Skype before Microsoft got their hands on it.
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#352The Zune (media players) and Windows Phone (upto 8, not even 8.1). The fluid interface with focus on readability and content. The photos app was amazing. Live tiles are amazing. The music player and it's live tile was amazing. The performance was the same whether on a low end budget phone or the top of the line model. So many good ui and ux decisions like the lack of hamburger menus and placement of all menu items al…
Imo, the hubs were really what made WP special and it would've been amazing with more third-party buy-in (which realistically was never going to happen). Going to a single centralized spot for social media or whatever else, instead of browsing through a dozen different apps, is such a great idea.
I was totally on board with WP but then Microsoft bungled the later WP updates (my phone wasn't supported, and it was one of the last ones with a physical keyboard) and third-parties never really supported the platform.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#353Google Reader. Now I have a mix of HN, Reddit and GMail, and none of them work really how I like.
Agreed. I'm sure there were many reasons it died, but my theory is that Google strategically wanted to kill it because the User was in control of the data-sources and the algorithm. Google wanted people to migrate to Google+, News, etc. where they control what you see. This is what Facebook and Twitter did. Their feeds used to be a simple chrono sort of sources you determined, but then they slowly took control. In my…
This is by far the best explanation I've read. Thx for making my day.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#354Surprised nobody mentioned them yet: Borland and their approach to UI development. I know some of their products live on, but I am nostalgic towards the wysiwyg days of old without being forced to use MS. I of course am aware of modern equivalents, but sadly the market/users moved.
Heck, even their IDEs. I was more productive in BCC 3.1 (in text gfx mode of course) or even TCC than I am with Visual Studio.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#355KDE 3.
I used it for years, it was a good and mostly stable desktop environment. Then with KDE 4 they added all kinds of fancy features that added instability, strange error messages and then made them non-optional.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#356Youtube without ads and easy download.
Youtube-dl and ublock.
Adding these to ublock as custom filters removes a lot of extraneous stuff in the player, too:
youtube.com##.ytp-pause-overlay
youtube.com##.ytp-title-channel
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
youtube.com##.subscribecard-endscreen
youtube.com/get_endscreen?Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#357iPod shuffle before they stuffed up the design. That was the perfect device but of course they had to make it smaller thus the clip no longer held.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#358[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
> nor get my GPG and SSH keys for Github working. This definitely works, I've used it back in the day (needs "enable-ssh" in config).
Good to know. I was following instructions for Windows on Github and just felt ultra dense as it kept not working.
I always just installed git for Windows and put keys in my user\.ssh folder and that's worked for me for as long as I can remember. What issues is everyone having? Am I just missing something?
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#360Incredible Universe was an IKEA-sized, mid-90's electronics retailer that existed before the dominance of Best Buy. It was an amazing customer experience and you could demo pretty much anything in the store. They famously had video game consoles even in the child-care area. Every DIY PC builder, circuitry geek and soldering enthusiast went there for supplies. Eventually they started hemorrhaging money and sold out to Fry's.