Sparrow. Yes, still.
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
121–130 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#122Windows Phone.
To this day no Android phone I've used ever as fast, reliable or plain refined as WP8 was.
Unique design and many genuinely useful features, and it reflected a time when smartphones could have been vibrant and diverse, not our current two mega-platforms or nothing.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#123The game Lunatic Fringe
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#124Microsoft MapPoint. This was a phenomenal piece of mapping software and had features I haven’t been able to find in any of the online map replacements. When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”. You could map all sorts of census data. Want to colorize the map based on crime rate divided by median home price? No problem. You could import lots of data from a spreadsheet a…
> When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”. It's noteworthy, because I've only seen this feature in Rolls-Royce navigation in recent times.
It does seem somewhat paranoid. Might be useful to exclude certain routes with an easy interface, but tremendously harmful by seemingly legitimizing the myth of “no-go” areas that has recently become a favorite talking point of the alt-right in my (perfectly safe) country.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#125Microsoft Money. I didn't have to give access to all my accounts to some website, or pay an annual subscription for upgrades. I got keyboard shortcuts and reports and I could search for things to find out how old my computer is or when I went to Vegas. It seems like in the physical economy, if you create something of value and you aren't making money off it, you will sell it and someone else can make money off it. Wi…
The interface may not be the same, but I highly recommend http://plaintextaccounting.org. I've used ledger and currently am using beancount. Both are great!
There's also gnucash, never used but its interface may be similar to Microsoft Money (which I also never used).
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#126BeOS
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#127Microsoft MapPoint. This was a phenomenal piece of mapping software and had features I haven’t been able to find in any of the online map replacements. When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”. You could map all sorts of census data. Want to colorize the map based on crime rate divided by median home price? No problem. You could import lots of data from a spreadsheet a…
> When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”. It's noteworthy, because I've only seen this feature in Rolls-Royce navigation in recent times.
Fairly sure my parents old TomTom navigation thing had that option too.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#128Google docs but private. (So back when it was private which I assume it was at some point)
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#129Mostly game engines I enjoyed. The Escape Velocity Engine for one, though clones exist. The Tiberian Sun/Red Alert 2 engine is this crazy mix of voxels, dynamic lighting, height-mapped terrain all in a fundamentally 2d environment which is really cool. I would have loved to read Starcraft's source code, but I imagine that'll never happen now with Remastered.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#130Zenbe, the email system that made me using email again.