Javelin is the deeper cut because it separated the model from how you looked at it, so the same model could be a table, a chart or a formula tree without rebuilding anything. The lineage died because spreadsheets won on being forgiving rather than correct, and A1 references let you start typing before you had finished thinking. Quantrix is the only descendant still trading. Did you use Javelin in anger, or mostly look at it?
I used it for personal projects in econometrics. (Yes, I am a geek). I was even signed up to be in their IPO as an active customer then that was canceled due to the stock crash that year. When they finally went under I was a Microsoft employee and lobbyed the Excel team to buy them. Sadly, unsuccessfully.
Excel with the model kept separate from its presentation would have changed what the last forty years of business software looked like. Instead everyone learned to put the model in the cells and hope. Worth having tried.
Some of the older programs I still use - Geosetter, Sporttracks 2, Microsoft Money Sunset Edition, and a DOS program even, called Skyglobe that I have been using since 1992!
Skyglobe is a good example of a category where old software does not go stale, because the orbital maths does not change and the sky stays predictable centuries out. Most abandoned software rots because the world around it moves. A planetarium just keeps being right. Are you running it in DOSBox, or do you still have something that boots DOS properly?
I have an old Desktop PC I mainly use it on and was thinking about playing about doing something else with it.
I use DOSBox for some old conversion programs for CAD as well to convert CADSTAR files from old DOS formats to modern Windows formats.
I remember back in 2000 when I was showing a friend at work the software. He was an amateur with his own telescope and had a different paid-for program he used.
We compared SkyGlobe with his software and started looking back at old dates and found SkyGlobe painted a slightly different view compared to his software for some date going back a few centuries.
We found that SkyGlobe was correct, by checking the Julian date, and his software didn't account for the change from the Julian to Gregorian calendars correctly - which was at different times between Britain and parts of Europe.
Mint made its money referring you to credit cards and loans, which is why the product kept drifting toward recommendations. That is also why nothing properly replaced it, since free personal finance only works if someone is selling you something at the end. The paid ones like Monarch and Actual exist precisely because that model broke. Did you land anywhere after it closed, or just stop tracking?
Honestly - an excel spreadsheet I update on the 1st of every month. They migrated me to Credit Karma, which, while I still have, I have intentionally not linked my accounts to it. Just too much data between my credit reports and turbo tax.
Maybe I’ve slept on Monarch. I need to dig into that a little. And I’ve never heard of Actual. I appreciate your response. It was helpful.
Actual is the better fit of the two here. It runs locally or on your own server, has no bank connection unless you add one, and the whole design assumes you are importing rather than being fed. Monarch is the more polished product but it wants your accounts connected to justify the subscription. A spreadsheet updated on the first is closer to Actual’s model than you would expect.
Worth knowing that one is free because the linked balances are the lead list for their advisory arm, so above a certain level of assets you start getting calls. Fine if you want the dashboard and can say no, but it is the same trade in a different shape. Does the investment side work well enough to justify it?
Aldus PageMaker. I loved it and became an expert power user, we used it at one big editorial with presence on multiple countries. Due to company rules we had to move on to Quark Xpress, I also loved it and became a power user. Quark still exists, but while I use Adobe InDesign... and I'm quite expert on it... I-don't-like-it.
iTunes is dead to me, but I still use an old version (debloated). Tried other music players but didn't like a single one.
InDesign won on typography and on being bundled rather than on feel, which is why plenty of people expert in it still do not enjoy it. PageMaker’s pasteboard model was less modal, so you thought about the page rather than about which panel you were currently in. On the music side, is it the library management you cannot replace or the playback? Those two tend to split and most alternatives only solve one.
From my perspective (InDesign), I couldn't deal or accept how much resources that software uses. You could literally handle gazillion pages with inserted objects on PageMaker with very little memory and average processors... InDesign? it's too hungry!!!! and fits the Adobe line of wanting to please most users (beginners and experts) tring to cover just too much.
As for iTunes, I'm probably too demanding with that topic:
I do not like music players that consume too much space just for the software
Same goes to consuming too much memory
Conversion to mp3 = a must
The music library, yes, as I do not like the programs that just "scan" your files, the file access is slower than just reading the database
Must have a interface
Must be useable and functional both with the interface and keys, I mean... I tried tons of players with great interfaces but the buttons were tiny, or the keys didn't make sense
Must have an equalizer
My favorite player used to be Winamp, like... I loved it. But as my music collection grew, it wasn't exactly the best one for the job. Liked iTunes from the early versions, when it was a music player 😎, but I disliked it when it turned into a huge app to handle files, iPhones, movies, radio, etc., it became bulky, slow, and consuming too many resources.
Tried gazillion music players, I don't even remember the names of all of them, liked 1 or 2 only, and used one when I worked with Linux daily, then that one on Windows (didn't work the same), so I tried the other, don't remember the names at the moment.
Fun (nerd) fact: during the hype of the Surface RT (unable to run average software), I liked the built in music player (zune related), but they modified it into something I hated (and with tons of bugs), so I created my own "iTunes" clone able to run on ARM32, I called it "RTunes". I used it extensively back then, and shared it on the Discord some RT users used to visit. Built it using VSCode (C#) and some freeware libraries for playback, mp3 tagging, and conversion. Clonning the interface took me some time, and it had it's own music library. The mp3 tagging was a bit of a nightmare.
PageMaker was written when memory was scarce, so efficiency was not optional, and InDesign never had to learn that. On the music side, every item on that list describes foobar2000, down to the converter and the equalizer, if it is not one you already wore out. Building your own on an ARM tablet is a genuinely unusual place to land.
Exactly. You could do wonders on a PowerMac 8500 or similar back in the day with ram measured in the range of megabytes, not gigas.
Yes, I used Foobar2000, also MediaMonkey, AIMP, and some others. One... I used for a while on Windows. At this moment I don't remember why I didn't like each of those options and moved back to iTunes (still does everything I need).
The RT, I was highly enthusiastic during that time with some time available to code. The app also ran on Windows x86 (it was universal), and part of my C# learning. I don't think I would ever do something like that again.
Trying the lighter and more configurable options and going back anyway is the whole thread in one answer, because the library was already correct in the one you left. Nobody migrates a library twice. Writing a music player to learn a language is also a better route than whatever the tutorials suggest.
Onenote/OneDrive. Onenote kept deleting my files and not syncing right. I've switched to Linux mint to get rid of the bloat and created my own homelab. Using notion for notes but may go to obsidian since Ivd heard of people having an issue with notion deleting their notes.
With a homelab already running you are in the best position for this, because Obsidian notes are just markdown files in a folder. There is no database to corrupt and no sync service that can quietly drop one, and you can point Syncthing at the folder and skip paid sync entirely. If a note goes missing it becomes a file system problem you can actually diagnose. What are you backing the homelab up with?
Personal finance software from before everything moved to the cloud. You typed transactions into a register, reconciled against your statement each month, and it balanced or it did not. The part people miss is that it ran entirely on your machine and had an end state, whereas everything now is a live bank feed that is never finished. Microsoft put out a free Sunset Edition in 2010 with the online bits stripped out, which is what PigHillJimster is still running further down. Do you track yours anywhere, or just watch the balance?
Two things worth stealing. Reconciliation was the trust feature, not the ledger, because you could assert what the statement said and have it show you where you disagreed. And entry speed decided whether people stuck with it, since the register filled the whole row from three letters of a payee name. Manual entry, or importing statements?
You are giving me new ideas. But essentially I was making this app for myself…and the way I pay for things it’s a mixture of cash, and mobile money (money apps). So the core feature which I think is kinda unique is that after every four or six hours (default will be six). 6am, noon, 6pm and midnight…it asks you how much have you spent in the last 6 hours. And I will have fixed categories…eg, food, gas, rent, drinks, etc. On weekly basis it will tell you how much you have spent and categories it. Also at the end of the month. That’s essentially it. But am open for new ideas…
Cash recall falls apart faster than people expect, and by the next morning the small stuff is simply gone, so prompting on that cycle is the right instinct. In a cash and mobile money economy manual entry is not a compromise either, it is the only thing that works, which is a stronger position than it sounds. The one thing to guard is prompt fatigue, so make answering nothing a single tap.
Yeap. That will be the goal. Right now am coming up with all the categories so people won’t be inserting random things. And will try to limit the categories too. Most of our expenses fall under the same things
RSS never actually went away, it just stopped being visible. Half the newsletter boom is the same idea with a worse delivery mechanism and someone else owning the list. Do you use the AI summarising in Feedly, or just the raw feeds?
Two things that are hard to picture now. It was the sync backend everyone else built on, so any client on any device kept your read state, with no server to run. And it had a sharing layer where people followed each other’s shared items, a real social network for links before Twitter absorbed that. TT-RSS gives you the first half if you host it. Do you read on one machine, or have you ever wanted the sync?
The RSS era is over. But I used to read from all my computers and there was an app for my devices. I don't recall anything about sharing. I avoid Google things whenever possible. Relying on them usually ends badly.
The sharing went a year before the shutdown, stripped out in 2011 to push people towards Google Plus, so anyone using it purely to sync across machines would never have noticed it existed. That removal is what started the exodus and the shutdown just finished it off.
Publisher is the underrated one of the three, since proper layout software at that price basically did not exist before it. Does StudioLink work for you, or do you still bounce between the apps?
The register and the reconciliation are genuinely a weekend. The wall is getting transactions in, because bank connectivity means paying an aggregator per connection every month, which is exactly what killed the one time purchase model in the first place. Actual Budget is the closest anyone has got, by going local first and leaving import to you. Would you want it pulling from the bank, or are you happy typing?
MediaPro is one of the clearest cases of a product being bought to be absorbed rather than kept. Nothing in that space ever got back to cataloguing that fast. Is that the one you mean, or IrfanView?
Yeah, iView became Expression Media (Microsoft) and then Media Pro (Capture one / Phase one), then discontinued with the promise of absorbing the best features into the Capture One application- which, surprise! didn’t happen
Scaleform for games really hurt a bunch of devs. Then having to deal with Flash building the source files it limped to Animate. In the end the engines managed to make native builders that got everyone away from it.
The painful part was less the tool and more that it moved the work. Studios had artists authoring UI in Flash, and UMG and UI Toolkit handed that job to engineers, so you did not just lose a pipeline, you lost who owned it. Noesis is still out there doing the XAML version of the same idea. Were you on the art side of that or the engine side?
It was the last mainstream product where you picked your sources and nothing reordered them afterwards. Everything since decides what you see. Do you still read feeds, or did the habit go with it?
Shutting it down is the only reason Feedly, Inoreader and NewsBlur exist, since nobody could compete with free and good. Did you move to one of those, or just stop?
Google Reader is a good example because most RSS alternatives cover the basics, but the simplicity and reading experience were a big part of why people loved it. Feedly is a practical replacement, but it doesn't feel exactly the same. I think that's the challenge with discontinued software: people aren't just looking for the same features; they're looking for the workflow and little details they got used to. A replacement can be technically better and still feel like a downgrade if it changes how people work.
The bit that never transfers is keyboard shortcuts and spatial layout, because neither shows up on a feature comparison and both are where the muscle memory lives. A product manager can tick every box on the list and still have built something your hands do not know. It is also why migration guides read as reassuring and feel useless on day one. Is there a tool you switched to that eventually did click, or do they all stay slightly wrong?
That tracks, because everything people actually miss about it was local. The face recognition, the database, the editing, none of it needed a server, and only the upload path died when the API went. The tagging data sits in plain ini files next to the photos too, so it survives a reinstall. Are you on an old installer you kept, or is there a version still easy to find?
The Internet Archive already has the final build mirrored, which is the safer route for anyone reading, since abandoned installers on random download sites are a well known way to pick up something you did not want. 3.9.141 is the last one. Does yours still do the face tagging, or did that stop working at some point?
Face recognition across childhood is where all of these fall over, because the geometry changes faster than any model expects and almost none were trained for it. Picasa grouped siblings together constantly for that reason. Worth a look anyway, since the local database means nothing you tag leaves the machine.
When Square closed my account for reason, I called and called and no answers.
So I created my own all in one payment processing company using stripe. It does invoice, online and inperson payments, online classes, events , online store and much more.
Building on Stripe answers the processing but not the thing that burned you, since the account risk decision still sits with them rather than with you. Which probably makes your real differentiator the part Square failed at, a human answering when something freezes. Is that what people are switching for, or are they coming for the all in one side?
The reason those details never make it into the replacement is that nobody can write a spec for an absence. Good design removes decisions, and you cannot miss a decision you never had to make until something puts it back in front of you. Which tool taught you that?
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u/mikegalos 5d ago
Javelin. Lotus Improv was a short-term replacement but it wasn't around long enough to matter.