Ask HN: What old or outdated software have you never found a replacement for?

[dradra67]

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]

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.

[mikewarot]

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]

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.

[kingkongjaffa]

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]

Have you tried Tempest Rising?

[EdwardCoffin]

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

[aleksjess]

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

[dogman1050]

Winamp with the classic skin. Old but not outdated.

[markus_zhang]

Reminds me of a Terminator Genesys quote: Old, not obsolete.

[alok-g]

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Winamp, as another comment here noted, cannot be considered outdated.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.

[Metalnem]

ClickRepair (https://archive.clickrepair.org/software_info/clickrepair.ht...)

[austin-cheney]

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]

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.

[kypro]

I use Audacity a lot and it hasn't really changed much over the last 2 decades I've been using it. It's probably the oldest piece of software I still use at least weekly. It's simple and just works, plus I can use on my Mac, Linux and Windows machines.

The other is probably VLC, but I'm not really sure if that's what you're after since it's just a media player.

[FrojoS]

Skype’s international VoIP phone calls for dirt cheap.

[greatgib]

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.

[duffyjp]

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...

[mmh0000]

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/

[alok-g]

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.

[torunar]

X11

[burnt-resistor]

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.

[emseetech]

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

[delduca]

Turbo C with conio.h

[pesoneto]

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]

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

[animesh]

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.

[adrianwaj]

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.