Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
421–430 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#422Microsoft Money. I didn't have to give access to all my accounts to some website, or pay an annual subscription for upgrades. I got keyboard shortcuts and reports and I could search for things to find out how old my computer is or when I went to Vegas. It seems like in the physical economy, if you create something of value and you aren't making money off it, you will sell it and someone else can make money off it. Wi…
Money dance is the closest I found that will download from financial institutions and auto import. I switched when my banks stopped supporting my Msmoney vm.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#423The Opera 12 browser, for umpteen reasons: - UX-wise, it solved many issues browsers today are still struggling with. Vivaldi is working in a similar direction, but they've basically started from scratch again so aren't close to the point of development Opera had achieved by version 12. - These HN posts from today's frontpage [0] [1] give some idea of why we really need Presto today. Not only would it just be good to…
Just FYI, you can select link text in Firefox and, I think, Chrome if you hold Alt.
Learned that rather recently even though I'm practically living on the web.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#424PalmOS (the original one)
Ha ha, good one. I had a Palm V and a Palm Zire. Both were very good devices. One of the best features was the instant-on and you're back in the app you were last using, after power-on. No booting period of even a few seconds. And of course, the Graffiti handwriting system (with the stylus) was great too. I even tried using Pippy, a port of Python to the Palm. Would have been great for writing small snippets of code on the go, at a restaurant, bus stop, train station, beach, etc. Unfortunately it was buggy and crashed a lot.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#425Acta, an "outliner", which means a hierarchical text editor: http://a-sharp.com/acta/ I ended up writing most of my school essays in it. You could start with a high-level outline and recursively flesh it out until you had a complete document. The tree structure made it really easy to reorder sections at any scale. There is a successor called Opal - the last version of Acta was in 1993, and the last version of Opal wa…
Some years ago i wrote this: http://runtimeterror.com/rep/ol
I still use it at works for notes, etc although under Windows is really needs a custom lnk file to setup a fixed window size. At some point i plan on rewriting the UI bits to use a GUI instead.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#426Earlier 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?
JS had nowhere the popularity it had today. At the time, creating a desktop app in Javascript was not regarded as serious. The reason electron became popular is because so many people from other fields (designers, integraters, students...) learn programming through copy / pasting JS and wanted JS for everything. Hence node. And now electron.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#427Apollo Domain/OS.
How come?
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#428* 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…
For email, on Mac I’m using MailMate. It’s everything I wanted Thunderbird to be.
On the other hand I think the web is awesome and I’m 36, I remember very well what the landscape looked before web apps. So I don’t understand the fetish for native to be honest.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#429Is no one going to mention Pebble? It's the only smartwatch I've ever wanted, and I was so sad that it got bought and died right when I had enough money to spend some on a smart watch. It just had the perfect combo of good design, long battery life, and usability.
I have one sitting in my drawer; happy to send to you for free if you're interested in owning one. Just drop me a line.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#430* Windows Phone. Fantastic UI, and coupled with the Lumia, it was an awesome user experience. * The old Winamp, with all the intricate shortcuts that I had memorized. * Windows XP itself. I have been on Linux for years, and XP was the last Windows I used alongside it (for MSOffice). XP had reached the peak in terms of being able to control the desktop using the keyboard. And then the downslide started.
I know a lot of people who loved Windows XP, but I always hated it. Especially compared to Ubuntu, it felt like the past. Having to hunt down drivers and install them before any hardware started working was a pain, and after I tried Ubuntu and it auto-detected my wifi card and sound card, that was the end of any respect I had for Windows XP. And that's not even mentioning the number of times I had to call the phone n…
Well, people who like XP and older versions of Windows in general tend to like the UI, not the kernel :-P. I know many who would love a version of Windows 2000, XP or 7 (depends on the taste) with the Windows 10 kernel.
It is a problem with Windows that you have to take all of it or nothing. At least on Linux you can use whatever UI you want with the latest kernel.