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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?

#481

Post by k__ »

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."

Will probably come back with edge-computing.

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

#482

Post by albertgoeswoof »

IshKebab wrote: post #405
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try the Amazfit BIP, it’s similar (e ink screen), cheaper ($69) but does lack a bit on software / integrations side

Does not look comparable. Appears to be basically a heart rate and step counter. One of the great things about smart watches is notifications.

It has notifications, shows texts, let’s you reject calls etc.

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

#483

Post by nwhatt »

tyoma wrote: post #439

Visual Basic 6. Fantastically easy to learn and let you make extremely useful GUI apps quickly. And the edit and continue debugger is still a dream compared to some of today’s debugging setups.

You can still find VB6 jobs. Overwhelmingly successful platform that continues to drive Windows market share. Binary compatibility sucked but COM was ultimately worth it.

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

#485

Post by zmix »

marktangotango wrote: post #285
zmix wrote: post #267

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. 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?

In the early 2000's there many people, who'd want to develop with XUL (especially Intranet solutions were often done this way by people, who wanted an alternative to Microsoft technologies). Several people started creating IDEs or addons for Eclipse. Mozilla Inc. never showed any interest (or support) in this. There never has been an official schema or DTD for XUL, for example.

I don't know the reasons, Mozilla Inc. hated their own (technical) identity so much, back then, all the rage was promotion of Firefox on the web (Firefox coffe mugs, Firefox BBQ parties, community videos, etc., cheap, superficial themeing (Personas)). So, they dealt with identity on the social level. The CEO, back then, was a female lawyer.

It was very clear, that Mozilla Inc. didn't want XUL to become more important.

If we compare the addons, that existed for Firefox with those, that exist now for the Chrome/Firefox type of extension API, they were hugely superior. Now it seems, that half of those apps in the app stores are being used by the marketing teams of some companies, to place their logo somewhere, so people can see it.

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

#486

Post by redwards510 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #217
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…

I really hope Purism's Librem5 pans out for this very reason. A third alternative. I don't want Windows Phone, since that would not buy me much more privacy than Android with today's Microsoft, so having an open 3rd party mobile platform would be the solution here, I think.

I agree it is an exciting phone, but what are the privacy gains versus an android phone with lineageOS and f-droid foss apps? AFAIK it's just the baseband code. Convincing regular users that opensourcing the baseband will solve any problems seems pretty DOA when you have the very visible google play services tracking issue and no on cares.

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

#487

Post by vram22 »

badsectoracula wrote: post #418
vram22 wrote: post #248

Turbo Delphi Explorer. It was a free version of Delphi 6. They still do have a Starter Edition, of course, with some restrictions, which TDE had too. But IIRC, TDE was available in both Win 32 and .NET versions. Borland Sidekick, a pop-up TSR productivity utility. Turbo C 2.x MS QuickC Probably a few others I need to remember.

Note that Turbo Delphi Explorer was a free version of Delphi 2006, not 6 (which was released in 2001). TBH i think it made more harm than good overall since it disallowed installing custom components (which defeated a big reason for using Delphi) and it was based on perhaps the buggiest and slowest versions of Delphi ever released with a convoluted setup procedure (that among others required an obsolete version of .N…

>Note that Turbo Delphi Explorer was a free version of Delphi 2006, not 6 (which was released in 2001).

Okay, I must have got that wrong. Thanks for the correction. I must have mixed up 6 and 2006, likely, since that Delphi Digital Clock v1.0 I mentioned elsewhere in this thread was written by me in 2010.

>TBH i think it made more harm than good overall since it disallowed installing custom components (which defeated a big reason for using Delphi)

Could be so. Yes, even the current Starter editions of Delphi 10.x (code named Berlin, Tokyo etc.) disallow that, IIRC. Or don't have the DB-bound controls (I forget which of the two it is, or whether both). I get your point about not being able to install custom components, which was/is one of the big plus points of Delphi, like VB before it (VBX and then OLE controls).

It hugely increases the ecosystem and potential, and was one or the main reason for the runaway success of VB (the other reason being the drag-and-drop GUI creation and ability to hook up procedures to events by clicking on an event in the event list of a control, and writing a snippet of code that reacts to the event, in the window that popped up, so I've read (I did some VB projects earlier too)).

But I do think that even the limited versions of Delphi are useful, to let beginners get entry to such a good RAD tool. Price is an issue for the full tool, I know.

Of course, I'm somewhat aware of the meanderings and corporate missteps that have troubled the product over the years, every now and then, as it transitioned from Borland to Inprise to Codegear to Embarcadero to ...

>and it was based on perhaps the buggiest and slowest versions of Delphi ever released with a convoluted setup procedure (that among others required an obsolete version of .NET).

Didn't know that stuff. (Heard about the varying bugginess of different Delphi versions over the years, though.) IIRC, I installed and used the Win32 version of Turbo Delphi Explorer, since I prefer non-managed EXEs in general, having a background in compiled languages like C and Pascal from earlier.

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

#488

Post by rpeden »

Microsoft Bob.

Not because it was great, but because I think we need more exploration into alternate ways to interact with computing devices.

I've seen plenty of people - even young people - doing things wrong because their mental model of how their devices are supposed to work is inadequate or incomplete.

I've seen more than one person with hundreds and hundreds of browser tabs open on their iPads and smartphones, because they just don't seem to be able to incorporate the "tab" concept into their model of how their web browser works. And so they're constantly clicking and opening new ones without realizing they can switch back to ones that were previously open.

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

#489

Post by quickthrower2 »

petra wrote: post #55
John_KZ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair SaaS destroyed the previous financial model of the software industry, which was much better for the end user imo. Back then, software companies tried to make good, comprehensive products that respected user privacy, were meant to run locally, provide a complete solution to the problem, and were supposed to be a permanent solution. Better software meant more sales and more money. Unfortunately excessive pir…

Looking at the best software, the sass world has created, Google - it's orders of magnitude more valuable than any PC based software. So maybe it isn't fair to say the user for a bad deal.

Google search is an exception in that it really needs to be a SaaS because there is no way you can run it locally. Your typical SaaS doesn't need to be one.

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

#490

Post by albertgoeswoof »

ixwt wrote: post #218
gegtik wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

although its no pebble, the amazfit bip is the closest contender available today

Holy crap, I've been looking for something to replace my pebble... This product can't be real... 30 day battery life?!

It’s not quite 30 days for me, more like a couple of weeks, but I have everything enabled.

It genuinely is really great, if it had an app ecosystem, slightly higher resolution and was a little smaller / more stylish it would be perfect. A FOSS OS and support for emojis would also be nice

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