Final Cut Express and Color
IBM Lotus Symphony (pleasant and convenient GUI)
and ofc Google Reader
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
341–350 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#342* 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…
> compared to today's bloated apps that have difficulty keeping up with keystrokes on 8-core 3.5 GHz monsters
Seriously, I recently had to disable Thunderbird's spellchecking so that typing emails wouldn't stall for 5+ seconds at a time on my 8-core machine. Ironically, my older dual core machine has no such problems, and the same email accounts, OS and extensions are at play.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#343Earlier 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 haven't used electron, but in 2007 xulrunner was such a pain in the ass to write code for it wasn't worth the effort for anything where you didn't absolutely need an embedded browser, and even then there were better options.
Documentation was poor or non-existent and IIRC the API was based on the half-baked XPCOM because COM and CORBA were all the rage at the time it was created.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#344edit.exe I think Windows 10 needs to have a standard text editor in the console.
PFE - Programmers File Editor.
Was way more advanced then any of the editors available now. Could handle GB sized files easily. Had macro that can record your operations and playback. Was very nifty and virtually consumed no memory and was simply superb. I still use it though as it is available in 32 Bit version.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles....
Would love to see a 64 bit version and with some more advanced features.
Still loving it and it's one of my main stream editor which just works with just one executable and part of my big list of portable apps collection which mostly consists of single executable based tools for almost any task!!!
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#345Starseige:Tribes - the slightly broken physics in that first of the franchise really made for a fast paced and fun game. Update the models and textures and it could be a great modern day esports game to play and spectate.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#346Windows Phone. To this day no Android phone I've used ever as fast, reliable or plain refined as WP8 was. Unique design and many genuinely useful features, and it reflected a time when smartphones could have been vibrant and diverse, not our current two mega-platforms or nothing.
I do miss Windows Phone. The animated tiles meant that a lot of the time you didn't need to switch to the app to get the info you needed (weather conditions, how the market is doing, etc.) And it was fast I really dislike the pointless animations that iOS and Android go through - since the icons in Windows Phone were rectangles the few animations it did have were quick because they didn't have to worry about clipping…
I think WP suffered from the problem (among many) that app statistics are based on people actually using them. If no one opens your app, you can't track if they're using it. So now it seems like no one is using your app on Windows Phone. Combine that with WP natively replicating the features of a lot of apps (you didn't need to install Twitter and Facebook because it was built into the People app that shipped with the phone), and it paints a picture of lower user engagement on WP.
There's a perverse incentive on other platforms for app makers to send you notifications that require you to open the app to view. It increases user engagement numbers, because no one really knows how to measure user engagement properly.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what circumstances this would happen. I have hundreds of thousands of mails in tbird, in various accounts and folders. It's never struck me as slow. And its search (one of the features i use most) is simply fast.
> This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what circumstances this would happen.
I see it both fast and slow. Ironically it's absurdly slow on my 8-core desktop and just fine on my older dual core laptop (both with SSDs and same accounts, etc). Definitely weird, but this behaviour has peristed for years, so much that I had to disable TB features on my desktop just so I could type without stalling.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#348DabbleDB, this YouTube video gives a great introduction to this online spreadsheet-like database. Sadly they were bought out by Twitter, never to be seen again.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#349* 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
The gigants buy up competitors and bury it, shot down the project.
We would have more freedom and viable options as consumers if not the big companies such as Facebook, Google buy up the competition. It should be illegal to do this. The world is a more poorer marketplace because of this.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#350* 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…
PFE - Programmers File Editor.
Was way more advanced then any of the editors available now. Could handle GB sized files easily. Had macro that can record your operations and playback. Was very nifty and virtually consumed no memory and was simply superb. I still use it though as it is available in 32 Bit version.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles.....
Would love to see a 64 bit version and with some more advanced features.
Still loving it and it's one of my main stream editor which just works with just one executable and part of my big list of portable apps collection which mostly consists of single executable based tools for almost any task!!!