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Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
201–210 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#202The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect.
Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I can't seem to figure out how to install PHP 7.2 correctly to work on Laravel, nor get my GPG and SSH keys for Github working.
The bright side is if I move to Windows I wouldn't have to give up very many programs, or they have some rough but useable equivalents (Spectacle, Sequel Pro, Gifox, Bear).
I was tempted to go with Elementary on the Razer Blade Stealth, but I still want 32gb of RAM, and Propellerheads Reason doesn't work on Linux.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#203Widget Workshop [1]
It was a electronics tinkering game where you had different components like timers, light bulbs, switches, gravity testers and what not, which you could connect with wires and build interesting things.
They had several demos that you could check out, like poem generators, dog barking sound generator machine and other interesting stuff.
As a kid, it really helped fuel my imagination to make new contraptions out of random things.
I haven't seen an alternate that works on modern systems or phones. The original version, I believe, worked only till Windows ME or so.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was a live tile? On a side note I do wish there were strong 3rd or 4th choices for a phone OS. A shame Blackberry is now just an Android flavor.
A live tile in windows phone, 8, 10, etc is an app icon that contains realtime info like weather. I've never used the particular app mentioned, but live tiles are just a cool way to display info.
Yeah you could flick open your phone and the live tile said the current Temperature. Or rotated your latest photos in the photo app (or favourite photos depending on config), showed the latest headline in news app.
I spent alot less time on my phone cos information was at a glance and I didn't need to open/close many apps all the time.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#205Kai's Photo Soap and Kai's Power Goo. Or anything by Kai. Especially the little tools like the texture explorer and fractal generator. The user interfaces were refreshingly unique.
Check out Adrian Mendoza's photo-based works. He's still using Kai's Power Tools and other filters on a PowerMac.
(Not sure he has a site with that work but it's scattered throughout his Twitter feed[1] along with some neat aerial photography of SF and the bay area.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#206Old-school Winamp. I use Spotify these days, but man it was fun to customise skins and play with the awesome visualisers.
Half-Life 3 would also be nice, but I guess it was never "around" to begin with.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#207Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#208Macbook pros when they had a good keyboard!
They were called Powerbooks back then :)
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#209Rdio. No other streaming service has come close to the UX perfection of Rdio.
When they were both new, I tried out Rdio and Spotify. Rdio won my subscription hands down and it was long after they'd shut down that I finally bit the bullet and subscribed to Spotify.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#210Carousel and Mailbox by Dropbox. God i loved the design language and maturity of Dropbox as a company/product in the 2012-2014 era compared to the trash it has become now.