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Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
181–190 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#182Microsoft Image Composer
What a brilliant piece of software. I had an artist friend who used it years after its discontinuation. I need to investigate whether it runs under Wine.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#183Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#184YNAB4 (you need a budget 4) It wouldve been perfect if they'd just added an API so that users can create and share ways to get the data from various banks. And a refactor was necessary to a native library (or even electron) But this cloud native follow-up version is just not an option.
Been using the cloud native version for about a year now, and I'm debating if I should renew. What are you using now if not YNAB?
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#185Opera's Presto engine. I quite miss it.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#186Magic Cap from General Magic. What a lovely, odd little operating system.
I read an article saying there was an effort to get it open sourced after General Magic folded, but unfortunately all their IP fell into the Sarlacc-like maw of Intellectual Ventures.
While we’re on the topic of failed, over-ambitious mobile OS’s, Newton OS would be great too.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#187Google reader
I've been using https://www.inoreader.com and am pretty happy with it as an alternative. It has a lot of the same keyboard shortcuts, which is really all I want.
I miss google reader because it was simply lists and lists of news. Not these new readers that love to extract an image from the article and use it to cover quarter of the screen(exaggerating here). Then 4 more articles on the next page. Then so on. Google reader was perfect for skimming through 100 pieces of news in a short amount of time and just click the articles you want to read in a new tab and done.
Any new reader I’ve tried fails to understand this. They go for complexity and glamour. They need a mode for just simple long list of headlines and not waste any screen space.
Edit: context
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#188Windows 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.
I do miss Windows Phone. The animated tiles meant that a lot of the time you didn't need to switch to the app to get the info you needed (weather conditions, how the market is doing, etc.)
And it was fast I really dislike the pointless animations that iOS and Android go through - since the icons in Windows Phone were rectangles the few animations it did have were quick because they didn't have to worry about clipping arbitrary regions.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#189Microsoft 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…
QGIS is free/open source and can do a lot of this type of stuff too. More like ArcGIS than MapPoint.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#190Picasa (desktop app). It hit a sweet spot for me - linux compatible, very easy to do the majority of simple edits (crop, rotate, colour tweaks), and a few other nice features. The only significant failing was that it couldn't handle removable media at all well. Shotwell is the best I've found so far, but it's not quite the right feature balance for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
irfanview should be adequate, .. wine on ubuntu