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Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

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

#461

Post by [deleted] »

nojvek wrote: post #271
cztomsik wrote: post #254

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. and while javascript is certainly one of the worst choices if you care about performance, it's also one of the best choices if you need to iterate really quickly (which I believe is very important…

Why is JavaScript the worst choice of you care about performance ?

[deleted]

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

#462

Post by coredog64 »

Irix. I often have this fantasy that if I were to hit one of those monster PowerBall jackpots I’d see about buying the IP behind Irix to open source it.

For a while there was a guy who was replacing the CPU on r5k O2 workstations. These days, pretty much everyone has a super fast MIPS cpu in their router/WAP. I’d love to see 4dwm running on that level of CPU.

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

#463

Post by sentrysapper »

sheepybloke wrote: post #176

Is 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.

Pebble definitely deserves a mention. Lost mine this October on a high dive. Had it for three years never had an issue with it. I was feeling okay with it for awhile, but then I started missing meetings at work and time sensitive texts - was too used to having easy access to it my calendar and notifications.

Started looking for a comparable smartwatch: always on, good battery life, and Android notifications, there's just nothing there.

Ended up ordering a Pebble Time Steel from eBay. I feel like a part of my life and sanity was restored.

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

#464

Post by zmix »

drblast wrote: post #343
marktangotango wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Documentation was poor or non-existent

That's absolutley not true.

"Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" has been published before 2004. It is still online: http://mb.eschew.org/

XUL (and assorted technologies) is/were broadly documentet on MDN.

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

#465

Post by erikpukinskis »

bane wrote: post #313
LeoPanthera wrote: post #246

HyperCard. It's been decades and I've still never found a better way to make simple GUI applications.

It's an absolute mystery to me why this hasn't happened even through the open source community. For a tour down memory lane: https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive...

Simple point and click programming tools are not a stable state.

The problem is people start using them. Then they have collective needs. Then the tool adds complexity to make those needs go away. Thus begins the slow process towards the tool no longer being simple and/or maintainable.

You could do it, but you’d need a Craigslist-like “we’re not adding anything, it seems to work ok” attitude.

That attitude is totally incompatible with VCs, who generally set the tone in this industry.

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

#467

Post by nuxi »

iscrewyou wrote: post #140
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 used picass for one thing and one thing only: image organization. I could point it to a directory and it would read all the images. It wouldn’t copy them to it’s database, it wouldn’t try to change their format. It would simply read them as fast as I’ve ever seen and show me what’s in that directory. Then it would keep the directory hierarchy in place. I haven’t been able to find anything similar. I search for a si…

Have you tried XnViewMP[0]? I use it on Windows, but they also have OSX and Linux builds.

[0] - https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/

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

#468

Post by aasasd »

InGodsName wrote: post #75

I want an app which let's me design webscrapping workflows visually. Then once workflow is completed, upload it to cloud and run N instances of this workflow. There was a software called SpiderClimber for this. Unfortunately, the author disappeared and software too. Edit: i want to extract ad banners from websites, think Google ads or any other ad network ads. Pop ads etc... Including redirect sequence and page's scr…

It sounds like Selenium may be in the general area of your wishes: afaik there are browser extensions that create a workflow for Selenium, which I think you then run with scripts in e.g. Python. If you're in data science, Python is probably already useful for data processing.

Alternatively, other Selenium-like ‘headless browsers’ may also have visual tools for creating workflows—e.g. PhantomJS and such. See https://alternativeto.net/software/selenium/

Maybe there's even something for Scrapy, which is made for scraping in the first place, as the name indicates.

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

#469

Post by Improvotter »

modeless wrote: post #215
sheepybloke wrote: post #176

Is 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.

Over two years after Pebble shut down I am still wearing my Pebble Time Round every day and it works just as well as the day I got it. There's really good community support with Rebble. You can still find Pebbles for sale in various places and I'd recommend getting one over any of the Android Wear watches. They're just that much better.

My Pebble Time Steel has been in my drawer for 2 years I think. I bought it on release and didn't really use it for that long because I honestly didn't found it useful. What do you use it for? Most of the time I just find it easier to take out my phone.

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

#470

Post by TeMPOraL »

eldavido wrote: post #363
bhauer wrote: post #156

* 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…

> As a broader concept, a return to prevailing use of on-device processing and computation I don't think anyone ever liked developing for the web. It solved three problems pretty well: - Data portability: log in from anywhere, have your data at your fingertips. - App model: no broken installations of programs into desktop environments, dependency problems, DLL hell - No concern about the mostly broken Windows desktop…

> It's instructive to consider how: very locked-down app APIs to the operating systems (e.g. no dumping files all over the place)

But this is precisely the problem. And also why mobile apps aren't really native, nor becoming native. Developers think, "since our app is just a thin wrapper on our web service, why not just make a webview and do everything through the web?". APIs being opaque to the system means you don't own the data. Saving actual files in actual filesystem is still much better for user freedoms.

> A mobile device does about 99% of what they need -- most people aren't "creators", they don't author websites, write code, edit videos, design buildings, etc.

True to some extent, but how many of those things they would be doing if the mobile platform wasn't limiting them? Users don't imagine the hypothetical things they could be doing, they choose from what's available.

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