Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect? • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by hsitz » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

api wrote: post #302

coleifer wrote: post #283

Old-school visual basic, but maybe powered by python or another modern scripting language.

Agreed. Best visual GUI editor ever made. A modern reboot of similar concepts with modern look and feel would be something I would pay for, especially if you could target both desktop and mobile.

The VB GUI editor and IDE generally were a fair ways behind that of Delphi, back in the 90's. With current Lazarus/FreePascal open source Delphi clone you can get a feel for it

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

#592

Post by brotherjerky » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 9:11 PM UTC

dfee wrote: post #153

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

> Conventional spreadsheets used on-screen cells to store all data, formulas, and notes. Improv separated these concepts and used the cells only for input and output data. Formulas, macros and other objects existed outside the cells, to simplify editing and reduce errors. Improv used named ranges for all formulas, as opposed to cell addresses. Amazing.

Sounds very similar to how Coda works: https://coda.io

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

#593

Post by y4mi » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

noahdesu wrote: post #184

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.

Been using the cloud native version for about a year now, and I'm debating if I should renew. What are you using now if not YNAB?

I started a side project and created my own budget planner that did exactly what I wanted (and imports data from my bank).

I've recently considered to refactor it into a AWS Lambda app, as the current setup with Django API, celery workers and markojs for frontend is ... Slightly overengineered

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

#594

Post by orangeshark » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 9:15 PM UTC

linguae wrote: post #87

I have a few software packages in mind: 1. The Genera operating system for Symbolics Lisp machines. Ever since I've gotten bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp machine bugs, I've been wanting to use Genera, but I was born at the beginning of the last AI winter, and unfortunately the operating system is still proprietary, with no word about whether or not it will become open sourced. It's regrettable that the proverbial b…

I always see interest in these sort of operating systems. Are there any serious attempts at creating one?

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

#595

Post by walterbell » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #442

walterbell wrote: post #14

Ecco Pro for Windows and its predecessor, Lotus Agenda for DOS, which inspired a multimillion dollar open-source software debacle that inspired the book, "Dreaming in Code". Ecco is still being used 20 years later and has been binary patched to support Lua extensions. Written by a four person team in Seattle. doogiePIM has been resuscitated by its founder, hopefully it will carry a torch for some of the ideas in Ecco…

I loved Ecco's outliner features. Give me cross-platform ecco pro with cloud syncing and I'll never use onenote again.

Yes, I've bought every alleged outliner since and nothing compares. What's amazing is that Ecco had 100% reliable cross-device syncing in 1990s, both PC-PC and PC-PalmPilot. So it has enough metadata in the database.

TreeSheets (http://strlen.com/treesheets/) is an open-source cross-platform codebase (wxWidgets) with fast graphics, since it was designed by a game developer. That's one possible starting point for cloning Ecco.

NoteLynx on Android has the ability for an item to be in two places within the outline, https://www.appbrain.com/app/notelynx-pro-outliner-mindmap-w..., as does Mindscope on iOS, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-thought-organizer/...

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

#596

Post by fyfy18 » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 9:19 PM UTC

joshmn wrote: post #338

tgtweak wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't it live on as webos (now in many smart TVs and printers)?

I believe LG Smart TVs are webOS based.

Under the hood it's webOS, but obviously a custom UI for a TV. I have a 2017 LG with it and it works rather well, no issues with 4K HDR on Netflix and YouTube, and other than booting, it reacts instantly as a TV should. It's a shame there are limited apps for it though - I'd really like apps for Steam Link and Kodi.

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

#597

Post by BugsJustFindMe » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

Microsoft Excel for Mac. I know, I know, but I'm only half joking. I wish Microsoft had even a tenth of the bug reporting options for their proprietary offerings that they have for VSCode. Without being able to get any kind of engineer eyes on serious performance regressions it may as well be abandoned.

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

#598

Post by gregopet » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 9:22 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #507

eldavido wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree and I used to work at Microsoft. Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps. It's an instructive story of how an inferior product can win. I'm not saying that happens all the time or that it's inevitable, but I think it's safe to say that's sort of what happened here.

> Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps I wonder how much of it was because they had a sorry arse mobile browser? Not supporting ontouchstart etc events must have been a killer. MSPointerEvent was awfully buggy in the initial release, and what dev wants to rewrite their web app/page to use PointerEvent? Why wouldn't you make sure Hybrid apps (Cordova etc) work well? Why not just copy WKWebView…

Not just the browser, the whole platform was crap to develop for. My company ported a bunch of apps by a major app publisher to various versions of Windows Phone and the documentation was shitty, the APIs were shitty, everything shifted with each new version and everything was buggy. We kept asking our local Microsoft branch for help (backed by the publisher we were porting for) and more often than not they were powerless to help.

A far cry from developers, developers, developers.

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

#599

Post by _8j50 » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 9:22 PM UTC

SamWhited wrote: post #89

_8j50 wrote: post #10

Solaris

Solaris was mostly open source; there are plenty of derivatives. Look up "illumos". I use Joyent's SmartOS pretty regularly and it's pretty solid. EDIT: unless you meant the video game, which someone just told me is a thing… oops.

I meant the OS. Afaik,opensolaris was open source but solaris itself had closed source components,illumos and the rest ate forks not maintained and supported versions of solaris

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

#600

Post by bradnickel » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

dcminter wrote: post #31

Picasa (desktop app). It hit a sweet spot for me - linux compatible, very easy to do the majority of simple edits (crop, rotate, colour tweaks), and a few other nice features. The only significant failing was that it couldn't handle removable media at all well. Shotwell is the best I've found so far, but it's not quite the right feature balance for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

Elegant easy to use interface. Something my wife, mother, and others without any computer expertise used religiously and were saddened by demise. Now Google Photos on mobile is pretty good, but the web UX feels like it was pasted together without any thought as to user experience and both seem to make assumptions about what users know.