Google Wave had so many potential routes to usability as a kind of collaborative scratch pad. Google Keep and the now-very-good Google Docs collaborating is what we really needed all along, I guess.
Google Keep is still quite low on features.
Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
771–780 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#772Earlier quoted context omitted.
In an alternate universe, Apple bought Be. Inc. instead of NeXT. It nearly happened too - they got down to talking price[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History
In that alternate universe, what happened next?
I think that Apple would not have had quite the same resurgence. POSIX compatibility is one of the unsung heroes of the post-OS X era, and BeOS wasn't quite compatible enough.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#773Adobe Air. HTML/CSS/JS in a native executible with access to native methods? It sounded like a dream. ANd yeah, you can do Adobe Air without Flash. You could build desktop apps and phone apps with the same tools on top of it. I really liked the desktop stuff. I made a couple of apps and used a ton of Adobe Air apps (non-Flash) back in the day. Thought it was the future. It failed, for some reason. ^^^^ this is the re…
Microsoft flirted with it as far back as Windows 95, in the form of the HTA (HTML Application).
HTA were awesome, I wrote a very rich UI Innosetup-alike entirely in it back in the late 90s. Everything was there, it exposed pretty much any system interface via COM, and everything pristinely documented in Microsoft style
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#774Parts of the old Web Services stack.
It is obvious why SOAP died (to me at least). It was a solution in search of a problem that was already solved by REST/HTTP with generic payloads.
BUT.... things like WSDL that gave you an interface description... it would be nice if something like that had survived.
The closest thing to this that I know of is Swagger. But not having a standard machine-readable way to integrate with REST APIs/services is a missing piece of the puzzle I think.
The Web Services Description Language provided that. I'm surprised that or an equivalent never got traction.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#775Paypal used to have this feature that allowed you to install a browser add-on and you could generate a CC number on the fly that was good for either one time use or recurring use (for subscription services). This feature served two primary purposes: 1) to be able to pay using PayPal on sites that didn't support it 2) to help prevent against fraud which was becoming a massive problem at the time. If the number was sto…
On the Quora page they explained the main reason behind dropping the product was that fact that users had to install a browser extension to get the CC number, which put people off.
Surely they could have very easily sent the CC details to the users by email or SMS (security risks) or better still they could obtain the details by logging into their PayPal account.
Seems odds that the execs axed the product over this when they were so many solutions to the problem.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#776Paypal used to have this feature that allowed you to install a browser add-on and you could generate a CC number on the fly that was good for either one time use or recurring use (for subscription services). This feature served two primary purposes: 1) to be able to pay using PayPal on sites that didn't support it 2) to help prevent against fraud which was becoming a massive problem at the time. If the number was sto…
I’d suggest you look at what we built at Final. Getfinal.com We took a hard deep look at a massive stagnant industry (credit cards) and use experience and features as differentiators
Too bad it requires an invite code. Do you have one for us? :)
I use privacy.com for something similar, but it's a debit card (so it just connects to your bank account) rather than a credit card and doesn't offer any rewards.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#777GWT. To create client-side web apps, rather than writing Javascript, write Java and have it transpiled to Javascript. Java has IDEs, isn't a new language to learn (like Dart), has static type checking, support for refactoring in the IDEs, etc. GWT could do tree shaking, obfuscation, etc. You could write your server code in Java, and "call" remote server methods from your client code, "passing" Java objects transparen…
In addition to the ones mentioned, another issue with GWT was that the differences in browser JS environments were much more salient in 2006 (IE6 was still a massively popular browser) and browser development tools were limited. If your script didn't work, debugging was likely difficult.
It was a stated goal of GWT to produce different JS files, one per browser, so that it could generate the right JS dialect for each browser. (And so that the browser didn't have to download "if" statements containing code for other browsers that it was never going to run, meaning a smaller downloaded, also relevant then.) That always worked perfectly for me, but I only used it for about 6 months, on a small project.
Also, it had a debugging version where it actually ran the client code in a JVM, and you could step through it with Eclipse etc. Of course that didn't help if the bug only happened after the Java-to-Javascript compilation process, but in my short experience with it I never had such a bug.
Of course Javascript and the browsers have caught up, but I would have expected these features to be gladly embraced by the development community at the time, as they really did help. But they weren't.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#778Airships. I wish they got off the ground.
...ba-dum-tss...
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#779Pokemon Go. It did take the world by storm but promptly died due to incompetence from Niantic. One can only hope that they didn't set enthusiasm for AR games too far back.
I don't think Niantic was responsible for the decline but just the game itself was. It only garnered the attention it did because of the Pokemon name but at the end of the day the game was a grind. I saw a lot of people lose interest because there was nothing really unique about it. Everybody that I knew that played it turned the AR off as well, so it became just another game.
> I don't think Niantic was responsible for the decline but just the game itself was.
They re-skinned their previous game and only added a gym fighting minigame. It's entirely their fault. Even today the game doesn't have all the features shown in the trailer. Their game has no end-game content either so even the core demographic lost any reason to play.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#780Peer-to-peer file sharing. There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes. I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of you…
I used to work for an on-demand content streaming company, so I'm biased, but the cataloging, searching, and quality of content are big scaling issues for the average user.