Sunrise Calendar
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
331–340 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#332Surprised nobody mentioned them yet: Borland and their approach to UI development. I know some of their products live on, but I am nostalgic towards the wysiwyg days of old without being forced to use MS. I of course am aware of modern equivalents, but sadly the market/users moved.
Try the Red language.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#333Squaresoft, the company that made Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears. After merging with Enix, their games just lost that magical touch they had.
Firefly TV series.
Comme des Garcons Kyoto perfume.
And, of course, I second the MacBook '14-15 revival! Touchbar begone!
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#334Grooveshark had a better interface for managing "currently playing" than anything I've used before or since. Most apps don't even track what's currently playing in an intelligent fashion. Similarly, rockbox was really great mp3 player firmware, when I used to use one of those. It had a funny feature I've never seen elsewhere: multi-lingual article-ignoring sort. I had German band "Die Prinzen" on that mp3 player, and…
My wife still rues the loss of Grooveshark. She’s never recovered. I don’t blame her. All other streaming services suck horribly.
The ability to quickly spin up a "radio broadcast" in Grooveshark for friends was amazing. With a small group of five friends we set up a Friday DJ rotation where one person would queue songs all day and the others listen in. All the "broadcasts" got saved as playlists, which you could "favourite" from your own account and go back to whenever you wanted. People could make requests when they had a "next track" that would segue well with what you were already playing. It was really fun!
I have never had a period of more high quality music discovery and I sorely miss those playlists, many of which featured obscure/rare/live tracks that simply aren't available in today's music services.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#335HP 200 LX
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#336Ensemble Studios, makers of Age of Empires, Age of Empires 2, and Age of Mythology, some of the best RTSs ever made. There are other great RTSs, but they're all great in different ways from the Age series, which nothing else resembles. Microsoft bought them, and shut them down not long after for insufficient profits. Sigh. Age of Empires IV is being made now since they noticed there's demand, but the studio they chos…
There’s a full chapter about Ensemble in this book:
https://www.npr.org/2017/09/05/547367445/-blood-sweat-and-pi...
...which I coincidentally listened to via Audible today. There’s a lot more to the story than, “...shut them down... for insufficient profits.” They wanted to branch out from the RTS genre, prototyped a bunch of different ideas, but didn’t really get far enough (or enough traction with MSFT, which wrote their checks) to ship them. Microsoft was wary of them launching new IP, so tasked them with making Halo Wars, which was an RTS for consoles. This was a drastically different undertaking than RTS-for-PCs due to controllers (instead of keyboards + mice), and they all got burned out working on it after many years. Microsoft shut them down after Halo Wars shipped.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#337The 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 c…
WSL is terrible. It's basically a tech demo (look up what happens if you `cp` a file from `C:\...` to `/home/user` versus `copy` or going the other direction. It's alright to boot up a linux "VM" using docker, but then you have to pay extra for windows pro or whatever so you can unlock hypervisor privileges. I recently bought an extra SSD to put into the windows desktop I bought and am happily running linux, don't mi…
I don't see the issue with this, they clearly warn you not to modify the WSL filesystem from Windows because you'll break it: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/11/17/do-n...
They advertise it as being useful for development work, and it perfectly fulfills that purpose for me
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#338Demonoid, a private torrent tracker. It had a wide range of quality files and the enforced ratio kept seeders around.
Jeez I haven’t heard that name in forever, completely forgot about it.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#339The 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 c…
The design is terrible. I never use the touchpad for anything regular keys wouldn't do better. The keyboard on my 2017 MBP13 failed three times in the year I've owned it. The first time, the Apple Store person "cleaned" the keyboard, fixed things for a while. A couple of weeks later, the problem came back. I insisted on a better solution, and they replaced the keyboard. Five months later, a different key failed, and…
I personally find function keys useless (I’m mostly in Vim and map things to leader + mnemonic key sequences), so the Touch Bar tends to offer more value for things like media control. It really boils down to personal use, rather than a fundamentally flawed design.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#340Google Reader. Now I have a mix of HN, Reddit and GMail, and none of them work really how I like.
I recommend http://inoreader.com/ - I'm not affiliated with it in any way, however I am a very happy user of it.