Pebble
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
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Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#572KDE 3. I used it for years, it was a good and mostly stable desktop environment. Then with KDE 4 they added all kinds of fancy features that added instability, strange error messages and then made them non-optional.
KDE 3 has been forked in to Trinity. http://trinitydesktop.org/
Oh I didn't know that...
I'll try it out!
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#573The text editor "Brief" - by UnderWare iirc - in an age when humour was still allowed in commercial software. Was a fully programmable editor for DOS - a sort of cleaned-up, nicer UX riff off emacs. The programming language was its own lispish thing, though in later editions they also glued on a C-like language that did the same things.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#574Pebble - they created a series of smart watches that had: - long battery life (2-7 days depending on model) - e-ink colour screens, that were always on - an extensive app/watchface ecosystem - actual attractive watches I had a series of them and was all-in on the new models announced via kickstarter, when they suddenly disappeared and were bought by Fitbit. All forthcoming products were killed off. They've been prett…
I settled for an Amazfit Bip, which is not a Pebble but in some respects it's the closest thing there is right now AFAIK.
Battery lasts a month, screen is not e-ink but it's always on (I believe LCD), watchfaces are customizable but there's not a lot of good ones since the resolution of the screen and the colors aren't great. Functionality is pretty limited, but good enough for time, gps and notifications.
I have one and I'm satisfied with it, and I'm looking forward to what they do with v2.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#575Dr Dobb's Jolt Awards. There are still many technical books being published would be nice to have some curation.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#576Pebble - they created a series of smart watches that had: - long battery life (2-7 days depending on model) - e-ink colour screens, that were always on - an extensive app/watchface ecosystem - actual attractive watches I had a series of them and was all-in on the new models announced via kickstarter, when they suddenly disappeared and were bought by Fitbit. All forthcoming products were killed off. They've been prett…
I have a Garmin sport/smart watch, it lasts for weeks and it has always-on color display. Smart watches from other brands also last for many days or weeks.
Seconded. I really like mine. It does all I need from a watch and then some.
I also got mine replaced without any hassle after it failed.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#577Nokia n900. Portable linux box, real keyboard. http://neo900.org/ doesn't seem to have gained much traction. https://www.planetcom.co.uk/ seems to be the closest thing we have now.
I had one of these, was a lot of fun!
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#578Topsy. Being able to see the tweets surrounding a keyword was so useful. as well as seeing the monthly trends in volume.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#579Old-school Winamp. I use Spotify these days, but man it was fun to customise skins and play with the awesome visualisers. Half-Life 3 would also be nice, but I guess it was never "around" to begin with.
Old-school Winamp is still around and works just as well as 15 years ago.
Indeed, the lack of the UI shittification creep that we saw in iTunes, Skype, MS Office etc has made it look even better, faster, sleeker in comparison!
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#580Zeo sleep monitor, a low accuracy low precision low cost EEG-based sleep monitor, which worked a lot better for me than the movement-based systems. What I mainly cared about was tracking when I actually went to sleep.