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Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

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Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#281

Post by LMMojo »

krackers wrote: post #191
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…

>Windows Phone In a similar vein, Palm webOS. I still maintain that it was several years ahead of its time with the whole "mobile apps using javascript" Enyo framework.

If love to have PalmOS (pre-WebOS), still superior to Android or iOS in many ways.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#285

Post by marktangotango »

zmix wrote: post #267
cztomsik wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. XULRunner does the same thing, includes, in addition, a full XML GUI language and assorted technologies and the full runtime distribution, on my Windows10 system, including debugging, crash…

I often wonder why/how xulrunner has descended into obscurity while electron has blossomed. Anyone have input on that?

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#286

Post by culot »

pmarin wrote: post #195

edit.exe I think Windows 10 needs to have a standard text editor in the console.

Absolutely! I use Nano, and while it's okay, it's silly non-standard GUI and shortcut key combos are a mess. Something like MS DOS Edit or Borland TC++ IDE for DOS would be killer for Windows console - also for Linux as well, which has a similar problem of only bizarrely-designed editors available.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#287

Post by nicolapede »

culot wrote: post #252
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…

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 i…

With respect to windows phone, I really miss the tiles, the consistency of the metro style gui and other little details, like automatic do not disturb mode while driving or face recognition well before it became mainstream.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#289

Post by daveFNbuck »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #124
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.

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.

There's a neighborhood along my drive home that Waze will often try to navigate through to save a few minutes of driving. This rarely actually saves the time it claims, and is disruptive enough to people living in the neighborhood that entrances to the neighborhood now have signs excluding non-local traffic from entering.

Waze still tries to navigate me through this neighborhood all the time. It makes the app nearly worthless for finding routes home. There are also some other streets I've learned not to trust when Waze tells me to take them home, as they often have much more traffic than predicted. I'd love to be able to block those as well.

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