What apps are gone that you miss and wish were back in all their glory? I’m always hoping that Apple will see the light (?) and bring back Aperture. And there is still a lot to be said for Pages '09. And it’s not just Apple, I mourn the demise of Circus Ponies Notebook.
So what do you miss? What do you instinctively reach for only to find out it’s no longer there?
My favorite word processor was WriteNow, which got bought out by Wordstar in the 90s(?) and then was killed.
I thought Apple’s iWeb was great for quickly throwing up free, simple web pages.
I’m soon going to miss some 32-bit apps that won’t be updated, like ClipEdit, which is the only Mac app I know of to actually let you edit Clippings. I’m also going to miss Audiobook Builder, which the dev tells me uses deprecated macOS routines and would require significant re-coding to get to 64-bit. Great app - I use it (sporadically) to concatenate those 100-part audiobook mp3 files into a single one (and whose final size is smaller, too).
YNAB 4. No subscription, multi-month view, ability to turn the red arrow, insanely awesome forum. Crying shame it all got shovelled away for the sake of Jesse’s big head.
I just (re)purchased Typinator and was pleasantly surprised that it has added some really amazing power-user features, including the ability to run scripts (as in bash shell scripts, ruby, php, javascript), etc. So, for example, I created a snippet that grabs a website off my server, interprets the HTML, and puts it in to the email (or iMessages, or anything, of course).
If you are willing to use the commend-line, you can replace the main functionality of ABB with a tiny bit of work (and you could automate it easily if you wanted).
First, install home-brew and install ffmpeg.
Second, create a file named something like list.txt that looks like this:
file 'audio book chapter 1a.m3p'
file 'audio book chapter 1b.m3p'
file 'audio book chapter 1c.m3p'
file 'audio book chapter 2a.m3p'
at put it in the same folder as all the mp3s. Then:
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i list.txt Audibook.m4b
And bob’s your uncle. The only potential hiccough in this is that you have to be sure the aac libraries are installed for ffmpeg, but I think home-brew does it by default. There are, of course, many more options you can add to limit the bit rate, squash stereo to mono, etc. This doesn’t get your chapters and chapter titles, but for me it is enough.
I actually went more complicated, which kind of misses the point. I’m using BBEdit and Scrivener now for different purposes, and I just downloaded MarsEdit to try to get back to regular blog posts. Byword was great.
I am writing a lot of training documents. I have been using Clarify. It seems that the developers shutdown their cloud-based syncing service and discontinued the main program. I am still using it and never use the cloud sharing service. It makes creating step-by-step documentation a breeze. I hope it still stays kicking