I think VLC is a great piece of software. It has worked almost flawlessly for me for 22 or 23 years now. The last problem I had with it was in 2008 or 2009 when it would crap out on one specific type of encoding.

I also really loved omnigraffle and omnioutliner. They really embodied the Apple desktop design philosophy. Omnigraffle wasn’t as powerful as Visio, but it had a far superior UI and was 1/4 the price.

Winamp and mirc were great

all of my modern examples are open source software, as it still seems to largely be made by people that use it and are driven to improve it to make it more usable rather than profits, but obviously that's a trend rather than a hard rule

iView Media Pro. Did wat it needed to do, could use scripts. But then it was bought by MicroSoft, then Phase One.

Image Ingester Pro. Simple, yet efficient. No longer maintained.

Both no longer work on newer versions OSX/ Mac and haven't found a good replacement for either. Now I make do with a couple of other programs.

Even older (back when I still had a PC) was Ventura Publisher (before Corel purchased it). I still think it worked easier then Adobe InDesign.

firefox. I mean think about it, I started using it at the same time as those examples yet I still do today!

Reminds me I better make a donation.

From the days when we were all burning optical media: DVDisaster

The idea: When you burn a disc that isn't completely full, any unused sectors are truly wasted. This app uses them for extra ECC data. Here are screenshots from when I gouged a CD with a key, and then subsequently read the data from the scratched disc, without a single bit lost.

It's a nice example of a simple app that solves a real-world problem.

Back when I had to use Windows, I really enjoyed drawing diagrams with Visio.

Then Microsoft bought it and rendered it unusable 😠

The jump from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, it looked so nice and you could finally kill a single task without rebooting the whole system.

Also, apart from mIRC, Miranda as an alternative ICQ client.

I miss winamp.

Qmmp is close, but not the same 🙁

One that is nice, has a great interface and does a few things, but does them well is Keepass2Android: https://github.com/PhilippC/keepass2android

Since I started using a smartphone about 6 years ago I have used this nearly daily.

2 programs I have discovered recently are Localsend and KDE Connect, which are both great at transferring data between devices simply and without needing cloudy crap.

GitHub - PhilippC/keepass2android: Password manager app for Android

Password manager app for Android. Contribute to PhilippC/keepass2android development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

Thinking back in time I would say Winamp aswell. Only positive memories using it.

Regarding the present I would say vim/neovim. Over all those years using it on different platforms and in different situations, it has always been that one "feels home" piece of software.

* Notepad++
* TickTick
* PocketCasts
* Linux desktop (I tend to use Debian-based distros)
* Ivory (on iOS/ iPad)
* Day One
* Google Keep
* Signal
* Gmail
* (going to get some hate here) Microsoft Edge

We’re currently experiencing a golden age of software right now that’s highly functional, easy to use and low cost.

InfoSelect (formerly Tornado Notes)

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/infoselect-PONg9PY7T6CI8Y__hNzarg

InfoSelect

Info Select is a personal information manager (PIM) developed by Micro Logic Corporation, designed to help users organize and manage various types of data...

^{Perplexity AI}

though at the time I wasn't really a Windows user, the few tools that pop to mind are the Linux versions, really...xmms, ircii, and configuring the window manager.

It was new and casual and fun.

Every Opera version back when it was shareware.

The original installer for Command & Conquer.

MS-DOS's EDIT.COM.

And yes: WinAmp. Oh, WinAmp. So good.

--

The only things that give me the same kind of feeling nowadays are tools like curl. Familiar, reliable, up-to-date but backwards-compatible. A joy to use every time.

Windows 98

It was familiar, but added features, was easy to use and customize and didn't crash, that often.

DEVONthink. Encrypted at rest and end-to-end, sync via my own server. I dump everything into it, from Markdown notes and annotated PDFs to archived copies of web pages. It's fast and rock solid.

Also, rsync. Single most useful command line utility. If I ever met Tridge I'd buy him a beer.

Do you remember PageMaker?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker

one of the first desktop publishing programs

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

also:

1. WinAmp set a gold standard for being user configurable and customizable.

2. It really whips the llama's ass.

Total Commander makes Windows liveable for me, and using it extensively hides many of the changes to the platform over the decades. Before that, DOS Navigator played the same role.

Since you mentioned Winamp, we might as well remember foobar2000 too, which has remained just as faithful to its core. It’s still as lean and snappy as it was twenty years ago.

I loved both of those!

The best software I've ever used was Solidworks. It's a CAD program that has a very nice tutorial to get started, but that's not the good part.

Mechanical drawings use callouts that are simple arithmetic results of other dimensions. You can just type formulas into the dimension field. If you have something that's 7mm thick that's at the end of a 75mm length, you can type 75+7 into the field.

Not sure they pioneered that, but they did it right.

Mcrosoft Word and Excel, at least the Office-97 versions that I run on an air-gapped Windows XP VM.

IMO these represent the peak of Microsoft's usability work: it just seems that everything you need is well organized and easy to find (but maybe that's 30+ years of experience talking). The "ribbon" was definitely a step backward.

They also have far more features than I, a relatively sophisticated user has ever needed -- including creating a 500+ page technical book circa 1990.

@frankrausch
On Android, I really enjoy AnkiDroid (flash cards / spaced repetition learning). I've used it daily for years and it has only gotten better. The main learning UX hasn't changed.

My favorite detail: I can configure the end of the day, for example to finish my days cards until 4am. Most apps have that fixed at midnight, even though its often inconvenient.

I'll second everyone saying Winamp and VLC, and add on Steam, both for what it has done for Linux gaming and for the fact that it generally just works. I've never had to troubleshoot - just run updates. Clunky UI aside, I can still find things the same way decades later.

Minor shoutout to every plaintext gui editor out there doing the heavy day to day lifting for me. Mousepad, notepad, etc, y'all great and reliable.

Video games are software, and there are many I've enjoyed, but I'm pretty sure that's not what you're talking about.

I'll go with Godot, personally

I have a notepad app on my phone (Simple Notepad by mightyfrog) that is simple but very useful and I love it. With my most recent phone upgrade I found that it's not available anymore. I now have the apk file backed up various places so I don't lose it.

My other favorite software is DeskCalc which is an adding machine type calculator. Nothing has changed about it since I first started using it and it does everything I need it to do.

I could name dozens of video games I enjoyed, which are technically software. Do they count?

One way or another, +1 for Signal.

Debian. Thunderbird. Ye Olde Firefox (pre-chromification), currently using Waterfox. Vlc. For the reasons you mention: updated, but don't mess with userspace (thank you, Linus!), and very functional.

And not trying to sell me anything or rip anything off.

I've gotten so used to all the software and services I use trying to lead me towards monetization. I build emotional barriers so when the software is discontinued / enshittified / monetized / ruined it doesn't hurt as much.

Like others have said, my opensource stack is stuff I can actually like - vim, tmux, fluxbox, stuff like that. They're built for me, configurable, and aren't trying to sell me anything.

Irfanview is a teeny-tiny (used to be small enough to fit on a floppy disk; no idea if that's still the case) image viewer.

'sgot a slide-show mode with customizable settings (e.g. "do you want to see every thing in a dir, with/out subdirs? do you want a custom list of files? do you want fixed or random order? auto-progress or wait for input?), by default lets you go through the entire dir of the current image, batch rename/convert (with all SORTS of settings), lets you resize images, can (with plugins) handle audio, video, even PDFs, probably a bunch more stuff that i'm not graphically-inclined enough to know about.

oh and it's free, just like it has been for the last 20+ years.

https://www.irfanview.com/

#notsponsored

Yes, WinAMP is on that list, as is it's Linux clone XMMS.

Firefox comes close. It's mostly been a stable and pleasant experience that keeps me in control of my browsing experience.

And as a programmer I love Emacs and have used it for decades, though, sadly(?), VSCode has replaced it for coding these days.