Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 837 posts

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

#41

Post by halfastack »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #15

I'd resurrect Headway Theme for Wordpress. It was kinda open source but had some proprietary bits in I think. And there is a fork somewhere apparently. But the software is effectively dead and not getting updated any more. But that theme builder was absolutely amazing. Literally just drag and drop design for the entire theme, not just pages or whatever. Plus control over the loop and just some awesome stuff that real…

Isn't Wordpress 5 kinda focusing on this? The drag-and-drop way of designing your webpage, similar to something like Wix...

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

#46

Post by ioman »

Microsoft MapPoint. This was a phenomenal piece of mapping software and had features I haven’t been able to find in any of the online map replacements.

When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”.

You could map all sorts of census data. Want to colorize the map based on crime rate divided by median home price? No problem.

You could import lots of data from a spreadsheet and do useful things with it. I used this when looking for my first house. I scraped the data from realtor.com and made maps where the icon changed on the number of bedrooms and the color changed based on the price.

You could make drivetime zones. Want to see how far you can drive in 30 minutes from your office? No problem.

You can probably do a lot of this with ArcGIS, but I don’t know since its way out of my price range.

I keep hoping that Microsoft will bring some of this to Bing Maps. I would pay to use these features again and adding them to Azure would definitely differentiate them from Google Maps.

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

#48

Post by imhoguy »

dcminter wrote: post #31

Picasa (desktop app). It hit a sweet spot for me - linux compatible, very easy to do the majority of simple edits (crop, rotate, colour tweaks), and a few other nice features. The only significant failing was that it couldn't handle removable media at all well. Shotwell is the best I've found so far, but it's not quite the right feature balance for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

I have found Pix to be the good replacement of Picasa.

https://github.com/linuxmint/pix

Post reply on HN