The Psion S3a application suite. I've yet to come across anything as simple, useful and unfettered.
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
241–250 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#242Windows 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.
Why doesn't Microsoft just open-source the windows phone OS as an android alternative ?
I don't think open sourcing it would help much at this point. It's not as if it's impossible to find a Windows phone to use, but the ecosystem is falling apart too.
The biggest problems in my mind for using a Windows phone today are really that what apps there were are going away (which open sourcing the os isn't going to help), and the browser is bad. On Windows phone 8, the browser is bad because the rendering engine of mobile IE isn't very good / workable with modern web; on Windows mobile 10, the browser is bad because Edge frequently delays responding to user input and it's uterly unusable at times. Plus or minus when the browser locks up the phone and the watchdog timer reboots it.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#243Timeful. An amazing iPhone todo / calendaring app that was bought by Google and shut down.
Also Sunrise Calendar. Bought by Microsoft and shutdown.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#244Google docs but private. (So back when it was private which I assume it was at some point)
Look at Libreoffice Online
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
although its no pebble, the amazfit bip is the closest contender available today
Holy crap, I've been looking for something to replace my pebble... This product can't be real... 30 day battery life?!
Me and my girlfriend been using the Bip for a month now.
We run every day.
The battery life is pretty phenomenal, the step counter and weather bits are handy, the GPS just works, you need the AmazTools app if you want to share your runs to Strava (but it works great), I have an alarm set to shake my wrist every morning at 7am, and if I destroy the watch.. it was all of $70.
The continuous heart rate monitoring is also handy for our gym and zone workouts. I wish it had multiple levels of heart zone alarms, like the TICKR FIT app -- which is amazing for more refined zone training, but it will tell you when you pop out of zone 2 on a run, so it's still useful.
Sleep tracking works great for my girlfriend, doesn't work great for me. So I turned it off and that doesn't bother me.
I think it's a great starter watch, I can see upgrading to the Garmen vivoactive 3 Music, since I'm not very interested in an Apple Watch.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#246HyperCard.
It's been decades and I've still never found a better way to make simple GUI applications.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#247Skype.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#248Turbo Delphi Explorer. It was a free version of Delphi 6.
They still do have a Starter Edition, of course, with some restrictions, which TDE had too. But IIRC, TDE was available in both Win 32 and .NET versions.
Borland Sidekick, a pop-up TSR productivity utility.
Turbo C 2.x
MS QuickC
Probably a few others I need to remember.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#249Macromedia Fireworks.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#250Truecrypt. But even if it comes back now, I would have a hard time trusting it.
Try VeraCrypt.