Microsoft Image Composer
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
151–160 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#152Microsoft 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…
Esri offers an ArcGIS for personal use program. $100/year gets you ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, and a bunch of the apps.
I've never used MapPoint so I don't know how it compares - I expect the ArcGIS stuff is more powerful but less usable (for your particular needs) than a more focused solution.
Note: Esri calls isochrones (30 minute drive time) 'service areas' and you have to search for it under 'network analysis'.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#153https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv n-dimensional spreadsheet with a logical data model (including hierarchies) rather than rows and columns: Net Worth := Assets - Liabilities
> Conventional spreadsheets used on-screen cells to store all data, formulas, and notes. Improv separated these concepts and used the cells only for input and output data. Formulas, macros and other objects existed outside the cells, to simplify editing and reduce errors. Improv used named ranges for all formulas, as opposed to cell addresses.
Amazing.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#154VALDOCS. I had an Epson QX-10 with a Z-80 processor, 256K, and green monochrome screen when 486's were out and the 1st gen Pentium was coming out, but with VALDOCS I was able to do all of my homework the same as anyone using the Microsoft Office Suite. (VALDOCS could do word processing, spreadsheets, and charts and graphs.) It was more responsive on an 8-bit computer than modern bloated Office software, and so much e…
The video in that article is great!
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
If you find people staying safe to be tremendously harmful to your politics it might be time to reconsider your viewpoints.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#156* Windows Phone. We need a third viable option in the mobile space. This week we are concerned about the loss of a browser engine, recognizing this is unhealthy for the market. Windows Phone was terrific in many ways and recent concepts by fans such as @boxnwhisker (Harry Dohyun Kim) [1] show how beautiful the Metro design could be today.
* Microsoft Image Composer. A little known sprite-oriented graphic arts program. Combining its sprite model with the necessary several years of modernization it would have enjoyed had it not been abandoned would be impressive and easy to use.
* High-performance lightweight desktop email clients. I was especially fond of one named AK-Mail in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Blisteringly fast on PCs of its era, a modern incarnation would seem incomprehensibly fast compared to today's bloated apps that have difficulty keeping up with keystrokes on 8-core 3.5 GHz monsters. Of course, back in the day, desktop apps were built in systems languages and not in JavaScript.
* As a broader concept, a return to prevailing use of on-device processing and computation. Today the too-facile argument that data must be shipped off-network to a third-party cloud in order to be processed efficiently means this happens all the time without users paying it any attention.
[1] https://twitter.com/boxnwhisker/ (scroll down to see a bunch of examples)
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#157Sim Earth
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#158I’d still like to have FrameMaker for OS X and/or Linux.
Oh man I loved FrameMaker, I used it to write my thesis after spending a couple weeks fretting over and trying various features in Word and LaTeX. FrameMaker blew both of them away in terms of ease and ability to manage styles and table of contents, bibliography, equation editing, everything that normally makes writing a book hard.
I just went and read the history, and hadn’t realized that FrameMaker used to be UNIX and Mac only. Windows support was the last platform to be added, and after that UNIX and Mac support faded out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker#History
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#159Oh geez. I can’t remember the name of the browser. It was portable/usb based. I think it actually came with my usb back in 2008 or 2009?
Any page you went to, it would show you the media of the page on the right hand side in a column and you could simply click and download it. It essentially kept a running tally of media elements on the right side.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#160Flash.