Skype ; Because my R.I.P. grandma was using it to talk to her relatives overseas just like she would use a phone, but it didn't cost an arm and a leg (unlike phone calls).
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
311–320 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? Probably not, but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to render? If xhtml had been coupled with some cool features which only worked in xhtml mode, it might have become successful, but on its own it does not provide much value.
> but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to render? I think those benefits are quite similar to having more programs failing to run (due to static and strong typing, other static analysis, and/or elimination of undefined behavior, for instance), or more data failing to be read (due to integrity checks and simply strict parsing): as a user, you get documents closer to valid ones (at least in the rough…
Sure, authoring tools should help authors avoid mistakes and produce valid content. But the browser is a tool for the consumer of content, and there is no benefit for the user if it fails to to render some existing pages.
It is like Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards compatibility even with buggy software. The interest of the customer is that the software runs.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#313Adobe 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.
Macromedia Fireworks was an outstanding piece of software.
The 20 most common things you’d do with the tool were there for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about every file extension you could think of.
Most useful feature of all was that it’d load instantly. You’d click the icon on the desktop, and there’d be the Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a coffee while it starts, it’s phenomenal performance.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#314Gawker.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#315CueCat it was an affordable barcode scanner that anyone could have connected to their computer, and it scanned barcodes. It took almost two decades before we could finally do it again with our mobile phones.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#316Was recently reading about Project Ara, the modular smartphone project by Google/Motorola [1]. Would have liked to see a few more iterations of the idea. Something more customizable than what we have today without having to take the phone apart. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
It would have been very thick, too thick to compete.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#317ICQ ; 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.
They got bought by AOL in 98, long before most/all of this innovation happened?
Edit: in fact I'd say they were irrelevant before pretty much all of those innovations. By the time AIM or MSN Messenger really became popular, ICQ didn't matter anymore.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#318Adobe 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.
Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#319In the late 90s there was a website called fuckedcompany which was a place where people could spill the beans about startups (mainly in silicon valley). It was anonymous and a pretty good view into the real state of tech. Now there is twitter/x but it's not as focused on this niche.
creator now makes wild, bespoke headphones https://www.reddit.com/user/pudjam667/submitted/
That is just fantastic.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#320I thought Google Wave was going to kill email and chat and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Worse is better.