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Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
671–680 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windyws Phone's tile setup is still the best home screen setup for mobile. As I peep at my Android home with pretty wallpaper with acres of bhank space and uninformative icons, I pine for the informative, intelligent WP tiles. Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then. Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison. As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow , how i…
>As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite. Compared to Gmail or Microsoft Outlook online it's very very fast. Gmail lags severely compared to when I use Thunderbird.
Thunderbird struggles with managing and searching large mail archives in a way that Gmail doesn't. I use Thunderbird for a work email account, and its GUI thread regularly gets blocked while trying to search or open messages.
To be fair, my work email account is an exceptional case - it's got somewhere around ~1 million emails.
Gmail, particularly with the new Gmail interface launched a few months ago, also sucks performance wise, but in different ways from Thunderbird.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#673Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windyws Phone's tile setup is still the best home screen setup for mobile. As I peep at my Android home with pretty wallpaper with acres of bhank space and uninformative icons, I pine for the informative, intelligent WP tiles. Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then. Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison. As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow , how i…
> I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what circumstances this would happen. I have hundreds of thousands of mails in tbird, in various accounts and folders. It's never struck me as slow. And its search (one of the features i use most) is simply fast.
I have ~1 million emails in Thunderbird. The GUI thread often gets blocked waiting while it's trying to open messages. Search is horrifically slow. This is on a fairly decent ThinkPad X1.
One day I'll finally take the plunge and jump to notmuch, which I've been told is the only email client actually capable of handling millions of emails without sucking.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
At one point I cleared out all TB folders and started from scratch, problem reappeared, so I don't think that's it. Very strange indeed.
The items mentioned above should be done periodically, not just once. Perhaps there are some giant files in there too?
> The items mentioned above should be done periodically, not just once
While helpful advice - if you need to do this manual maintenance regularly, the application is broken.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say exactly the same for Delphi 5 and 6.
Out of curiosity what happened to Delphi? It always seemed quite good to me.
Borland got greedy. Up to Delphi 5, the IDE was something anyone could afford at $99.95 with the cheapest option and going up from that up to $1000+ for the "architect" version. In Delphi 6 they made the cheapest option only for non-commercial use, still at $99.95 and the next tier was a few hundred. In Delphi 7 they made the non-commercial version free, but then they got distracted by .NET and started rising their prices hard to the point where the $1000+ version was the cheapest one until a few years ago. Then a few years ago they made a "cheap" $350 version but the license allowed only for $5000 annual income or something silly like that (they changed the limit a couple of times IIRC) and then you had to buy the next most expensive option which was several hundred dollars more. Lately they made that version free but the limit is still there. To add on that, most of the community doesn't really believe in the free versions since ever since the Delphi 7 Personal Edition they keep discontinuing them (they made another in 2006, based on the slowest and most buggy version which wasn't exactly a great idea) and then bring them back years later with different limitations (and always the reason for discontinuing them is that it didn't work - as if they'd magically become popular in a few months for releasing a free yet extremely limited version).
Add to that that after Delphi 7, which by many was considered the most stable and generally best version, they got distracted by .NET and Linux (with a very hacky project, Kylix, that never got any traction in the Linux community) and decided to make Delphi a .NET product, rewrote the IDE with a highly unpopular (at the time) interface with a lot of bugs and generally a much worse experience for developers and you get the idea.
They basically did the worst thing they could ever do at every single front: abandoned their core audience (Delphi was very popular with smaller developers, especially in Europe) to go after enterprise customers, closed the gates to new blood by increasingly rising the prices, created a sense of unreliability by changing their minds every few years, replaced a stable product with a buggy mess and drove a lot of their skilled people to leave over the years.
The same stuff apply to C++ Builder too, btw. They actually lost a chance here - C++ Builder could have been a the IDE to use for tools in the game industry that relies a lot on custom tooling and some developers did try to use it (e.g. Bioware and i personally worked on another company that also considered it) but Borland/Inprise wasn't very cooperative and they left their C++ compiler stagnate (in our case the compiler simply couldn't build the codebase due to outdated standards support).
Delphi and C++ Builder are products that you can't help but wonder what they could have been at the hands of a company with more competent management.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#676[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#677 - iChat
- Garageband
- iPhoto
- iTunes
- Microsoft Expression Design
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#678Interesting how the top comments are about Microsoft products discontinued years ago.
Nowadays google's the one shutting down products people love (reader, inbox...).
Looks like an inevitable phase in the unicorn lifecycle.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#679[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#680Jasc Paint Shop Pro - before Corel picked them up and gave the software a horrible identity crisis. It had all the right features for graphics editing targeted at the web. Mixing vector layers with raster layers, both fully featured, is still something many modern programs either don't have, or half-ass. And it was dirt cheap, compared to the competition.
i did not expect anybody remember paintshop. it was incredibly easy and productive for me. how many years have passed.