* Microsoft Image Composer. A little known sprite-oriented graphic arts program. Combining its sprite model with the necessary several years of modernization it would have enjoyed had it not been abandoned would be impressive and easy to use.

* High-performance lightweight desktop email clients. I was especially fond of one named AK-Mail in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Blisteringly fast on PCs of its era, a modern incarnation would seem incomprehensibly fast compared to today's bloated apps that have difficulty keeping up with keystrokes on 8-core 3.5 GHz monsters. Of course, back in the day, desktop apps were built in systems languages and not in JavaScript.

* As a broader concept, a return to prevailing use of on-device processing and computation. Today the too-facile argument that data must be shipped off-network to a third-party cloud in order to be processed efficiently means this happens all the time without users paying it any attention.

[1] https://twitter.com/boxnwhisker/ (scroll down to see a bunch of examples)

Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then. Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison.

As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.

Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps. It's an instructive story of how an inferior product can win. I'm not saying that happens all the time or that it's inevitable, but I think it's safe to say that's sort of what happened here.

I wonder how much of it was because they had a sorry arse mobile browser? Not supporting ontouchstart etc events must have been a killer. MSPointerEvent was awfully buggy in the initial release, and what dev wants to rewrite their web app/page to use PointerEvent?

Why wouldn't you make sure Hybrid apps (Cordova etc) work well? Why not just copy WKWebView (20/20 hindsight now!).

Their equivalent of WKWebView is some sort of zombie IE11 version (not edge, with different features and flaws than IE11 desktop). Hideous.

Disclosure: we developed a Hybrid app for Windows Phone (based on Xamarin).

A far cry from developers, developers, developers.

Also being able to select text from most anywhere was useful.

Windows Phone though? Absolute pleasure to type on. I've never used any device that was easier to type on than my old Lumia 920.

It's effectively single-threaded, with all the I/O running on the same thread as the GUI (oh import is so fun). And you need to load the entire metadata database for a folder into memory at once.

I have looked into fixing it before, but it does require redoing pretty much the entire API, which means its several man-years of developer work. And Mozilla has never invested enough in Thunderbird to let that sort of work get done.

I leave Thunderbird open in the background and come back to a notification that some component or other crashed. Happens all the time, no clue why. Email is common enough that I'd expect there to be a half-decent client for it, but I don't know of one...

(IRC is also common, at least among people who write code, but I don't know of a free client that isn't worse than running irssi in cygwin.)

This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what circumstances this would happen. I have hundreds of thousands of mails in tbird, in various accounts and folders. It's never struck me as slow. And its search (one of the features i use most) is simply fast.

I see it both fast and slow. Ironically it's absurdly slow on my 8-core desktop and just fine on my older dual core laptop (both with SSDs and same accounts, etc). Definitely weird, but this behaviour has peristed for years, so much that I had to disable TB features on my desktop just so I could type without stalling.

Might also recommend a disk check, perhaps FS needs fixing.

While helpful advice - if you need to do this manual maintenance regularly, the application is broken.

One day I'll finally take the plunge and jump to notmuch, which I've been told is the only email client actually capable of handling millions of emails without sucking.

The rendering corruption/lag issue with scrolling only happens while scrolling a message while in split-pane view, not when the message is maximized in its own tab.

Example: on two identical iMacs (4 cores, 16GB RAM, PCIe SSD) with about 100GB of local synced IMAP and the same accounts, it's slow for one user's iMac but fast on the other. Deleted TB and profile, fresh user, fresh TB install, fresh config; same result.

I don't have either of those problems, using TB for a decade. Not sure what your issue could be but first thoughts would be to compact your folders and if that doesn't help, vacuum the sqlite files.

Compared to Gmail or Microsoft Outlook online it's very very fast. Gmail lags severely compared to when I use Thunderbird.

To be fair, my work email account is an exceptional case - it's got somewhere around ~1 million emails.

Gmail, particularly with the new Gmail interface launched a few months ago, also sucks performance wise, but in different ways from Thunderbird.

The number of times where I am typing an email and somehow trigger hot keys is absolutely ridiculous. Mid-word and suddenly I've deleted the draft, changed labels, and muted & archived a critical conversation is absolutely infuriating. It's Outlook level bad.

There is an Android launcher (launcher 10, i think) that offers tiles, and some of them even live tiles. It's okay, not quite the same slick experience though.

I still miss having my next appointment on my lock screen. The Pixel gets this mostly right with calendar info on the ambient screen display, but still seems a bit shy about showing it.

So download widgets to show what you want?

I don't think anyone ever liked developing for the web. It solved three problems pretty well:

- Data portability: log in from anywhere, have your data at your fingertips.

- App model: no broken installations of programs into desktop environments, dependency problems, DLL hell

- No concern about the mostly broken Windows desktop: viruses, etc.

(1) is mostly a solved problem even on desktop, the web just got there first. We have everything from Dropbox to various data APIs.

(2) is largely solved in mobile app development. It's instructive to consider how: very locked-down app APIs to the operating systems (e.g. no dumping files all over the place), standard packaging formats and distribution channels (.apk, .msi), etc

(3) is also mostly solved on mobile.

I would go as far as to say that in 2018, software should be native-first. And indeed it is, in mobile. The major shift is desktop->mobile. Mobile development has much more in common with native desktop development than web development. The reason desktop isn't likely to come back is because it's a niche market. Everyone has a phone but if you aren't in tech circles, it's surprising to see how many people barely use computers at all, especially those who don't work in offices, older folks, and the less well-off. A mobile device does about 99% of what they need -- most people aren't "creators", they don't author websites, write code, edit videos, design buildings, etc.

I work in a warehouse, and the specific thing I do requires a laptop. They've tried to train backups for me, but they have a hard time finding people who know how to use a computer. Most people don't - they only have a smartphone.

But this is precisely the problem. And also why mobile apps aren't really native, nor becoming native. Developers think, "since our app is just a thin wrapper on our web service, why not just make a webview and do everything through the web?". APIs being opaque to the system means you don't own the data. Saving actual files in actual filesystem is still much better for user freedoms.

> A mobile device does about 99% of what they need -- most people aren't "creators", they don't author websites, write code, edit videos, design buildings, etc.

True to some extent, but how many of those things they would be doing if the mobile platform wasn't limiting them? Users don't imagine the hypothetical things they could be doing, they choose from what's available.

I call it “the Photoshop test”: Pretend you’re Adobe and you just invented Photoshop in 2018. How do you build the GUI for each desktop operating system?

...considering you need to do things like OpenGL hardware acceleration, 30-bit color, support binary plugins, and access certain low-level hardware features (e.g. supporting TWAIN, Pro-level broadcast media devices and interfaces, etc).

On Windows it’s an unfortunate situation because all of the “new” application frameworks since 1998 are unsuitable: WPF is .NET only, UWP requires your application to run in a sandbox, you can’t even use MFC because it’s tightly coupled to User32 with its lack of support for 30-bit color. The only choice is the long hard road of doing almost everything by yourself through low-level interfaces with the DWM. Not pretty.

The sad thing is that UWP is very capable - if it weren’t for the sandboxing then it would be perfect (that, and you would need to build your own widget library as UWP’s stock set is almost entirely touch-first controls that are utterly inappropriate for a mouse-first desktop UI)

There's so much malware, anti-virus that slows down all I/O, browser toolbars, etc. Just open Internet Explorer and see how long it takes. On my computer it takes <1s. On many computers I've used in peoples' homes, small offices, etc. it's more like 10.

Calling that anything but "broken" seems like a misnomer. Look at the 99% of computer users, not the 1% power users/people at companies with good IT groups.

In a similar vein, Palm webOS. I still maintain that it was several years ahead of its time with the whole "mobile apps using javascript" Enyo framework.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS

[2]: https://pivotce.com/2018/11/28/luneos-november-stable-releas...

Seriously, I recently had to disable Thunderbird's spellchecking so that typing emails wouldn't stall for 5+ seconds at a time on my 8-core machine. Ironically, my older dual core machine has no such problems, and the same email accounts, OS and extensions are at play.

It's not the world's most advanced mobile OS, but a good way to escape the Apple and Google ecosystems.

It is possible to purchase the OS and install it to Sony Xperia phones. https://shop.jolla.com

Not enough people value openness to make the trade off versus iOS and Android.

Does iOS not provide the privacy you need?

I think Purism would be satisfied with much less initial adoption on the overall market than somebody like Mozilla/Canonical. In short, they'd probably consider it a success much sooner. Also, both FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Touch were essentially adopting the same philosophy as Android in terms of having a closed-hardware approach and a software stack that while open in principle, was largely restricted on-device to run just the apps available in the respective app-stores, made for the platform specifically, which weren't that many.

Purism is making it so that practically any Linux app can be installed out of the box and with a small amount of work, any GTK3/4 app can be made touch friendly as well. I think this could provide them the app ecosystem head start they'd need.

> Not enough people value openness to make the trade off versus iOS and Android.

I think you're, sadly, right. However if PurismOS becomes a solid choice in its own right and then you have the privacy advantage on top, it might sell.

> Does iOS not provide the privacy you need?

Kind of, that's what I use now, however I have to trust Apple on keeping its word, which may be difficult considering they're moving more and more into "services" == rent seeking. Also, I have serious problems with the war on general purpose computing Apple is involved in and the closed nature of their software, where they have the ultimate say in what I can run on a piece of hardware I paid thousand pounds for to own, not rent.

Google oozes from every part of Android. I very much doubt that installing LineageOS with closed-source blobs for most of the hardware makes Google/NSA/OEMs completely unaware of your activity. Moreover, Android is such a critical piece of software that probably every significant 3 letter agency in the world has some sort of a backdoor in/to it. Android suffers a security fiasco quite often and the update situation is quite awful. Lineage is also often not as stable as one'd like and the update process from one major version to another can be itself nerve-wrecking.

On the technical side, it is running ancient, out-of-tree kernels that lack a lot of the security work going upstream, which is especially concerning considering there's a new Spectre variant patch in practically every release.

Lastly, having the full GNU/Linux experience in my pocket is something I've always wanted.

Whether 'regular users' care about this is not particularly concerning to me, as I think the 'enthusiast crowd' is large enough to get the ecosystem started and once we feel comfortable recommending this to our 'regular' family members and friends, they need not to be aware of any of the additional benefits - it would be just the new smartphone that they have.

Nevertheless, I hope that Purism will be able to deliver a product which is as easy to use as a "normal" Android device with those privacy/sustainability features as a bonus. That way I might be able to give the people who ask me which phone they should buy next some good advice.

We have TypedArrays, WebAssembly, very smart JITs. With Typescript, JavaScript is a very productive and sane language to work with.

I 100% agree with you that the current state of desktop apps are extremely bloated.

Mostly agree with your comment on the broader point that front-end (coding) is a lot saner than it used to be. This sentence however sounds to me like "With C, assembler is a very productive and sane language to work with." (FTR: I used to enjoy assembler.)

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles.....

Would love to see a 64 bit version and with some more advanced features.

Still loving it and it's one of my main stream editor which just works with just one executable and part of my big list of portable apps collection which mostly consists of single executable based tools for almost any task!!!

and while javascript is certainly one of the worst choices if you care about performance, it's also one of the best choices if you need to iterate really quickly (which I believe is very important in overall, especially for new projects)

I hope there will be lighter electron one day (I'm actually working on something like this already) but it's unlikely that people will start doing UIs in systems languages.

XULRunner does the same thing, includes, in addition, a full XML GUI language and assorted technologies and the full runtime distribution, on my Windows10 system, including debugging, crash-reporter aids, VC libraries, D3D libraries, consumes 72MB.

it's nowhere near to XUL but it's also little more powerful because of react (vdom is more dynamic than XML, it will be possible to use react-devtools and it should support HMR too)

xulrunner may be a superior technology, but if it's a PITA to work with, then nobody is going to want to use it.

Documentation was poor or non-existent and IIRC the API was based on the half-baked XPCOM because COM and CORBA were all the rage at the time it was created.

That's absolutley not true.

"Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" has been published before 2004. It is still online: http://mb.eschew.org/

XUL (and assorted technologies) is/were broadly documentet on MDN.

When xulrunner was being developed there wasn't the same interest in desktop software. It seems like Chromium reached a point where you could build desktop-class software, but the distribution model wasn't right. Someone then decided to adapt Chromium to solve the distribution problem and you have Electron.

If Firefox had evolved to allow the tipping point experience that Chrome did, then you might well have seen xulrunner be that thing. It was years ahead of itself, but perhaps you could question the focus of the folks on the Mozilla side who were spread across so many concepts/ areas compared to the folks at Google - but I think that's for a different thread.

webapp development is a lot of work and SPAs are actually even harder... and so is server development with node. I love javascript, yet I don't think it's suitable for everything.

electron got popular, because companies could reuse code and tooling, only for the cost of cpu & memory

javascript is very dynamic and V8 has very limited time to make its magic so the optimizations can't ever reach level of rust/c++ (but V8 can do some runtime-only optimizations)

it's very hard to predict performance of given code (and this itself is why it's the worst choice for perf-sensitive code, V8 is moving target, and what was fast yesterday might be slow tomorrow - so basically, it's not worth time and money to actually spend too much time optimizing javascript, it's much better to identify hot spots and do them in rust/c++)

It usually doesn't matter and it's more than fast enough for any kind of scripting, but it's certainly not a good fit for cpu-heavy tasks. I love javascript, to be clear.

BTW: run some node.js code with --print-opt-code so you have an idea how big amount of code is generated even for very simple things.

https://www.claws-mail.org/

Don't dismiss it because of the lack of bells and whistles on its web page, it runs circles around everything else. Outlook mail folders also can be imported through an external utility. Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and reportedly can be built on MacOSX.

https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/features.php

"Continuously improving since 1998"

Agree. It feels like apple respect users privacy which is great, but are you not interested in ios you are stuck with android and how google collects everything about its users, which feels really bad. I also think that "google play store" is rather bad. So it really needs competition here and a 3rd option.

What I really hope is that Microsoft (which have the muscles) should embrace android fully and build an "MS android app store" and an ecosystem around it for android so there could be an real option and competition to google and "google play store" on android.

WP died a lot because it did have to few apps. But because this should be android, developers shouldn't need to convert any apps, just simple upload the same app to "MS android app store" too, more or less. This way they could get a lot of apps in their app store and fast. To get developers to upload they could give better deals (ex lower %) and for users they could give an better user experience, focus on privacy like apple to differentiate them self from google and play store etc to get traction and popularity.

If MS did and got some traction, smartphone manufacturers would have an real option not to be forced to install play store and all googles apps just to be able to sell their phones, because there whould be an viable option for it users to download all android apps they want anyways. And competition is always good for consumers. At least for me, I would love to buy an android phone without google, with someone that respected and focused on privacy, and with an good app store out of the box.

For those of you haven't tried a Windows Phone, this video gives a good overview of some features:

I Used a Windows Phone for a Week in 2018! I Will Miss It:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2yzrZvZU6E

It seems to be missing an OSX client, but Windows and Linux is supported.

When I have 100 firefox tabs open and it starts to go wonky my thunderbird also has issues doing just about anything. Sometimes even get the "stop this script" on occasion.

I think this has more to do with the java heavy pages in firefox getting bogged down while other software is trying to run backup tasks and AV and such.

I still enjoyed the older outlook, but with the current two I'm not longing for shiny new tools lately. I also realize that my lack of trust in cloud servicing means I am not using some likely popular features like calendar notifications and other things that may be important to others. So bias, ymmv, etc.

On the other hand I think the web is awesome and I’m 36, I remember very well what the landscape looked before web apps. So I don’t understand the fetish for native to be honest.

Will probably come back with edge-computing.

Interesting, haven't had performance problems with email in about well, never. Been using Thurderbird for a decade. Not perfect, but slowness isn't a problem.

Nobody cared about Windows phone and nobody noticed when it died.

It enjoys the same prestige as Microsoft Bob.

I hope the SublimeHQ gods are listening to this

The only significant failing was that it couldn't handle removable media at all well.

Shotwell is the best I've found so far, but it's not quite the right feature balance for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotwell_(software)

I could point it to a directory and it would read all the images. It wouldn’t copy them to it’s database, it wouldn’t try to change their format. It would simply read them as fast as I’ve ever seen and show me what’s in that directory. Then it would keep the directory hierarchy in place. I haven’t been able to find anything similar. I search for a similar piece of software every now and then but nothing shows up. Lightroom is close but it’s god awfully slow. I just loved how fast Picasa.

I actually did some cleaning on my computer last night and found the last Picasa dmg. Maybe I run it and see if it still works.

[0] - https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/

After the Nth photo sharing website that I'd early-adopted decided to close up shop, I determined I wanted to own the next solution I invested time into, and I founded PhotoStructure.

I've got 20-odd hard drives from laptops and servers and backups. No software that I tried, either open or closed source, would do what I wanted: organize everything into a nice, timestamped, deduped folder structure.

Many years ago, I'd shot myself in the foot by using tools to do JPEG editing and rotation, but those tools quietly deleted EXIF metadata, so PhotoStructure applies a suite of metadata inference heuristics to heal those holes, too.

The MVP is focused on high-quality metadata extraction and inference, and has a simple web-based UI. Simple editing support, along with GPS POI and face detection, is planned.

After spending more than a decade in the ads business, and (helping build) ML-powered behavior targeting based on metadata, it blows my mind that so many of us give the most rich metadata stream, our photos and videos, for free, to the FAANG. PhotoStructure isn't just an effort of love, it's also, at least in some way, penance.

I've got a limited number of beta users trying it out right now. If you're willing to share your feedback, please consider signing up. Use of PhotoStructure during the beta period is free.

https://PhotoStructure.com

Curious about privacy aspects though. When you say it's a private cloud, does it communicate back to your servers at all?

Any goals for Linux compatibility?

I'd love something that can store the photos on a NAS or network share drive, runs its processing in a Docker container on my LAN, and serves a web app locally with absolutely no external internet access. That's basically my dream photo manager. I can connect to my own LAN remotely to access it then, without any need for the privacy/security risk of hosting my (and my clients) photos on some 3rd party server.

Your images, videos, and metadata stay yours, and are not uploaded anywhere.

Currently I've got error reporting that phones home if there are critical problems detected, but the log events only include the stack trace and possibly the path to the problem file.

PhotoStructure spins up a webserver bound to localhost by default. In other words, other machines in your LAN can't open the PhotoStructure web UI (unless you set an environment variable or use ssh port forwarding).

Sign up via the website or send me an email, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Then I browse the pictures, star the ones I like and process them.

An no other software I have tried so far comes close in terms of speed and UI efficiency.

So I would also love to try PhotoStructure and have signed up via your landing page.

https://github.com/linuxmint/pix

Also, I'd love to switch to Linux full-time but that's the main program I'm lacking. I've tried most the suggestions but none handle high numbers of photos without becoming intolerably slow.

Part of the problem is that only a small fraction of the population needs a high-performance photo manager. Most of the market has always been for "color snaps" and that has just gotten worth with the proliferation of cell phones.

If you are handling lots of RAWS and you care about speed then you have to start with hardware.

For instance, if you care about performance you just can't use a mac. Forget about it.

An application that cares about performance might tell you to ditch the hard drive on your computer for an SSD if you want to run it and that we'd rather give you your money than just give you the same bad performance you expect from Lightroom, Photos, etc.

Having your images on a RAIDed network server could be good but if you are using WiFi performance will be bad. If you feel entitled to keep using your 100 Mbps Ethernet hub on your DSL modem than performance will be bad.

Wedding photographers spend $5000 for a camera and would probably get much more than $2500 of value from a $2500 photo management suite, particularly if you factor the lower blood pressure from not staring at a spinning beach ball all day and the lower health care costs and extra years of life they could get.

Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil" might have made since back in the 360 mainframe day when you couldn't get N very high so an N^2 algorithm wasn't as bad as it is today.

People today have the wishful thinking that they can find the "one" bottleneck and open it and that was sometime true in the past for prototype projects (eg. less so in the age of networking, deep cache hierarchy, ...) but in real-life systems there are usually 5-10 bottlenecks that all need to be cleared if you want to make a difference in performance that people will feel.

Most people think they can clear two or three of them and will spend a lot of effort for it and will argue until they are blue in the face and bankrupt that they don't need to fix the other ones.

Love it for quick and easy edit controls. Like the speed and looks. Wish some remaining bugs were fixed.

- UX-wise, it solved many issues browsers today are still struggling with. Vivaldi is working in a similar direction, but they've basically started from scratch again so aren't close to the point of development Opera had achieved by version 12.

- These HN posts from today's frontpage [0] [1] give some idea of why we really need Presto today. Not only would it just be good to have more competitors in the space, but also, for most of its existence Presto was ahead of its competitors in every detail (except for the one important, and very political, issue of "site compatibility", a.k.a. making badly written websites work). It also, similarly, got many UX points working at an engine level that modern browsers still get wrong, like text selection of html content and link text, responsiveness of scroll and of page links during navigation, etc.

- M2 will never be surpassed by Thunderbird, and quite possibly will never be surpassed full stop (though I really hope I'm wrong about that).

... so many other things

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626316

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18622516

Learned that rather recently even though I'm practically living on the web.

When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”.

You could map all sorts of census data. Want to colorize the map based on crime rate divided by median home price? No problem.

You could import lots of data from a spreadsheet and do useful things with it. I used this when looking for my first house. I scraped the data from realtor.com and made maps where the icon changed on the number of bedrooms and the color changed based on the price.

You could make drivetime zones. Want to see how far you can drive in 30 minutes from your office? No problem.

You can probably do a lot of this with ArcGIS, but I don’t know since its way out of my price range.

I keep hoping that Microsoft will bring some of this to Bing Maps. I would pay to use these features again and adding them to Azure would definitely differentiate them from Google Maps.

https://www.npr.org/2012/01/25/145337346/this-app-was-made-f...

The issue you linked to seems different. I agree that the headline is hysterical, but the patent mentions, among other sensible ideas, that it would plot paths factoring in demographic data. Which is just plain weird when you already have crime data available.

I've never used MapPoint so I don't know how it compares - I expect the ArcGIS stuff is more powerful but less usable (for your particular needs) than a more focused solution.

Note: Esri calls isochrones (30 minute drive time) 'service areas' and you have to search for it under 'network analysis'.

He delegated to me the task of putting together his route using Streets and Tips, a great introduction to navigation, mapping and spatial reasoning. Been a cartography geek (not to mention massive road geek) ever since.

Will be a lot easier in the future.

It's noteworthy, because I've only seen this feature in Rolls-Royce navigation in recent times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software)

I would happily pay for an update that fixed outstanding bugs and ensured compatibility with future versions of macOS. It would be nice to have some new features, too, but it is basically "good enough" as it is and I dread the day I can no longer run it. I'm really not sure what I will do.

The claim that Photos was going to be a meaningful replacement for Aperture was obviously a lie at the time it was released and even nearly five years later it is still not true.

I'd have moved to Lightroom had Adobe not moved to a subscription model.

When Photos just came out and Apple was making the claims about how they've taken everything good from Aperture and stuck it into Photos I was pretty optimistic considering how solid of an app Aperture became over the years.

Now, few days down the road, pretty clear that Photos is just a marginally better iPhoto with the vast majority of features that were useful for professionals such as Stacks, never coming back.

The dumbification of professional apps to the lowest common denominator continues ...

I'm trying to find an alternative and, quite frankly, everything I've tried is not great. I ended up buying AfterShot Pro, but I'm not terribly satisfied with it. It runs on the Mac, but it's really hurt by the fact that it's not actually a Mac application.

Adobe is out because of the subscription model. I'm willing to buy the software, and I'm even willing to periodically buy new versions when it makes sense, but $10/month forever is hard to stomach.

Several months later, something happened that basically reaffirmed my decision. Nikon released a new camera, which I bought at launch. Lightroom added support for its RAW format in a minor patch almost immediately. Meanwhile, Aperture couldn't be bothered to add support until 6 months later and a major version update.

Flash-forward, I really wish Adobe didn't become so obsessed with their subscription models. While cloud storage/backup definitely has its advantages, I'd much rather simply own my software and use my own servers. (But since the "run it yourself" options are always grossly inferior, I just put up with their new approach and make sure I have a local copy.)

Specifically, the date is December 18. There's also a (small) discount if you buy in the next 8 days: https://skylum.com/luminar

Not involved at all, just discovered this while looking around.

Started looking for a comparable smartwatch: always on, good battery life, and Android notifications, there's just nothing there.

Ended up ordering a Pebble Time Steel from eBay. I feel like a part of my life and sanity was restored.

You can still find Pebbles for sale in various places and I'd recommend getting one over any of the Android Wear watches. They're just that much better.

I keep looking at the Fitbit Versa, which is clearly Pebble's spiritual successor, but it doesn't have an always-on screen or the Time Steel's 7 - 10 day battery life. I just hope Fitbit keeps the Versa around by the time I need to replace my Pebble.

But the killer feature to me is notifications. I can keep my phone completely silent with no vibration and never miss an important call or text or calendar reminder. I never have to pat my pocket to see if my phone is vibrating. I can decline spam calls and decide whether to respond to messages without taking my phone out. I can even leave my phone in silent mode on the counter across the room and not miss calls or texts.

I also love the Google Maps integration (third party app). Being able to see my next turn on my wrist is very useful and the navigation screen is more informative and easier to read than the native Google Maps Android Wear integration. When I get in my car that doesn't have Android Auto, I can still say "OK Google, navigate to X" and without taking my phone out of my pocket I get voice directions through car Bluetooth audio and visual directions on my wrist.

It's also just a good watch. There are lots of faces to choose from, some with extra information like weather or stock prices or step count or whatever. It's far thinner than any other smartwatch and you don't have to flick your wrist just to turn on the screen and see the time.

I couldn't find an email address for you, mine is HANEEF at PDX dot EDU. I've never actually had a smart watch before, but hearing all these people talking about the pebble is making me really interested to try this one.

I used to be big into those dorky digital watches when I was growing up, and I've been tempted by fitness trackers. My concerns are:

A) Is the Bluetooth connection secure? Are they taking steps to make it so the Bluetooth connection isn't easily trackable? How easy is it, for instance, for me to set rules to turn off the Bluetooth when the watch isn't actively syncing?

B) Does the watch send any data to someone else's remote servers, at all? Do I need to go through a 3rd party to get access to my own data (ie. what Fitbit does)?

I already have a Smartphone, I don't want my watch to act like one. I don't want to have to do a bunch of syncing through a 3rd-party server that will get shut down and sold off with all of my data someday. I'd pay a lot of money for a device that uses my Smartphone as an access-point/hub, but that largely just works offline and independently.

We run every day.

The battery life is pretty phenomenal, the step counter and weather bits are handy, the GPS just works, you need the AmazTools app if you want to share your runs to Strava (but it works great), I have an alarm set to shake my wrist every morning at 7am, and if I destroy the watch.. it was all of $70.

The continuous heart rate monitoring is also handy for our gym and zone workouts. I wish it had multiple levels of heart zone alarms, like the TICKR FIT app -- which is amazing for more refined zone training, but it will tell you when you pop out of zone 2 on a run, so it's still useful.

Sleep tracking works great for my girlfriend, doesn't work great for me. So I turned it off and that doesn't bother me.

I think it's a great starter watch, I can see upgrading to the Garmen vivoactive 3 Music, since I'm not very interested in an Apple Watch.

It genuinely is really great, if it had an app ecosystem, slightly higher resolution and was a little smaller / more stylish it would be perfect. A FOSS OS and support for emojis would also be nice

It seems like in the physical economy, if you create something of value and you aren't making money off it, you will sell it and someone else can make money off it. With software like Picasa, it's just gone. Some programs release a sunset version, but you never know how long it will work and you can't promote it because they might take it down.

There's also gnucash, never used but its interface may be similar to Microsoft Money (which I also never used).

[1] http://furius.ca/beancount/

[2] https://beancount.github.io/fava/

I would not recommend anyone start using it if they are not already.

Didn't inuit buy and kill / sell quicken or something. If they would of just kept the ux wrapper from Qhnb 98 and layered that over the DB of quickbooks it'd be okey with me.

I too hate hate hate quickbooks, and price structure, layout and all that.

1. The Genera operating system for Symbolics Lisp machines. Ever since I've gotten bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp machine bugs, I've been wanting to use Genera, but I was born at the beginning of the last AI winter, and unfortunately the operating system is still proprietary, with no word about whether or not it will become open sourced. It's regrettable that the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater when Lisp machines lost out in the marketplace to RISC workstations and the x86 running Lisp on other OSes; there are a lot of interesting lessons we can learn from Genera in today's operating systems and programming environments, and an entire generation of computer scientists and software engineers are unfortunately completely unfamiliar with Lisp machines.

2. I've heard wonderful things about the productivity software developed by Lighthouse Design for NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. I haven't used them myself, but I've read that many NeXTSTEP users were devoted fans of Lighthouse Design software, and the presentation tool that the company designed influenced the design of Apple's Keynote.app. Unfortunately when Sun acquired Lighthouse Design, Sun hasn't done much with the Lighthouse Design codebase. It would have been nice had these programs been updated and further refined for Mac OS X.

3. I would love for someone to resurrect the ideas of Apple's OpenDoc platform, which allows for component-based development of GUI applications, much like how pipes and redirection in Unix allows for different command-line utilities to be used together.

My dream is an operating system where all objects can be inspected (like Smalltalk or a Lisp machine OS), where there is a component framework similar to OpenDoc that allows for component-based GUI application development, and where there's a REPL that allows power users to have complete control over their applications (both command-line and GUI). All applications would adhere to some type of well-designed usability guideline (I'm thinking about the classic Apple Human Interface Guidelines from the pre-OS X days), and the interface would be reminiscent of Mac OS 8.

Its use on the open Internet was a nobrainer from an implementation perspective, although it killed the reputation of the entire thing (make a Google search for ActiveX and 99% of the content you'll find is about its use on Internet Explorer) and .NET cemented its demise.

But yeah, the idea is solid and actually other platforms had similar tech, like BeOS's replicants, AmigaOS's... something (i don't remember the name :-P) and i think KDE's KParts was originally supposed to be something like ActiveX.

https://static.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html

On the other hand, an official emulator is in the works and should be released at some point.