Windows 7
Strikes me that you meant this as a joke - but whether you did or not, it is not such a bad call.
Windows XP. I still miss XP.
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
61–70 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#62I'd resurrect Headway Theme for Wordpress. It was kinda open source but had some proprietary bits in I think. And there is a fork somewhere apparently. But the software is effectively dead and not getting updated any more. But that theme builder was absolutely amazing. Literally just drag and drop design for the entire theme, not just pages or whatever. Plus control over the loop and just some awesome stuff that real…
Isn't Wordpress 5 kinda focusing on this? The drag-and-drop way of designing your webpage, similar to something like Wix...
No and that's the difference Headway made. Wordpress 5 is concerned with the output of the 'content' part of the page. It lets you do what you could with a page builder, but more limited.
Headway is literally like creating the theme without coding anything. You build it out of blocks still but you literally just drew boxes onto the page where you wanted boxes to go (based on column system but CSS grid/Flexbox would be better now) and it would output the theme files for you.
And I'm not talking the page, I'm talking the entire theme. So headers, footers, custom pages, custom loops with custom queries, custom blocks mixed in with content blocks on the same page template to allow users to output content in the right places, same with custom fields etc.
It was incredibly powerful and let you effectively WYSIWYG the function of the site as well as then being able to switch over to the design module and WYSIWYG the design too. Plus managing custom CSS was easy.
Later versions let you draw/build and design in the same step like Elementor and Pagelines do, but those don't give you the same control over the functionality of the theme like Headway did.
As I mentioned, you can get most of the same functions Headway provided through something like Elementor Pro and combining it with something like the Toolset plugins. But those rely on integrating and there are issues (dynamically showing content generated by shortcodes currently broken for instance) which make the whole process much more of a chore.
Headway really was great.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#63Adobe Fireworks Jagged Alliance 2 Settlers 2 Heroes of Might and Magic
Settlers 2 got rereleased along with the other titles a few weeks ago
https://store.ubi.com/eu/the-settlers-history-collection/5b6...
You can buy on its own too
https://store.ubi.com/eu/the-settlers-ii-veni%2C-vidi%2C-vic...
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#64I really miss the simple, powerful feature set of Cricket Graph, Mac data graphing software from ~1988
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#65MacOS 9
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#66So many old 32 bit VST instruments trapped on Windows. Most 64 bit DAWs will bridge them, but they're never going to see a port with the new Linux SDK. You can run Windows VSTs on Linux with various WINE-based solutions, but they take a huge performance and stability hit.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair SaaS destroyed the previous financial model of the software industry, which was much better for the end user imo. Back then, software companies tried to make good, comprehensive products that respected user privacy, were meant to run locally, provide a complete solution to the problem, and were supposed to be a permanent solution. Better software meant more sales and more money. Unfortunately excessive pir…
Looking at the best software, the sass world has created, Google - it's orders of magnitude more valuable than any PC based software. So maybe it isn't fair to say the user for a bad deal.
Google is a jumbled mess of multiple pieces of software, and you get access to none of them, only a search service, and it is loosely defined. Also Google isn't particularly good at anything nowdays, except maybe NLP. Their ability to deliver good results is only a result of massive spying. Many researchers would be able to provide software 10x as useful as that of Google given access to the same data.
Imagine a pre-SaaS Google: You get a few of LTO tapes delivered to your doorstep. They include an index of every website in existence, it's owner/creator, a short description of what it is, and a number of semantic flags.
Moreover, you'd probably get a list of all identified businesses there are in every country, region and industry with their contact information and website addresses.
Imagine what you could do with that...
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#68Battlezone. This was a great game on Windows 9x, but never got updated to work on the NT based Windows. Of course, a Linux port would be even better.
Got a HD remaster with multiplayer, it's really good
https://store.steampowered.com/app/301650/Battlezone_98_Redu...
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#69After 5 years with no upgrade, software should become public domain.
Big codebases tend to contain licensed code or at least depend on it, so you'd get code that's either illegal to publish or contains huge gaps. Getting it in a state where you can put it on github, would require quite some dev and legal work, not likely to happen with abandonware.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#70Aperture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software) I would happily pay for an update that fixed outstanding bugs and ensured compatibility with future versions of macOS. It would be nice to have some new features, too, but it is basically "good enough" as it is and I dread the day I can no longer run it. I'm really not sure what I will do. The claim that Photos was going to be a meaningful replacement for Ape…
Iirc, you can buy Lightroom 6 perpetually, no creative cloud needed. Might be worth looking into.