

The best apps and services today in search, email, music streaming, and to-do management today weren't always number one. Some of the apps we loved a long time ago are still out there, updating, adding features, making their fans happy even if they don't have what it takes to thrill tech bloggers or stay in the limelight. Here are a few of those old dogs you may remember, and some of the new tricks that make them worth a fresh look.

Duck Duck Go


Duck Duck Go is a bit of an obvious choice because it's enjoying a huge resurgence now, but it wasn't always that way. The search engine was founded back in 2008 as an attempt to aggregate more useful information from first party sites and trim out some of the fluff that you may have gotten searching with other popular engines at the time, including Google. It's a "hybrid" search engine, which means its results are compiled through other engines and crawlers via open APIs.

What that really means for you is that as opposed to engines like Google and Bing, which do their own indexing of the web and use their own algorithms to organize the results, Duck Duck Go takes results from elsewhere and prioritizes them for you. The end result is a bit like the "metasearch" engines from the early 2000s, where you can see tons of different results from different sources without the fear that something you want is being filtered out, and sift through them one by one if you like. Duck Duck Go rocketed to popularity in the past year because it's re-branded itself as a truly private search engine—one that doesn't track your searches, doesn't need you to log in, and by contrast to Google, doesn't collect any data on your activities to sell, store, or give to anyone who asks for it.



In an age where Plex and XBMC are the most popular media center apps and we can stream music and movies with gadgets like the Chromecast, little old Subsonic seems to have fallen by the wayside. It's consistently been one of your favorite personal media streamers for years, but never a winner, and never incredibly popular. That's a shame, since Subsonic has a passionate community around it and active developers who are busy adding features and improvements. Even if you love Google Music or Spotify or Plex, Subsonic gives you control over how your media is shared, what format it's in, whether it's transcoded or not, and who accesses it—all without uploading it or its metadata to anyone else.

A long time ago, it used to be just a service for streaming music from one computer to another on the same network, but over the years it's grown into a full-fledged media streamer that supports Windows, OS X, and Linux, as well as mobile platforms like Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. There are even Subsonic apps for the Roku and Sonos. It runs on your own computer at home, and you have complete control over its security and who can access your media. You can easily stream music, movies, and other media whether you're at home in another room, on your phone across the globe. Additionally, Subsonic serves as a jukebox app, and can download album art, lyrics, reviews, and more for you automatically. You can use it as a podcast catcher. Plus, if you're a fan of unique or niche file formats and lossless audio, Subsonic is perfect for you. Seriously, take a look at its features if you haven't lately.

Remember The Milk


A number of people have pointed out that Remember The Milk isn't the productivity darling that it used to be. We covered it first back in 2007, but the discussion around its most recent updates, even if they're been great, has largely been about how they compare to newer tools. Regardless of the competition, the team behind RTM has been busy working on the service, and it still has a passionate user base.

Over the years, RTM has introduced Evernote integration, made their mobile apps free, brought down their paywall, updated their apps to keep up with design trends, integrated with Gmail and Google Calendar, and more. Even if it's not as popular as it once was, it's still one of the most flexible productivity apps on the market, and it works seamlessly with so many other services that most of us already use that it's hard to believe. The fact that most of those great features are behind a $25/yr paywall may be part of the issue, but free users get access to all of the mobile apps and once-daily sync. It's by no means a full idea of what's available if you pay up, but it is a taste.


Opera has been around for ages, and while there are definitely a lot of people who love it and evangelize it, most browser market share stat counters reveal that its usage share is consistently low. It's remarkably popular in Russia and specific European countries, so you'd be forgiven for thinking little has changed with the browser over the past several years. However, the team behind Opera has been busy. The browser recently made the switch to Chromium and WebKit for its next generation browser, called Opera Next. That new version of Opera exited beta in a semi-unfinished form back in July, but it shows a lot of promise, even if some people have called it out as a "crippled Google Chrome."

Other people have been a bit more optimistic about it, and the new version does come with the bonus that you can install Chrome extensions in Opera with a little sleight of hand. However, with any new browser comes new features and new opportunities, and the new Opera is lightweight and fast. If you're looking for an alternative to Chrome that doesn't mean giving up on the core features that makes Chrome great, the new Opera is worth a look.

Hotmail (now Outlook)

We were abuzz when Microsoft unveiled Outlook, its replacement for Hotmail. If the last time you logged in to that Hotmail account you created back in the late 90s was to change your password or empty out the spam that had accumulated in it, or when Hotmail eventually transitioned to Windows Live Mail, it's time to take a fresh look. The new interface is fast, the new spam filters and junk mail tools are powerful, and reading your email is an ad-free experience. You can message friends, connect with SkyDrive to send files and attachments from the cloud and share photo galleries, and more. You can even use Outlook with your own domain.

Personally, I signed up for my first Hotmail account back in 1996, long before the Microsoft buyout, and I still have that address (and it still works). I remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth when Microsoft bought it, and I wouldn't be lying if I said people had a reason to be worried—it took until 2012 for Microsoft to do the name justice and present a really useful, functional, and fast webmail platform, but it's here now. If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl.


Winamp may not be fair to include here because it's still (for now anyway) our favorite music player for Windows, and one of your favorites, too. In many ways, it's exactly the way you remember it, down to the layout of the player windows and the equalizer, and the skins available to make it look the way you like. Still, that doesn't mean all has been quiet on the Winamp front—the team behind it has been working hard on Winamp for Android, and the Winamp Mac beta for syncing with mobile devices and organizing music.

If you haven't used Winamp for ages, you'll find a tool now that's both familiar and more powerful than it was before, offers tons of music sources and downloads built-in, more complete library management and automated tools to help fill in the blanks in your music library's metadata, scrobbling to and other services, and of course, tons of streaming music from ShoutCast radio stations built-in, without you having to go hunt for them like you used to. If you have an Android phone, Winamp is one of the best tools to sync and organize your music with your phone if you don't want to upload it all to someone else or use a cloud service for your music, and it's only getting better on all of its supported platforms. It still whips the llama's ass, after all these years.

These are just a few apps and tools that have long been toppled from their seat of dominance by other apps and companies, but are still great options in their own right, and continue to update to provide more features and value to their users. Contrary to the perception that the Internet only wants one of everything, options are good things to have, and the top tools in a category aren't always the best for a specific use case or set of needs. If you've been looking for options and alternatives to some of the big names and haven't looked at some of these for a while, take another look now.

Photo by sleepy kitty,