Screenhero used to be great for remote pair programming, but as its gone to premium slack only I haven't been able to use it since. I'm surprised there haven't been any copycats made since it was acquired
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?
#622Altavista. I miss it every single day. Searching for technical (unix, programming, etc.) content is so much easier when you can use nested parens and proper boolean language. This is in contrast to google where searches return things that don't even contain your keywords. This is in contrast to google where the modifiers like allinsite: and '+' and "quotes" are not respected or change their behavior over time. Man I…
I hope someone somewhere makes a new version of Altavista search, if only for the developers. Searching via google is easy for basic errors but is a huge pain if you are slightly advanced. With the capabilities being extended (and more and more people writing code everyday), having a separate search engine dedicated to the developers could cut short the search times tremendously.
There is still http://symbolhound.com/ for search that doesn't ignore special characters but the index is probably not that big.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#623Adobe Fireworks. Easy, intuitive vector-based editor with bitmap support. Ideal for creating/editing images for UIs. It worked the way I expected an image editing tool to work. The complete opposite of Photoshop and Gimp (I don't understand the mental model there). Sketch is a decent replacement—although there are some UI decisions I don't agree with—and I believe Figma is also very similar.
This. I still have the CS6 installed and use it often.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I'm sure there were many reasons it died, but my theory is that Google strategically wanted to kill it because the User was in control of the data-sources and the algorithm. Google wanted people to migrate to Google+, News, etc. where they control what you see. This is what Facebook and Twitter did. Their feeds used to be a simple chrono sort of sources you determined, but then they slowly took control. In my…
I can't figure out what I've read up to on Twitter anymore since it shuffles tweets around and inserts random "your follower also follows this person" tweets which I didn't ask for
If you turn off the "show the best tweets first" option in your content preferences you get a chronological timeline back. (They made this change a month or two ago)
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#625Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#626The Commodore Amiga. The desktop would have looked much different had they stayed alive. For better or worst.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#627Is there a site that anyone knows of that allows people to track if a consumer item has been discontinued and what the best alternatives are?
This is less about tech products/services/games and more about stuff you'd buy at Walmart or the grocery store.
For example, my wife has used a very specific eye liner for years in a certain colour, and then the brand discontinued the line with no equivalent replacement and we can't seem to find a similar one (so many wasted trips to various stores). We had to google it and find a few other folks complaining as well on various random forums that it's been discontinued just to confirm. Same goes for specific products in sensitive-skin editions or that one flavour of something you like.
I was thinking of maybe making a site like this, but figured I'd ask the crowd about what I might be missing or if anyone else has the same issues and would be interested in using it?
Why does it always feel like the one thing we like and use regularly is the only thing that no longer has shelf space at the store?
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#628The Zeo sleep monitoring headband. As far as I know, the only consumer device that accurately measured and reported sleep stages based on actual direct brainwave measurement, and not just secondary indicators like pulse and movement.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#629SimCity up until SC4.
EA really dropped the ball there, completely destroying a classic. No one ever asked for a multiplayer version. And most just want to build a big city, not the tiny shthles it only lets you build now.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#630Metrowerks CodeWarrior. Xcode and Visual Studio have come a long way, but in its day CodeWarrior felt so much more efficient and productive than the alternatives; imagine what it might be today if it had continued!
Wow, you miss CodeWarrior? That is so surprising to me, I hated it :-)