I actually did it for GridMove -> Stack.
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
51–60 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#52Aperture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software) I would happily pay for an update that fixed outstanding bugs and ensured compatibility with future versions of macOS. It would be nice to have some new features, too, but it is basically "good enough" as it is and I dread the day I can no longer run it. I'm really not sure what I will do. The claim that Photos was going to be a meaningful replacement for Ape…
Oh man, so much this.
When Photos just came out and Apple was making the claims about how they've taken everything good from Aperture and stuck it into Photos I was pretty optimistic considering how solid of an app Aperture became over the years.
Now, few days down the road, pretty clear that Photos is just a marginally better iPhoto with the vast majority of features that were useful for professionals such as Stacks, never coming back.
The dumbification of professional apps to the lowest common denominator continues ...
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#53I’ve been a heavy user of FoxPro [1] back in time. I would really love someone to make a better version of it. Although these days you have Airtable [2] and Ninox [3] they are having different user base than good old FoxPro. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro 2: https://airtable.com 3: https://ninoxdb.de/en/
I currently maintain a "legacy" VFP application that is actually quite robust. Not as modern as most languages, but desktop apps can be quite robust. The access to HTTP libraries and WebView controls can bridge some gaps.
What's really missing is a better IDE with better type hinting, autocomplete, tabs, etc... VS Code would be a great base for an updated IDE. I know that Rick Strahl's West Wind has support for Visual Studio, but there's still some functionality missing.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#54Best days of software development seem to be behind us? I’m really not sure what that means or why someone would say it, other than typical nostalgia.
well, maybe if there were 'some closed-source proprietary software that you once loved that is not being developed/enhanced any more' that was completely unique someone would say it? hmm
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#55Best days of software development seem to be behind us? I’m really not sure what that means or why someone would say it, other than typical nostalgia.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#56Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#57Games on iOS: Flight Control, Flight Control HD and Flight Control Rocket, all by Firemint (later Firemonkeys after being bought by EA). I have an old device on which I can play a couple of these until those devices die.
Features to add: I wouldn’t really add anything more than what they had.
Pay for resurrection: Yes, I’d certainly be willing to pay for their resurrection. But EA is a lousy company for games. So I have no hopes of this happening.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#58Battlezone. This was a great game on Windows 9x, but never got updated to work on the NT based Windows. Of course, a Linux port would be even better.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#59After 5 years with no upgrade, software should become public domain.
Latest TeX (not LaTeX) update was in January 2014, and the change was in a quite obscure tiny corner case of an advanced feature. https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb35-1/tb109knut.pdf
> The new version of TEX differs from the old only with respect to the “null control sequence” \csname\endcsname, which has been a legal construct since version 0.8 (November 1982) although almost nobody uses it.
Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy features including the capacity to send emails?
Also, what about books series like Harry Potter?
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#60This is a great thread!
Am currently porting some old school gamedev techniques used in classic Sega games such as Hang-On, Turbo Outrun and Space Harrier to modern WebGL. Specifically, super scaler "billboarding" of 2D sprites and pseudo-3D terrain projections. It will be interesting to see if accurate physical simulations are possible ;)
Internet Archive's Arcade is preserving a museum's worth of retro games via Emularity and Emscripten
https://archive.org/search.php?query=emulator%3A%2A+collecti...