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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?

#521

Post by cgsmith »

anonu wrote: post #480
ThinkBeat wrote: post #471

Blackberry. I have never had a more efficient handheld for doing what I need to do most, emali and chat/text messages. The version with the thumbwheel, enabled me to race through messages. I would expect slack to do great on it as well. It was not very good for web, apps, games, like my current smartphone is, but I think my current smartphone is clumsy and slow when it comes to message and email.

Old school. I don't think theres enough demand out there to bring it back tbh. Even though there are still many passionate ex-users - and maybe current users. Touch screens have proven to be far superior as they serve both input and output purposes.

I agree that touchscreens are more prevalent but disagree that they are superior. Having something tactile for a phone is useful and should be brought back. I was discussing the same thing with how cars are moving to only touchscreens.

The problem ends up being you don't know where to touch without looking at it. Imagine having a touchscreen keyboard on your laptop. You'd have to look down to verify where you were.

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

#523

Post by dbielik »

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…

Nerdydata.com offers this level of custom rendering and crawling! (Minus the visual part, if that's nice-to-have and not a requirement)

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

#524

Post by udioron »

rmprescott wrote: post #22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv n-dimensional spreadsheet with a logical data model (including hierarchies) rather than rows and columns: Net Worth := Assets - Liabilities

I was so happy to see someone mentioned improv before me :-)

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

#525

Post by spalt »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #111

Microsoft 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…

yes!!!!!!! hate hate hate quicken with a burning passion.

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

#526

Post by jacobkg »

twic wrote: post #229

Acta, 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…

You should definitely check out WorkFlowy (https://workflowy.com). It is a next generation outliner. People use it to write books and screenplays among other things.

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

#527

Post by petepete »

ransom1538 wrote: post #500
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.

Wow. To this day. I can only find IDE's that do 1/2 of the features VB6 had. But yeah. After .NET hit, all the VB6 devs I know, bailed.

I'd say exactly the same for Delphi 5 and 6.

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

#528

Post by cgsmith »

y4mi wrote: post #20

YNAB4 (you need a budget 4) It wouldve been perfect if they'd just added an API so that users can create and share ways to get the data from various banks. And a refactor was necessary to a native library (or even electron) But this cloud native follow-up version is just not an option.

I am not sure if you mean an API for banking or just in general an API - they have the latter https://api.youneedabudget.com/v1

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

#529

Post by netsharc »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #124
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”. It's noteworthy, because I've only seen this feature in Rolls-Royce navigation in recent times.

It does seem somewhat paranoid. Might be useful to exclude certain routes with an easy interface, but tremendously harmful by seemingly legitimizing the myth of “no-go” areas that has recently become a favorite talking point of the alt-right in my (perfectly safe) country.

Well if you live in sleepy Luxembourg you'll probably not need that feature, but other countries might need it.

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/05/americas/brazil-wrong-dir...

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