Apps of yesteryear (or) The one in which I feel old
A conversation I had with Aarthi yesterday went like this
Me: I feel old.
Aarthi: Why?
Me: In the past, when I saw some good-looking girl on television and looked her up on the web, she would be much older than I am. Today, I looked up Deepika Padukone and to my shock and horror, she's 3 years younger! I feel middle-aged.
Seriously though, I've now spent enough time with computers to see a generation of software. I find that my usage of software has changed - I no longer use apps that I used to use all the time 4-5 years ago. Here are some of the apps I used to use a lot in the past but now no longer use at all.
Note - most of the apps below still have thriving user-bases so don't read this as a 'X or Y was used in the past but is now dead' post.
Winamp
For several years, Winamp was my music player of choice. I don't remember how exactly I came across it - I must have got it through one of those computer magazine CDs I used to collect back then. I remember collecting hundreds of skins for it and installing a zillion different plugins ( the most memorable were the DSP plugins which did magic to how it *sounded*).
This was back in the day when a new version of some software had new features (as opposed to a security fix :-) ). Whenever there was a new version distributed, I would install it and go straight to the About screen where there would be some funny release notes.
What I use now
Windows Media Player / iTunes
I'm not quite sure why I moved away from Winamp - I do remember spending a long time away from it after the disastrous Winamp 3 and then moving back to Winamp 5. I think over time, WMP caught up and fixed a lot of the annoyances that had stopped me from using it in the past.
To Winamp's credit, a lot of my friends back home in India still swear by it. This may just be a case of me being assimilated by the B0rg :-)
IrfanView
Before the likes of Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery, you were out of luck if you had an image in a non-mainstream format (I used to run into this a lot from my past in game map-making) . You can argue that you're still out of luck but I just don't deal with much of those images anymore. IrfanView was the best story in town for image viewing - it could deal with images from almost any format and was *very* light-weight.
From the website, it appears that IrfanView is still going strong. The author appears to be getting..umm... a lot of love from his users. Quoting from his site
...In the years since IrfanView hit the Net I've received more than 50,000 e-mail messages thanking me, congratulating me, and wishing me well. And at least a dozen women have wanted me to be the father of their children ;-)...
What I use now
The picture viewer built into Windows or whichever OS I happen to be using at the moment. I've dabbled with Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery but have found plain ol' files and folders good enough for most of my needs.
IrfanView is still a great app - there are lessons to be learnt from the community support it enjoys (check out the number of codecs, skins packs, etc).
Winzip
Winzip was the de-facto archiver pretty much wherever you went. I remember seeing it on all my school computers, all the computers at college and on every friend's PC. However, I always remember seeing the shareware version (which used to pop-up a nag screen) so I'm not sure whether any of the people I saw actually bought a copy of it.
I remember the day when I stopped using the Winzip 'wizard' and just used the plain interface. That was probably the first time I felt like a true 'power user' :-).
I hadn't followed Winzip news for a few years now - they seem to have been acquired by Corel and do have a new version (v11.1) out. They also have support for RAR and Bz2 now so I should probably go and give them a try.
What I use now
I moved to using WinRar and now 7-zip for some of the more esoteric compression formats. For good ol' zip files, I just use the 'Compressed Folders' support built into Windows.
Visual Basic 6.
What more can I say :-). This was the single biggest reason I took up programming full-time. Though I don't use VB day-to-day anymore, I still
feel that my life revolves around the VB family. Apart from the fact that I work in the same building as the VB team, what we're doing with Popfly is in a lot of ways, VB 'for the web'.
It annoys me that VB6 doesn't get the credit it deserves at times. I would rank it as one of Microsoft's greatest applications ever, probably second only to Windows 95 and some of the Office releases.
Sometimes, I miss the days of installing VS 6 and then MSDN from the multiple CDs (ok- maybe not the multiple CDs bit). I should have guessed back then that I'll wind up working for Developer Division and be a part of making Visual Studio :-)
What I use now
Too many to list here :-)
I can think of a lot more apps that I've used in short bursts - Paintshop Pro, ACDSee, WinAce. Before anyone flames me, this list is Windows only because that's where I've done almost all of my computing. Also, a lot of the open source apps I use (Firefox/Thunderbird) are still apps that I use everyday.
I wonder whether someone will go through a similar exercise a few years later with social network sites of today :-). Does anyone have other examples of applications they used a lot in the past?
I'll only list the apps I no longer used. Apps like irfan view and WinRar continue to linger on my HDD till date.
I'll also skip the DOS apps - but Norton Commander cannot be missed :)
Mod4Win - Mod files were sort of like MIDI files with the samples of the instruments baked into the file. They sounded great no matter how primitive your sound card was. The big plus was their small (100-200k) file size. Of course all this was before MP3s became popular.
WinPlay3 - From the inventors of the MP3 used to come this tiny player. Of course WinAmp changed it all but this was my MP3 player on my 486 DX2 for a long time.
Paint Shop Pro - The program still survives but I've moved on to Photoshop. The acquisition by Corel IMHO hasn't been good for them.
Microsoft Image Composer - Used to ship with Frontpage 1997-98ish.. I used to use it along with PSP. For some reasons, I used to find the implementation of layers in this program more intuitive.
Cool Edit - I used to use this to record FM radio for offline listening :). They got acquired by Adobe and the first thing Adobe did was to kill the 99$ hobbyist edition. I now depend on Audacity.
Vizact - This was Microsoft's early foray into vector rendering inside browsers (not counting Liquid Motion(?)). The idea was to give users a timeline driven UI which would output HTML + Time, that would render inside IE without any plugins. Used to come with Office 2000, got scrapped later.
XEmacs - was on my machine till very late. VS 2005 changed that forever :). I was a Vi user before (on Slackware!)
PCQuest did an amazing job of introducing an entire generation of us in India to ShareWare. These are apps which - thanks to our slow, exorbitantly priced, dial-up accounts - we would've never downloaded.
I was a heavy user of WinAmp back in the day and used to download new versions as they came out. I still remember the default mp3 that shipped with the product - it said something like 'WinAmp - still kicking the llama's ass' or atleast that's what it sounded to me like :)
IrfanView is actually doing quite well - I know many amateur photographers who swear by it. It's more feature rich that Windows gallery and not as heavyweight as PS/PSP/Picasa.
Windows zip integration probably killed winamp.
Apps I used a lot:
1. Shell: Norton Commander - back in day, on my 486 PC, this was the best file manager for DOS till Windows came along.
2. Utilities: PC Tools/QEMM etc: There was an entire category of apps that were built to make system and memory management under DOS more meaningful - filling in with missing features like undelete, extended memory management etc.
3. Imaging: ACDSee/PaintShopPro etc back in the day before digital photography, I used these to manage and manipulate scanned and umm.. 'downloaded' photos. I'm still too cheap to buy PhotoShop, so I make do with Picasa and Paint.net.
4. Development: QuickBasic for starters (anyone remember the gorilla.bas game that shipped as a sample?), then MASM/TASM as I moved closer to the machine. Then I discovered Visual Studio and never went back. I also tried a large number of linux IDE (kdevelop etc.) but never found anything worth sticking to.
5. Compression: Terabyte hard drives mean that I don't need to compress anything anymore :), but in the old days, I used DoubleSpace to compress my hard drive and lharc, pkzip and a bunch of other DOS-based compression app. Read up on pkzip and its founder when you get the time, it's a sad story.
I had nothing but TurboC & Winamp for three years straight, and then came along VB6. A new computer saw me starting on .net, and after I got an internet connection, it was all VB.NET and WMP. I seem to be an exception here, starting out on Photoshop, but then again, it might be my computer science "courses" at "SSI" route...
I missed every softare in umesh and deepak's list! Maybe it was just because I couldn't actually get dad to buy me PCQuest...
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