Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect? • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by linker3000 » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

linuxlizard wrote: post #83

agentultra wrote: post #73

Workbench or the Turbo * IDEs.

Turbo Pascal was my first. You never forget your first. Turbo C then Turbo C++ were also amazing. My fingers still remember the copy/paste ^KB ^KC.

Oh boy - I've literally just come out of Turbo Pascal 3.0A on a Z80 retro rebuild - I've hacked together some code to run a 7-segment clock/timer board I made for my Commodore 64 in about 1984.

https://twitter.com/linker3000/status/1071459121210290178

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

#332

Post by kgwxd » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

Resurrected as closed-source and proprietary, destin to be abandoned again?

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

#333

Post by wenc » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

* The Borland Turbo IDEs, but modified for modern languages.

* Paradox for DOS (with PAL = Paradox Application Language), but with SQL backends.

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

#334

Post by gmfawcett » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

submeta wrote: post #323

Netmanage's EccoPro. That was/is a Personal Information Manager (PIM), outliner, database that was abandoned in 1997 after MS gave Outlook for free. - I haven't seen a better information manager ever since (outliners like OmniOutline or task managers like OmniFocus are good, but don't even come close to EccoPro)

You beat me to it. :) EccoPro was an incredible tool. I loved it the way that people slightly older than me loved Lotus Agenda, another legendary PIM.

These days I get by just fine with Emacs + org-mode, but Ecco had some amazing usability features that I've never seen matched in another product.

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

#335

Post by latexr » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

gardaani wrote: post #181

wanda wrote: post #74

FreeHand

Many old FreeHand users have moved to Affinity Designer. You should try it, it is available for Mac and Windows.

I’m one such user. I’ve been using Affinity Designer since the first public betas, and I curse it every time I use it. If you do any kind of precision work, it’s an abomination.

It can’t expand strokes correctly; it’s imprecise as hell when using boolean operations; it can’t do vector patterns (nor are they planned); it can’t even correctly join two specific points from different shapes!

I stick with it for the price point and because I ethically dislike Adobe, but the software as is is utter junk if you care about precision in your work.

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

#336

Post by cweagans » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

marktangotango wrote: post #285

zmix wrote: post #267

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. 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?

I tried building something with xulrunner a while back and the experience was awful, IMO. I was up and running with Electron within an hour.

xulrunner may be a superior technology, but if it's a PITA to work with, then nobody is going to want to use it.

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

#337

Post by travisgriggs » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

Interleaf word processor. It was like LaTex met a (zany) UI written in Lisp. Only word processor I’ve ever used that had a great balance between WYSIWYG and all the structure of the document.

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

#338

Post by joshmn » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

tgtweak wrote: post #329

LMMojo wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Didn't it live on as webos (now in many smart TVs and printers)?

I believe LG Smart TVs are webOS based.

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

#339

Post by glenrivard » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

Google Reader

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

#340

Post by projectramo » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

csdreamer7 wrote: post #244

projectramo wrote: post #128

Google docs but private. (So back when it was private which I assume it was at some point)

Look at Libreoffice Online https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

It’s funny that right after my post I was experimenting with Microsoft one drive with libre office locally. Thanks for the tip.

This looks selfhosted. I need to convince a like minded friend to host it for a split of the fee.

Edit: found this https://civihosting.com/collabora-online-hosting/