What old or outdated software have you never found a replacement for?
What old or outdated software have you never found a replacement for?
Good question. There's a ton of libraries that do what I want to do, but not updated anymore.
Winamp with the classic skin. Old but not outdated.
Anything that lets me manipulate the volume of different apps on MacOS feels outdated or doesn't work properly.
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.
Skype’s international VoIP phone calls for dirt cheap.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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(
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google Wave. One of the best "collaborative thinking" tools ever. It would even integrate well with LLMs.