Eudora
Yeah! It's not closed source anymore (finally!) but as far as I can tell nobody is working on it.
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
251–260 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#252* 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…
Windyws Phone's tile setup is still the best home screen setup for mobile. As I peep at my Android home with pretty wallpaper with acres of bhank space and uninformative icons, I pine for the informative, intelligent WP tiles.
Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then. Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison.
As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#253Opera Mini browser 2.x for Android, so that I could use one of my older Android phones, of a lower OS version. It is the Samsung Galaxy 551 and had a hardware keyboard.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#254* 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…
electron eats so much cpu & memory simply because it's still a web browser, it has to support all those 20 years of HTML/CSS history and it was designed to do so for 10s of tabs, so it has a lot of caches and other things.
and while javascript is certainly one of the worst choices if you care about performance, it's also one of the best choices if you need to iterate really quickly (which I believe is very important in overall, especially for new projects)
I hope there will be lighter electron one day (I'm actually working on something like this already) but it's unlikely that people will start doing UIs in systems languages.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#255Lots of old video games come to mind, especially the online ones that had proprietary servers that were shut down (medal of Honor heroes 2, halo 3). I was going to say BlitzPlus but that's open source already.
If you're not aware, a modded version of Halo 3 was released by a mod team on PC, although Microsoft is not happy about it: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/21/halo-online-retu... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1sxYvpNNlY
Thanks for the links I will definitely check this out.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#256Adobe Fireworks Jagged Alliance 2 Settlers 2 Heroes of Might and Magic
You can buy Heroes of Might and Magic 1-4 that are patched for Windows 7-10 at gog.com
https://www.gog.com/game/heroes_of_might_and_magic_3_complet...
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#257BBOS 7 and 10.
I just want a BlackBerry Passport with modern internals and a business and developer friendly OS.
I can't stop fantasizing about a BlackBerry Passport with Pure OS / Postmarket OS and all the modern hardware specifications. That would make for an awesome portable developer computer.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#258Hypercard - specifically the version that was combined with QuickTime so that it understood audio and video media too, and ran on every OS.
I was also going to say HyperCard, or a successor like HyperLook. For a brief moment in the 90s users were able to make their own tools in GUI form and the future of computing was bright. Then the programmers of the world abandoned the idea of enabling users with computing in favor of locking them into stores and subscriptions to line their pockets. Ok so the sales people and Steve Jobs in particular had a lot to do with it too.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#259Acta, an "outliner", which means a hierarchical text editor: http://a-sharp.com/acta/ I ended up writing most of my school essays in it. You could start with a high-level outline and recursively flesh it out until you had a complete document. The tree structure made it really easy to reorder sections at any scale. There is a successor called Opal - the last version of Acta was in 1993, and the last version of Opal wa…
Have a look at DynaList (https://dynalist.io/) and Workflowy. There are apps, too.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#260Apollo Domain/OS.