:02 AM

  Two roguelikes:

  - Avanor

  https://libregamewiki.org/Avanor

  - Abura Tan

  http://aburatan.sourceforge.net/

  More abandoned games:

  - Fanwor. The sprite should pallete-swap/blink when it's hit.

  https://github.com/gsantner/mirror__fanwor

  Now, software.

  ROX filer + rox desktop. Fluxbox may work as an Oroborox replacement, but Rox-Lib is tied to Python2. It works under Slackware 15 because we have Python2 and 3 for sure, but other distros are screwed.

  This runs circles over XFCE and even LXDE on speed.

  http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/

  ROX related repos:

  https://repo.or.cz/?a=project_list;t=rox

• by musicale on 4/6/22, 5:18 AM

  Flash

  HyperCard

  Two flawed but amazingly empowering tools that expanded the world of computing.

• by super_vic on 4/6/22, 6:05 PM

  KEdit with the selective editing feature. No current editors have that capability to my knowlege, but it's super useful. KEdit still has a web page, and can be downloaded. It would be nice if VSCode would implement the selective editing feature.

• by LarryMade2 on 4/6/22, 1:26 PM

  Old OS Printer Drivers - I can deal with a lot of old programs, just run them on old computers, but being able to print when classic printers are either in short supply or hard to maintain is an issue. So I would advocate for having modern printers with some open or legacy OS driver support.

  Alternative would be having some printer server/emulator which interfaces and emulates as popular legacy printer(s) and serves it out appropriately to modern devices.

• by wheels75 on 4/8/22, 3:36 AM

  Lotus Improv - the spreadsheet that allowed you to use formulas that could be defined like, "Profit = Income - Expenses," and didn't need to be specified in terms of cell references. You could also drag and drop rows and columns around easily. It was once described as "the first spreadsheet program good enough to be worth criticizing."

• by AnonHP on 4/6/22, 4:34 AM

  Media Rage, a Mac application that had a broad and rich set of features to manage metadata, find duplicates, and organize media files like music, photos, etc.

  The developer’s site (Chaotic Software) doesn’t exist any longer, but here’s an old page elsewhere [1] with a description of what it could do.

  [1]: http://mac.majorgeeks.com/files/details/media_rage.html

• by evaneykelen on 4/6/22, 4:52 AM

  Notational Velocity (https://notational.net/) a fast, no frills note-taking app for Mac.

• by mechatrocity on 4/6/22, 4:06 AM

  Winamp

• by tgamma on 4/6/22, 6:38 AM

  Apple Aperture - still missing it‘s DAM and automatic library management capabilities which IMHO were lightyears ahead of what Lightroom is even today

• by mindcrime on 4/6/22, 2:39 AM

  Counterclockwise[1]

  Scala IDE[2]

  [1]: https://github.com/ccw-ide/ccw

  [2]: https://github.com/scala-ide/scala-ide

• by nikivi on 4/6/22, 2:10 PM

  Ship GitHub client: https://www.realartists.com/blog/ship-is-open-source.html

  Still nothing that comes close to UX of it.

• by mattl on 4/6/22, 2:30 AM

  Looks like Amiga OS gets updated still just very slowly. Have you tried MorphOS?

• by antifarben on 4/6/22, 5:21 AM

  FTP Cube. An FTP client with multithreading written in Python. http://ftpcube.sourceforge.net/download.html

• by trinovantes on 4/6/22, 3:16 AM

  YNAB4

  Still works but performance is starting to slow down with almost 10 years of data

• by waste_monk on 4/6/22, 4:46 AM

  Space Empires 5 (a sequel would be ideal, but better support for current-gen OS's would be nice). Stellaris is good but doesn't quite stratch the itch the same way SEV did.

• by josephcsible on 4/6/22, 3:11 AM

  Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. It was nice to be able to use pf on systems without having to use unfamiliar variants of the rest of the tools.

• by fallsoffbikes on 4/6/22, 5:58 AM

  SoftICE

• by guessbest on 4/6/22, 5:50 AM

  Pocketpc 6.5 and similar handwriting builtin systems with slideout keyboards. There were gnu tools compiled to it, even emacs.

• by hbarka on 4/6/22, 5:53 AM

  VB6

• by devoutsalsa on 4/6/22, 4:32 AM

  Any cool DOS game.

• by anthk on 4/6/22, 1:40 PM

  Also, Dillo. Dillo. Seriously. I have more than enough resources to run Ungoogled-Chromium with the custom crapware and FX removed, but that small browsers rocks on a highly loaded machine when I am compiling some SlackBuilds such as WebKitGTK4.

  The repo is at https://hg.dillo.org/dillo. You need Mercurial, FLTK devel libraries and MBedTLS. With a proper user Agent such as Lynx or the PSP one it will work for a big list of sites.

  No JS, but meh. HN works, so does Lobste.rs, Simply Translate, 68k.news...

• by ycuser2 on 4/6/22, 5:02 AM

  Google Cardboard

• by rurban on 4/7/22, 5:15 AM

  flex

  perl5