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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
Type to create items at different levels. Drag and drop to rearrange. Click triangle to fold.
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:
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.
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.
Don’t get me wrong, I love it! and I don’t think there is anything close to it.
Development Comparison: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffi...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/image-compo...
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.
Smartdraw too.. Dia isn't quite as good.
Question could be rephrased to mean Windows software.
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.
aleksjess•7mo ago