Pivotal Tracker ; Users loved it, it had an excellent model for tracking work and limiting work in progress on software projects. There is no real good alternative and the usual suspects for tracking project work are horrible in comparison.
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
301–310 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#302Elm programming language. Arguably not dead but somewhat incomplete and not actively worked on.
Try the Roc language https://www.roc-lang.org/
It's at a very early stage of development but looks promising
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#303Google Reader. We could have had a great society, man.
There are plenty of clones, though. I use CommaFeed and it's pretty good, feels a lot like Google Reader.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#304TrueCrypt. free multi-platform open source disk encryption that suddenly disappeared in mysterious circumstances
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#305Google Wave. Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It…
Google Wave had awesome tech but if you look at the demo in hindsight you can tell it’s just not a very good product. They tried making an all-in-one kind of product which just doesn’t work.
In a sense Wave still exists but was split into multiple products, so I wouldn’t say it’s “dead”. The tech that powered it is still used today in many of Google’s popular products. It turns out that having separate interfaces for separate purposes is just more user friendly than an all-in-one.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#306Geocities ; It was a "put your html here" Free web hosting back when people barely knew what html was. Today you have to be a rocket scientist to find a way to host a free static "simple" page online.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#307Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.
Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else. I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.
Flash performance is still better than current web stack's. Probably will always be - you could write non trivial games that would work on 128MB memory machine. Currently single browser tab with simple page can take more than that.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#308Positron - Firefox version of Electron. "Electron-compatible runtime on top of Gecko" https://github.com/mozilla/positron This would have changed so much. Desktop apps powered by the engine of Firefox not Chrome. Why? Not enough company buy in, not enough devs worked on it. Maybe developed before a major Firefox re-write?
With more of Firefox's rendering migrating to Rust, there's got to be a market for a memory safe alternative to Electron now.
Looking at firefox memory usage, i’m afraid the issue there is not memory safety but rather the average javascript developer being completely and blissfully unaware of and careless about memory memory usage of the software they write
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#309I liked del.icio.us, it was online bookmark sharing, but with actual people I knew, and it had genuinely useful category tagging. I guess it was basically replaced with https://old.reddit.com and maybe twitter.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#310ICQ ; It was the first instant messenger, the technology could have adopted voice (and not get disrupted by Skype) and mobile (and not get disrupted by whatsapp) and group chat (and not get disrupted by slack/discord). But they didn't even try and put up a fight.