A really great program that people often throw away
A really great program that people often throw away
One thing I really hate about the software world is when people force us to throw away programs that actually work and do their job well. MicoSoft does this all the time. Just look at Windows. Anyway, the best word processor I ever used was PFS: Professional Write. It worked plain and didn't pretend to be more than it was - like a web page creator or formal publishing tool. The same thing happened with Quattro Pro version 4. It did things in DOS that Excel still has trouble doing today. And it brought tabbed spreadsheets. Two other programs were Adobe Photo Deluxe and ArcSoft PhotoStudio, especially version 5.5. Need to fix red eye? Just click a button. Want to improve an image? Click another button. Both cleaned up the photos well and quickly without much training or hassle. I also used PFS: First Publisher. It wasn't as easy as other tools, but it worked great for making annual reports and budgets. (Of course, printing a 20-30 page document on a tiny dot matrix printer was a bit noisy.) Another one that just worked fine was MicoSoft Access 95. I spent about an hour getting it running. When I switched to Access 2007, it felt like learning an entirely new program written by someone who really doesn't know how to code. Plus, there was the complete loss of backward compatibility for old programs. Oh well.
Eye-Fi is an SD card for cameras with built-in WiFi. You can turn any camera that uses an SD card into a wireless device. It worked great when I first bought it. The camera and the card could talk to other phones or computers wirelessly, both ways. Just take photos of your house until you get close enough to signal. Then the app starts copying all those pictures automatically to my choice of folder. Some go here, some there. I probably pushed about 20,000 photos from my camera to the computer. The program remembers what it already moved and won't do it again. It also deletes old files after a certain amount of time without needing an internet connection. You can buy one even though you don't have to use it yet. On more...
All in the name of "progress"! / snort / Yeah, I've never forgiven Microsoft for the changes they decided to make. The biggest two for me being: Windows XP to Windows Vista. Yes! Please upgrade! BTW, 40% of the software you use (what I used on my computer) will no longer work in Windows Vista. That $300 TV Tuner Card? Yep! Go ahead and trash that! You know? Not enough people use Windows Media Center so let's just drop that into the circular file. Nevermind those of us who spent money on hardware for that specific purpose. Sure, there are work-arounds, but why jump through hoops when it was working nearly perfectly. -Wolf sends
Eye-Fi is an SD card for cameras that has built-in WiFi. You can turn any camera that takes SD cards into a wireless gadget. It worked great at first. The card could talk to any other wireless thing in both directions. Take many pictures, get near your home's WiFi, and it starts copying automatically to the device of your choice. These files go here for JPGs, there for RAWs, or there for AVI/MOV files. I pushed about 20,000 photos from my camera to the PC. The computer knows what has already been transferred so it doesn't try again. (Endless). It deletes old files automatically based on how much space you set. No internet connection is needed. It was available but not required. On more than one time, I used it to transfer pictures from a camera to a laptop or tablet while walking around the house. Then... Sell that thing for Ricoh. You MUST use their cloud solution now. Endless is gone. Then... All previous versions of these SD cards no longer work at all. Then... The cloud service costs real money. Then... Kill it completely again. Took a working device and software, and killed the whole deal.
A different old item that just worked for a while then stopped working... MS Works