HyperCard , and the whole eco-system around it.
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
551–560 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#552Edit.com - Windows command promt text editor
I also wish linux had such an editor.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#553Microsoft MapPoint. This was a phenomenal piece of mapping software and had features I haven’t been able to find in any of the online map replacements. When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”. You could map all sorts of census data. Want to colorize the map based on crime rate divided by median home price? No problem. You could import lots of data from a spreadsheet a…
QGIS is free/open source and can do a lot of this type of stuff too. More like ArcGIS than MapPoint.
I actually like QGIS more than ArcGIS. It's not without some rough edges, but I found it way easier to use than ArcGIS (which is a bit of a UI disaster, IMO).
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#554Flash. 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.
Flash still exists as an authoring tool that exports JS/HTML5, does it not work well for animation?
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#555* 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 hate to be so blunt but it won’t pan out in any meaningful way. Why would
it succeed where FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Mobile could not?
Not enough people value openness to make the trade off versus iOS and Android.
Does iOS not provide the privacy you need?
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#556* 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…
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.
Compared to Gmail or Microsoft Outlook online it's very very fast. Gmail lags severely compared to when I use Thunderbird.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#557WeeWar - I thought it was very well done and the user generated maps were a great feature. Still can't believe they simply switched it off.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#558https://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
The concepts are there in Microsoft's SSAS, which also lives in Excel as Power Pivot (only the Tabular engine, not the Multidimensional).
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#559Avid Videoshop. I never understood why they quit making it, but it had the easiest to use interface of any video editing app I've used.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#560Winamp. It kicks the lamas ass.