Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

Post by nojvek » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

cztomsik wrote: post #254

bhauer wrote: post #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…

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…

Post by LeoPanthera » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

rcarmo wrote: post #241

The Psion S3a application suite. I've yet to come across anything as simple, useful and unfettered.

Post by pippolong » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

EamonnMR wrote: post #129

Mostly 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.

Post by Veen » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

Lukasa wrote: post #236

twic wrote: post #229

Acta, 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 you considered OmniOutliner for this use case?

Post by gpvos » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

zentiggr wrote: post #119

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #108

Earlier 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.

OSMAnd and Navigator on Android allow you to "disable" road sections. Not an area feature, but for things like the I-74 Bridge project where construction blockages change sometimes almost weekly, it's a big help to toggle individual blocks/intersections individually.