Do games count? I would love to bring an old OS 9 game called Barrack to modern machines.
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
621–630 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#622I heard a lot of good things about FrameMaker for text processing. For development environments I am deeply sorry that smalltalks are not a thing anymore. I know we have pharo, and that's great, but nothing with traction like let's say Lua or ruby or scala. Next thing I miss would be Dylan as it was planned for the Newton. We have opendylan now, but I would like to have it at the heart of a OS/platform.
FrameMaker is still a thing, but it's very targeted now (and no longer cross-platform).
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#623* 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…
> High-performance lightweight desktop email clients
https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/features.php
"Continuously improving since 1998"
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Oracle effectively started to close source Solaris with 10, I think and then completely closed sourced it with 11. Illumos is definitely a fork, but given that Oracle effectively doesn't work on Solaris anymore it's more or less picked up where Solaris left off, it's probably superior to the commercial Oracle version at this point.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#625Textmate. It was such a great native OS X editor, I don't know what happened to it, but although VS Code is very nice and what I use now, it's not a native mac editor and I miss that.
I think TextMate is a little bit alive: it had 3 releases in 2018 ("rc" for v2.0), but it indeed is not as amazing as it was and could be.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#626Firefox that ran Tree Style Tab properly Excel for Mac before it became a cartoon Google Reader so there would still be blogs to read Eudora so e-mail wouldn't suck a dozen or so iOS apps that stopped working after iOS 10 a dozen or so niche Windows apps that haven't been updated Reddit's redesign is probably the most destructive redesign of anything I've ever seen, and that is saying a lot. But kudos to them for (so…
I’m curious about which iOS apps you’re missing
DiagnosticPADD, Tafl, HexChess, SolChess, Spirits, C64 Paint, Quill, Fractile Plus, Toontastic, Jukebox, Etude, Soundbrush, Organ+, Harmonizer, SSquares, the microTone, and about as many again that I've forgotten.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using https://www.inoreader.com and am pretty happy with it as an alternative. It has a lot of the same keyboard shortcuts, which is really all I want.
I miss google reader because it was simply lists and lists of news. Not these new readers that love to extract an image from the article and use it to cover quarter of the screen(exaggerating here). Then 4 more articles on the next page. Then so on. Google reader was perfect for skimming through 100 pieces of news in a short amount of time and just click the articles you want to read in a new tab and done. Any new re…
That's why I use innoreader; if it has this, it's well hidden. I've never seen anything but list view. I imported my feeds and never really changed anything and it basically looks like Google Reader.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#628Bryce.
The Ambrosia Software games (Handsome Harry, the Escape Velocity series, ...).
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#629* 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…
While we're at Windows Phone I must say I miss Windows Mobile. Always found the decision to kill it and replace with Windows Phone a total disaster. At the time it still had a very dedicated user base built over many years. It got replaced with a half-baked copycat OS. I doubt many WM users had any reason to switch to WP instead of Android. It was a completely different product. Microsoft basically threw away a dedicated niche audience for a different niche audience. And I don't have any data on this but I suspect WM users were a much more affluent, valuable and "Microsoft'y" group of users.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#630Picasa (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…
I missed it too!
After the Nth photo sharing website that I'd early-adopted decided to close up shop, I determined I wanted to own the next solution I invested time into, and I founded PhotoStructure.
I've got 20-odd hard drives from laptops and servers and backups. No software that I tried, either open or closed source, would do what I wanted: organize everything into a nice, timestamped, deduped folder structure.
Many years ago, I'd shot myself in the foot by using tools to do JPEG editing and rotation, but those tools quietly deleted EXIF metadata, so PhotoStructure applies a suite of metadata inference heuristics to heal those holes, too.
The MVP is focused on high-quality metadata extraction and inference, and has a simple web-based UI. Simple editing support, along with GPS POI and face detection, is planned.
After spending more than a decade in the ads business, and (helping build) ML-powered behavior targeting based on metadata, it blows my mind that so many of us give the most rich metadata stream, our photos and videos, for free, to the FAANG. PhotoStructure isn't just an effort of love, it's also, at least in some way, penance.
I've got a limited number of beta users trying it out right now. If you're willing to share your feedback, please consider signing up. Use of PhotoStructure during the beta period is free.