sidekick - the TSR app for DOS
That was great!
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
291–300 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#292Old Windows 3.1 era MathCAD before the company ruined the UI. Extremely easy to use and powerful symbolic math engine and helped me learn calculus. My dad used to model a lot of analog signal processing and acoustic stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#293Courier (formerly Calypso) Email, a Windows email client.
I loved the way it handled multiple accounts, filtering, and auto-replies. Worked with POP3 and IMAP and had features that other clients lack such as blind send, configurable notifications per account, and export (which put any emails selected into a single text file, and dumped attachments to the file system and foldered them according to email ID.) Also, all account settings, filters, etc. and emails were stored in a ".box" file, so you could move or copy that single file from system to system.
It lacked SSL/TLS which was the final death knell for it I think, as most email providers started requiring it.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Won't happen. Apps with those features get accused of being racist. https://www.npr.org/2012/01/25/145337346/this-app-was-made-f...
The OP appears to be talking about just mapping demographic datasets, plenty of software does that today and isn't accused of being racist. The issue you linked to seems different. I agree that the headline is hysterical, but the patent mentions, among other sensible ideas, that it would plot paths factoring in demographic data. Which is just plain weird when you already have crime data available.
It's not weird if the demographics is correlated with crime (which it definitely is). It gives you more data.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#295Tweetie. Then again, with the way Twitter is today, I don't miss Tweetie as much as I used to.
Sparrow.
Aperture.
Picasa.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#296Lotus improv: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#297MSN Messenger
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#298Picasa (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…
I've thought about it (more than) a bit.
Part of the problem is that only a small fraction of the population needs a high-performance photo manager. Most of the market has always been for "color snaps" and that has just gotten worth with the proliferation of cell phones.
If you are handling lots of RAWS and you care about speed then you have to start with hardware.
For instance, if you care about performance you just can't use a mac. Forget about it.
An application that cares about performance might tell you to ditch the hard drive on your computer for an SSD if you want to run it and that we'd rather give you your money than just give you the same bad performance you expect from Lightroom, Photos, etc.
Having your images on a RAIDed network server could be good but if you are using WiFi performance will be bad. If you feel entitled to keep using your 100 Mbps Ethernet hub on your DSL modem than performance will be bad.
Wedding photographers spend $5000 for a camera and would probably get much more than $2500 of value from a $2500 photo management suite, particularly if you factor the lower blood pressure from not staring at a spinning beach ball all day and the lower health care costs and extra years of life they could get.
Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil" might have made since back in the 360 mainframe day when you couldn't get N very high so an N^2 algorithm wasn't as bad as it is today.
People today have the wishful thinking that they can find the "one" bottleneck and open it and that was sometime true in the past for prototype projects (eg. less so in the age of networking, deep cache hierarchy, ...) but in real-life systems there are usually 5-10 bottlenecks that all need to be cleared if you want to make a difference in performance that people will feel.
Most people think they can clear two or three of them and will spend a lot of effort for it and will argue until they are blue in the face and bankrupt that they don't need to fix the other ones.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#299* 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…
For email client, what about Claws? https://www.claws-mail.org
It seems to be missing an OSX client, but Windows and Linux is supported.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#300Is no one going to mention Pebble? It's the only smartwatch I've ever wanted, and I was so sad that it got bought and died right when I had enough money to spend some on a smart watch. It just had the perfect combo of good design, long battery life, and usability.
I have two Pebble/Rebble watches that I still wear. I love them!