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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?

#781

Post by vram22 »

foreigner wrote: post #497
vram22 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha ha, good one. I had a Palm V and a Palm Zire. Both were very good devices. One of the best features was the instant-on and you're back in the app you were last using, after power-on. No booting period of even a few seconds. And of course, the Graffiti handwriting system (with the stylus) was great too. I even tried using Pippy, a port of Python to the Palm. Would have been great for writing small snippets of code…

I still use Palm Graffiti as shorthand when playing Boggle.

TIL about Boggle. Seems like an interesting game, thanks. Must check it out.

For anyone else interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggle

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

#782

Post by extractly »

iscrewyou wrote: post #140
dcminter wrote: post #31

Picasa (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 used picass for one thing and one thing only: image organization. I could point it to a directory and it would read all the images. It wouldn’t copy them to it’s database, it wouldn’t try to change their format. It would simply read them as fast as I’ve ever seen and show me what’s in that directory. Then it would keep the directory hierarchy in place. I haven’t been able to find anything similar. I search for a si…

Picasa was definitely a state of the art app. Image controls, overall speed and smoothness of the user interface! I still cannot find anything close to it. I ended up using ImageRanger for browsing my pictures and it seems to be quite fast and non intrusive. It looks like these days almost every device and app is trying to force you to use their subscription based cloud storage or service.

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

#783

Post by bobak »

I've used a few later versions of rule-based tools like https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/knowledge-engineerin... but never got to try the original Lisp ones. Merging ART or one of the other ones in Common-Lisp with some semantic-web tools like allegrograph would be interesting.

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

#784

Post by mixmastamyk »

ajdlinux wrote: post #674
mixmastamyk wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Possibly, hard to know over this medium. I’ve never encountered the problem, but added the tasks to my cleanup command.

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

#785

Post by kashyapc »

culot wrote: post #252
bhauer wrote: post #156

* 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…

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…

Speaking of e-mail clients, come to the bright side and use blazing fast tools like `mutt`. Thanks to such tools, my day-to-day "computing experience" has become far more pleasant for the past five years.

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

#786

Post by albertgoeswoof »

IshKebab wrote: post #666
AdamGibbins wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can find on the internet, it does support notifications, even says so on their official site. So not sure what your comment is referring to.

Ah yes. The pictures I found made it look like it didn't have a proper display but it actually does. Definitely not e-ink though.

It is e ink... the screen is always on, works in bright light and lasts 30 days+

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

#787

Post by peach »

Interestingly enough I haven't read anyone suggesting this: Macromedia Freehand. Before Adobe acquired Macromedia and killed it in favour of Illustrator, it was probably the best vector drawing program you could get at the time.

I'd love to resurrect it and make it open source.

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

#788

Post by guitarbill »

gregopet wrote: post #598
robocat wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps I wonder how much of it was because they had a sorry arse mobile browser? Not supporting ontouchstart etc events must have been a killer. MSPointerEvent was awfully buggy in the initial release, and what dev wants to rewrite their web app/page to use PointerEvent? Why wouldn't you make sure Hybrid apps (Cordova etc) work well? Why not just copy WKWebView…

Not just the browser, the whole platform was crap to develop for. My company ported a bunch of apps by a major app publisher to various versions of Windows Phone and the documentation was shitty, the APIs were shitty, everything shifted with each new version and everything was buggy. We kept asking our local Microsoft branch for help (backed by the publisher we were porting for) and more often than not they were powe…

Even Microsoft themselves dropped the ball, when it took over a year for them to release Skype - which they owned - for their own mobile platform (if I'm remembering correctly, i had a Windows Phone and rather liked it).
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