Xmarks
Being able to pretty seamlessly synchronise bookmarks across browsers was awesome.
Its shuttering was the final impetus that made me move away from the decaying mess that is Lastpass. (Hello BitWarden!)
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
511–520 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#512* 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…
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…
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Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#513Keyboard-driven DOS Outliner Software:
* Borland Sidekick Plus[1] (not to be confused with the earlier Sidekick) OUTLINER applet(?). I loved the features (and key-bindings) of this more than ...
* Grandview 2.0 by Symantec (before it became a purveyor of software I despise) [2]
The closest I have come to finding a replacement for the following is Outlook email (which isn't saying much). Seemingly viable alternatives fail to meet my needs most immediately due to ineffective key bindings.
A hardy soul did yeoman work using vDos to allow Grandview 2.0 to be run on any recent Windows version with more than expected amounts of integration with Windows (clipboard)[3]. I used this for a few months at work but the relative inability to share my work led to me discontinuing it's use, though I never found a satisfactory replacement; I use plain text files today.
[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/sidekick/Sidekick_Plus_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandView_(software) [3] https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#514Earlier 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…
> 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 wonder what do you think about this: https://github.com/cztomsik/node-webrender
node+react+servo, consumes ~30M ram on my osx (if you precompile typescript files)
it's nowhere near to XUL but it's also little more powerful because of react (vdom is more dynamic than XML, it will be possible to use react-devtools and it should support HMR too)
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#515Jasc Paint Shop Pro. I've always found it incredibly intuitive to use.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#516Netmanage's EccoPro. That was/is a Personal Information Manager (PIM), outliner, database that was abandoned in 1997 after MS gave Outlook for free. - I haven't seen a better information manager ever since (outliners like OmniOutline or task managers like OmniFocus are good, but don't even come close to EccoPro)
You beat me to it. :) EccoPro was an incredible tool. I loved it the way that people slightly older than me loved Lotus Agenda, another legendary PIM. These days I get by just fine with Emacs + org-mode, but Ecco had some amazing usability features that I've never seen matched in another product.
Isn't it crazy? Twenty years later there ain't no product that has all the capabilities of EccoPro. I used Emacs/Org several years myself. And several other tools (Toodledo, Todoist,...)
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windyws Phone's tile setup is still the best home screen setup for mobile. As I peep at my Android home with pretty wallpaper with acres of bhank space and uninformative icons, I pine for the informative, intelligent WP tiles. Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then. Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison. As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow , how i…
>As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite. I leave Thunderbird open in the background and come back to a notification that some component or other crashed. Happens all the time, no clue why. Email is common enough that I'd expect there to be a half-decent client for it, but I don't know of one... (IRC is also common, at least among people who w…
Google killed the need for a decent mail client. The entire PIM space on Linux has gone through a major regression since 2012, when I shut down my XMPP/IMAP/SyncML/CalDAV/CardDAV services and started using google. It seems like a lot of folks jumped ship to web based tools about that time.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#518Microsoft Musical Instruments was a delightful application that used to grace my local Children’s Museum. It allowed you to browse and listen to musical samples of instruments from around the world.
I believe it was eventually absorbed by Encarta.
It shouldn’t be difficult to create similar software, but assembling quality samples would take a fair bit of work.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#519Flash. The transition to JS + canvas wasn't too bad for games, although JS games can't be distributed as single files, but for animation I don't think there's anything like it anymore. And we forget how much of early internet culture was driven by 4chan's Flash board, which you can only have with things like .swf files - relatively small single files that can contain an entire game/animation.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#520Meat Gone Bad, an old Mac game. For nostalgia. Would pay a modest amount.