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Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

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

#751

Post by y4mi »

cgsmith wrote: post #528
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.

I am not sure if you mean an API for banking or just in general an API - they have the latter https://api.youneedabudget.com/v1

That is ynab5, the cloud native version, where your data lives on their servers. That is not an option for me.

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

#752

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

mceachen wrote: post #716
ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a semi-pro photog who is very keen to quit Adobe completely, I'm very keen to try it out. Curious about privacy aspects though. When you say it's a private cloud, does it communicate back to your servers at all? Any goals for Linux compatibility? I'd love something that can store the photos on a NAS or network share drive, runs its processing in a Docker container on my LAN, and serves a web app locally with absol…

I have installers for Mac, 64 bit Windows 10, and 64 bit Ubuntu. My CI suite runs all ~2,600 tests on all three platforms after every commit. Your images, videos, and metadata stay yours, and are not uploaded anywhere. Currently I've got error reporting that phones home if there are critical problems detected, but the log events only include the stack trace and possibly the path to the problem file. PhotoStructure sp…

I've signed up via the site. Sounds very promising.

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

#753

Post by wwweston »

mappu wrote: post #563
skrebbel wrote: post #384

Jasc 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.

Fireworks (Adobe/Macromedia) was in this category of mixed vector/raster editors. I'd love to see it return, but a 2019 version would have to be somewhat different to survive. Krita is making serious moves in this direction.

It'd need to be somewhat different, yes, but... the biggest problem Fireworks faced in its last years at Adobe was basically who it was owned by. And what else they owned. Photoshop is the rare application with language warping household mindshare. It didn't matter that Fireworks was a better screen design tool on several level, Adobe almost constitutionally couldn't ever have really done enough with Fireworks without pitting it against their flagship title.

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

#754

Post by GauntletWizard »

Eridrus wrote: post #554
80386 wrote: post #519

Flash. The transition to JS + canvas wasn't too bad for games, although JS games can't be distributed as single files, but for animation I don't think there's anything like it anymore. And we forget how much of early internet culture was driven by 4chan's Flash board, which you can only have with things like .swf files - relatively small single files that can contain an entire game/animation.

Flash still exists as an authoring tool that exports JS/HTML5, does it not work well for animation?

No. Many of the things that made flash interesting just don't work when you're disturbing as HTML5, not the least of which is distribution - flash animations are one file, whereas HTML5 has at least a HTML file and a JavaScript object, but in practice doesn't ever get distributed that way at all. More often it's simply turned into a movie and distributed through YouTube... Which ruins much of the charm. Not just from resolution/compression issues. Flash animations, being vector based, scaled to any monitor, and even YouTube's 1080p just doesn't look nearly as good, because of compression algorithms optimized for live action video - if they actually compressed properly, they could get similar quality, but the price would still be way higher. Flash animations were typically sized mostly for their audio track - 3-4 MB of mp3 and 400k of animation code.

Then there's the whole thing about interactivity. Many of flashes best moments were Easter eggs. Most SBEmails have two or more. There's something about the hunt and realizing you "discovered" the extra bit that makes it so much more fun than a stinger.

Last but not least: flash is now much more... Hard to pirate. Much of flash animation was created by students and kids who were working with a tool they wanted to learn and with zero budget. It was an act of creative rebellion. It's hardly impossible, but it's not the same as it was.

The other large part is that flash is no longer as new and impressive and pioneering as it was. That bit can't be reclaimed, no matter what, but is also a shame. Exploration and boundary pushing was a huge part of all of what made flash so amazing - people realized that it could do "anything" and so did. That pioneering spirit lasted for a very long time, considering - the indie game scene is still riding the wave that flash started - but for animations, that hump is past and not least of which because it ran into the brick wall of iOS Safari.

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

#757

Post by dzamo_norton »

Tharkun wrote: post #314
culot wrote: post #252

Earlier 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.

Quiet often it's add-ons that are are at fault, e.g. the Lighnting calendar add-on can significantly extend launch time. Starting TB in safe mode will reveal if this is the case.

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

#758

Post by cylinder714 »

Windows 2000. That was the last version of Windows I used seriously, and it ran Firefox, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Pine (email) just fine with just 512 megabytes of RAM. Upgrading the machine to one gigabyte of memory made no difference I can remember. When XP was released, I felt no need to upgrade.

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

#760

Post by GordonS »

ilmiont wrote: post #122

Windows Phone. To this day no Android phone I've used ever as fast, reliable or plain refined as WP8 was. Unique design and many genuinely useful features, and it reflected a time when smartphones could have been vibrant and diverse, not our current two mega-platforms or nothing.

I did like Windows Phone, but it was buggy and crashed my phone at least every 1-3 days.
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