Unmaintained, obscure software

[Memory]

I recently found myself having a lot of fun with looking for the most obscure, old, unmaintained pieces of software for a specific use case I can find (e.g. file managers, IRC clients, window managers, music players et cetera) and just compiling them and building a system tailored to them.

I think it's super relaxing and interesting to look at pet projects of people who are now twenty or thirty years older or may not even be alive anymore, and using them as part of my daily driving! And some of them are actually way better at doing simple things than new software, for me at least.

These for example are my recent laptop experiments where I tried out the window managers Wind and WindowLab respectively, each only using default X11 programs:

Spoiler

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[Còbra!]

As someone who loves to play around with Windows 98 and MacOS Classic, I stumble across a lot of those. There's even a good site for them for MacOS.

One peice of unmaintained software I stumbled across a while back is VCDGear, which a Video CD authoring tool. Never have found a reason to use it, but I find it fascinating. Tested it and it works well enough. If anyone ever wanted to make a Video CD, there you go.

Another one which I actually do have a use for is UndercoverXP, which resizes and formats artwork for printing and sticking into CD cases, DVD cases, and loads more!

Another super useful program is Easy Feed Editor, which is a GUI program for generating and maintaining RSS xml files.

Another cool one is Feed Notifier, which sits in the background on Windows or Mac and pops up a notification when a new item on a subscribed feed is published. I love using this whenever I'm on Windows, but I can't find a Linux/Ubuntu equivalent anywhere. Anyone know of something similar?

[Memory]

@Cobra: Maybe test out QuiteRSS. You can set it up to make noises and pop-ups when a new thread arrives.

As for old, but especially obscure software, have a look at QuickView (http://www.multimediaware.com/qv/). A video player for MS-DOS. It's clunky. But it's probably the most efficent video player that exists. With that, you can watch moderately sized MP4 videos on really crusty machines.

[Còbra!]

@Cobra: Maybe test out QuiteRSS. You can set it up to make noises and pop-ups when a new thread arrives.

That's not quite the same thing. I'm looking for a program that just gives a notification that a new entry is published, and clicking on it opens the article in your browser.

I'm having to settle for Feed Reader under wine, but many RSS feeds just don't work with it, even with a version someone made after the original guy abandoned it to fix the issue.

[Memory]

That's not quite the same thing. I'm looking for a program that just gives a notification that a new entry is published, and clicking on it opens the article in your browser.

Let's discuss this in more detail, because I think QuiteRSS does the job indeed. Right click on one entry, then I have the option to "open in an external browser". And so Firefox pops up.
And notifications, yes, you can set your feed browser to search the feeds automatically for new entries after some seconds or minutes.

[arcus]

JGlossator. It's a tool for studying Japanese. It scans the clipboard for Japanese sentences, detects words, and outputs definitions of each word automanically.

There's no strong interest in reviving it, since everyone uses popup dictionaries now―add-ons that show definitions as one mouses over words. I prefer this tool over popup dictionaries when playing games, since one can check definitions without moving the cursor, which is handy when one is using a controller.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/jglossator/