
Coolest software of the decade? - raghus
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/11/19/coolestSoftwareOfTheDecade.html
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run4yourlives
Well, it's 2009. A decade would be anything after 1999.

For mean, that means Napster wins hands down.

Not only did it completely revolutionize the music industry in ways that are
still being felt today, it opened up whole new possibilities that helped to
popularize things like bit-torrent and decentralized networks - One could
argue that even cloud computing had it's origins in Napster.

Napster is like the Joy Division of the software world: Everyone forgets about
them, but everyone loves something that has been inspired directly by them.

~~~
anigbrowl
Well, I'd argue that 'of the decade' starts after midnight on 1 January 2000^,
and Napster was just a smidgen too early for that. but upvoted anyway because
I like your Joy Division comparison.

^ 2000, what a letdown eh? I'm still waiting for my atomic jetpack and frankly
I'm running out of patience.

~~~
mistermann
Napster was truly incredible, and the content on the network was so clean and
well organized.

Funny how long ago that was now....

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anigbrowl
BitTorrent wins my vote as most influential and generally cool software of the
decade, closely followed by BOINC.

~~~
njn
I say popular filesharing in general, be it soulseek, dc++, bittorrent or
whatever.

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fjabre
Dropbox? I love Dropbox but coolest software of the decade..??

How about Gmail/Maps, iPhone OS, iTunes, Firefox, TextMate.. etc..

~~~
igorgue
Sorry for this but TextMate? LOL

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chipsy
Mmm. For me, Python. It helped me break through the biggest programming walls
by gently introducing a ton of great concepts.

There are practical applications I could point at, and I've moved on to
shinier languages as well, but I think something so genuinely useful in
educating me would have to go down as having the most cool factor of all.

~~~
messel
What shinier languages you checking out? Ruby/rails & scala/lift are still in
my must learn bin

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redorb
I would give that award to Mozilla/Firefox because they made Tabs go
mainstream; I don't think they were the first / but they pushed others to
build a better browser.

~~~
mdemare
Firefox is the coolest software of the decade because they were the fifth
browser(1) to use tabs? I like tabs, but, really, _tabs_?

1) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(GUI)>

~~~
run4yourlives
Regardless the state of the "coolest" moniker, only a true geek would try to
argue that firefox's release with tabs was timed perfectly to take advantage
of the concept the best.

Prior to Firefox, tabs were the cool new feature of unknown utility;
afterwards, an expected for all browsers.

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martythemaniak
I set up a bare git repo in my dropbox folder so now I get a private github
replacement. Works very well for 1 person projects (but it could work for
several people as well)

~~~
Tichy
Now I am confused. Isn't that a bit overdone? git is already for distributed
files?

~~~
igorgue
nop, because that will require a server... and this will be like having
installed a git server on all your dropbox machines

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txxxxd
Keyhole (which later became Google Earth) is the only program that really blew
me away. I remember staying up way too late just flying around the planet
totally amazed.

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mattculbreth
I tweeted just today that GitHub was the coolest thing out in the past <some
unspecified bit of time>.

~~~
there
why?

~~~
simonw
It's completely changed my approach to open source software. Before GitHub,
open sourcing something was a bit of a drag - you were committing yourself to
setting up a mailing list, accepting patches etc - the administrative overhead
was enough to put me off releasing a lot of my code.

GitHub is ideal for the "fire and forget" method of open source. I can knock
out a bit of code that might be useful to someone, throw it up there and
forget about it. If someone likes it and wants to improve it they can go ahead
and fork it without me ever having to think about it again. If I /do/ want to
maintain it, it's really easy to keep track of the modifications people make
and merge them back in to my version.

The amount of high quality code coming out of GitHub projects these days is
astounding, and I'm willing to bet a LOT of it wouldn't ever have been
released using the older systems like Sourceforge and Google code.

~~~
davidw
IMO, open source means a lot more than just dumping code.

Not to contradict what you say about github (which is nice - I'm using it for
Hecl these days), but as people like to say at the Apache Software Foundation,
community is more important than code.

~~~
simonw
"Community is more important than code" - completely agree. That was my
problem - I had code to share, but didn't want to work hard on the community
around it. I kind of see GitHub as providing that community for me - it can
form itself without any extra effort on my behalf.

Obviously the best projects are the ones with proper maintainers actively
working on the community side of things - but GitHub enables the community to
take up a project even if the original creator just threw it over the wall.

(There's a lot more to GitHub than just enabling me to create irresponsible
throw-away projects, but personally I've found that aspect of it to be very
liberating)

~~~
freetard
Gitorious, google code and others allow that too.

------
paulmwatson
Quicksilver.

Spotlight, Colibri, LaunchBar, Google Quick Search Box etc. Even mobile phones
have "quick search" now.

QS is the first thing I install on a clean Mac, it gives me access to
everything else. When I use an OS without QS or similar I am slowed down and
even stopped from finding certain things.

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SandB0x
Mainstream software: Skype

Coolest software generally has got to be Photosynth. The video demos just blow
my mind:

[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_dem...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html)

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goodwill
Ruby on Rails :) know its too programmer, but without this framework we are
still using dump java/.net WebForm based approach... jQuery adds to this.

Really end user... hmm... Mac OS X? :)

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ssn
Google*, definitely.

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elblanco
Starlight and the XML engineering environment.

~~~
anigbrowl
Why was this downvoted? I found it fascinating. Is it because the software is
not freely available?

~~~
elblanco
Wow, I didn't even have to complain! Thanks! I use (and am blown away by) lots
of software, some on the web, some not, some free, some not.

The one that has blown me away continuously for the last decade are these two
apps (they are part of a suite).

If I had said "photoshop and illustrator" it wouldn't have been controversial.

But being able to take a pile of word documents, build an entirely custom xml
converter, entity extractor and semantic relation engine, in one tool (XEE),
without writing a single line of code, then take that XML and analyze it in
ways that would normally take at least a dozen disparate apps, but in one
environment (Starlight), has been absolutely mindblowing. These two apps
understand what XML is supposed to be about, use it as intended (for data
interchange) and use it like nothing else I've ever seen.

Photoshop is "cool" and illustrator is "useful" but neither one has kept me up
at night.

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sushantanand
Google Maps on the iPhone of course.

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jjguy
My CSOTD is OS X. I'm a Windows guy, 15 years of win32 development. But at
home, I use a Mac.

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blister
My vote is for Brizzly. It actually makes using Twitter and Facebook useful.

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jasonlbaptiste
Boxee gets my vote. I'll also give cedit to it's source - XBMC.

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cakeface
The coolest software that I've used this decade is emacs.

~~~
trafficlight
I'm not sure I would classify Emacs as part of this decade; the first release
was in 1976.

~~~
cakeface
Question was just what the coolest software that _you_ have used this decade.
I just started using emacs this year so its new to me.

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pan69
Google Search.

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uggedal
Mercurial

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messel
Nested virtualization, middleware recursion. What OS am I running on again?

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hyperbovine
How about dropbox.news.ycombinator.com

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known
Ubuntu

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pwpwp
del.icio.us

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Cherian
SSD?

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gr366
TiVo

