Wunderlist :(
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
861–870 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#862A diverse CPU collection. For a while we had some good alternatives to Intel x86. Alpha, Sparc, Motorola 68k, PowerPC, MIPS. Now we just have 32 and 64 variants of x86 and ARM. I guess powerpc is technically not dead yet (which is good!) although the new 64 bit powerpc is little endian I think... As for companies, Sun Microsystems. I'd like to think that Sun, if they were still around, would be handling Java better t…
I'd check out RISK-V, I think it will be a bigger player in the coming years https://riscv.org/
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#863Sunrise calendar app. I’m a naturally unorganized person, and sunrise was honestly the only calendar/task tracker that has ever kept me organized. I loved it and really used it, but it was bought by Microsoft and shutdown. They integrated some parts into outlook, but outlook is used for work and I don’t like to get my work schedule and personal schedule mixed up. Sunrise just worked and I really haven’t found somethi…
What was so special about that app? I've checked info at wiki and it seems like it was just calendar with daily schedule - birthdays, meetings etc. Nothing extraordinary. The same functionality you should have nowadays in every calendar app - Google, Microsoft etc.
It was the same functionality, however the UI was better imo and the platform integrated with almost every service. And since I use Microsoft for work and Google for school for me it was nice to have one with everything I wanted in it. Maybe any 3rd party app would have worked that way but I haven’t found it.
It’s been awhile now, but I remember it took me about 10 seconds to add an event which was really nice and all the fields I cared about were right at the top, so I didn’t have to stop in the middle of a conversation to actually add an event.
That’s what I remember anyway, technically pretty much every calendar app has the same functionality, sunrise just had great UX/UI, and integration so I could avoid the big players.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#864Ubuntu around 2010. It got fat and lazy after that so we no have to use xubuntu etc. for old pc's.
Lots of PC games naturally: half-life, quake3, fallout2, gta2 etc. etc.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#865I wish that Symbolics was still a going concern. I wish that openGenera was a going concern so that it could developed and distributed to run in a VM. The lisp machine computing environment still sounds so well thought out and engineered.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#866Grooveshark and Songza; I'll skip over Grooveshark since there's already a post mourning its loss.
I liked Songza's non-tailoring to me and more to the situations (rainy day for rainy days, party for late nights, even novelty playlists for Game of Thrones, musical scores from movies, etc).
When Google Play Music acquired Songza, they "sort of" integrated these things, but now just a shell of its former self where the "themed" playlist names stayed, but now its an echo chamber of stuff I've already heard. Sadly, there's no discovery anymore. And while it seems contradictory, I don't want to look for it. Grooveshark's radio stations and Songza's original playlists had a way of playing songs I never heard or haven't heard in a long time.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#867More mentality than product, but I’m tired of companies not focusing on solving problems well and focusing more on generating a religion around their tech. I feel like prior to the iPod, things either worked well or didn’t. Now, you can put out the most half ass tech, generate a religion and have an “argument” against well matured tech and call for its death by fire. Looking at you NoSQL-anything. Maybe it’s always b…
Yep, we are right at the middle of that craze. A group of buzz makers tries to steal the glory from the real titans under disguise of so called disruption. All without delivering the real value, but with tons of religious preaching. The computing industry probably reached the levels of Hollywood in 1930s where every Joe and Mary were going to make it. It clearly is a fad, but at the same time we have to face the fact…
As much as I wish you were correct, but I don't know if this is the "middle". It's all speculation. Hell, maybe tomorrow will be the day that social media will be banned and punishable by death by the Hague. But, I personally don't foresee too much of a slow down until there's a catastrophe due to it. Theranos I think is a good case study as to how the whole cult/religion mindset in tech is stupid and potentially dangerous. But that religious modal works fantastic in the scope of Apple and Google. Yes, there are the rebel movements against these guys, but let's be honest: "There's dozens of us! Dozens!". Relatively speaking to whom they cater to.
Hell there will always be folks like Musk and Jobs. Both were the second coming of Jesus for their respective groups. Both are deeply flawed... well, assholes if you actually knew them. Jobs literally funded one of the largest sweatshops on the planet to make iPods and iPhones. Musk has the same emotional temperament as Trump.
Facing the fact, most people in tech are just as religious as West Boro Baptist Church followers. Actually, I'd argue more because they don't realize they are. At least in most well rooted religions "Don't believe in false idols", at least teaches you that you are praying to something. That makes you aware that you are "praying". No difference between Sunday service and a tech stage conference with the giant projector images of everyone's current worshiping idol. "We removed the audio jack and you should all be happy, amen".
And people clapped to that shit.
This could actually be a super long legit post I could make. But long story short, Silicon Valley is the new Vatican. They're imposing their ideology of what they think is right (We own your personal information to better sell to you). Only difference, there's many more sects within it, all going for the same populous (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc). They hide behind having "faith in disruptive tech" but deliver, first off crap tech and second really intrusive, ethically shit-stained privacy practices.
I'm getting soap boxy and this requires a lot of explaining. I still think there's still more room for this all to get worse. Obviously, I want to be wrong. Like, I hope one day you can go "Dude, you realize how stupid you were?"
My legs are getting numb from doing this on a toilet with my phone.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#868I miss rdio, before Spotify. I loved how in Rdio, you could search for a song, and then the next song after the one you play would be from that album. In Spotify, the search results begin playing! It's so frustrating.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#869I miss the old Mint app. The new Mint has one screen with nested navigations and four useless tabs that I don't use.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#870Come next March, I'm going to be missing Google Inbox. Completely changed how I use email for the better. I'm dreading going back to the tradition email workflow and hope to God that somebody builds something to replace Inbox in my life. I also miss StumebleUpon from years ago. I don't even know if the site still exists, but for me it died when it forced me to pick interests. The great thing about that site was that…
Ditto on Inbox. Tried to use Spark as a replacement, but it wasn't even close to providing the experience Inbox does. Do you have any alternatives in mind?
It's pricey, but superhuman.com is very good.