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Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

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Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#361

Nokia n900. Portable linux box, real keyboard. http://neo900.org/ doesn't seem to have gained much traction. https://www.planetcom.co.uk/ seems to be the closest thing we have now.

Yes, phone with real keyboard. Last one I had was Nokia E7, five to six years ago, and I still miss the keyboard.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#362

Old-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.

You can still download the old Winamp and use it on a modern Windows installation. Works just fine, though it doesn't know what media buttons are.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#363

SageTV. You could hook up an HD cable box and record shows to a PC or server with a simple, intuitive interface for later viewing. Basically turned your PC or home server into an infinite PVR. It was wonderful. Google purchased and shuttered them a few years back. For a while I tried a regular pvr + Slingbox, but found it to be such garbage that I basically just stopped watching most sports rather than deal with the…

Plex and silicon dust does the job for me.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#364

A 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…

It's a real shame we lost Sun. It was such an innovative company when it came to technology - one of the few examples of really engineering led software teams where management had no say in technical decisions. Unfortunately, the market doesn't really reward world class technical solutions/expertise. I'm still not sure what it rewards. Predatory business practices a la Oracle?

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#365

Nokia n900. Portable linux box, real keyboard. http://neo900.org/ doesn't seem to have gained much traction. https://www.planetcom.co.uk/ seems to be the closest thing we have now.

The N900 was such a cool idea and also a pretty decent phone. I owned two of them but then had to eventually let it go..

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#366

Nokia n900. Portable linux box, real keyboard. http://neo900.org/ doesn't seem to have gained much traction. https://www.planetcom.co.uk/ seems to be the closest thing we have now.

GPD Win 2; DragonBox Pyra (upcoming).

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#367

The Zune (media players) and Windows Phone (upto 8, not even 8.1). The fluid interface with focus on readability and content. The photos app was amazing. Live tiles are amazing. The music player and it's live tile was amazing. The performance was the same whether on a low end budget phone or the top of the line model. So many good ui and ux decisions like the lack of hamburger menus and placement of all menu items al…

Isn't a hamburger menu just a two-dimensional ellipsis?

The difference is that instead of being in the top left or right corners all the all menus / buttons were placed at the bottom of the screen which made them infinitely more accessible to use.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#368
The original PlayStation Portable. No other console I've had so far has been quite as fun to play, mobile gaming just isn't the same, and I had a lot of fun learning to crack it and install pirated games. I used to take it on road trips and even watch full movies, it was a great way to pass the time as a kid. I had it repaired twice before it finally gave out, and the nostalgia sometimes hits and I consider getting one again.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#369
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I’ve been interested in the touchbar as a way to get emacs-mode-specific shortcut keys.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#370

Grooveshark 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…

Grooveshark was the only music streaming service I’ve been ever using. The way Grooveshark was slaughtered was despicable and turned me down to pay any subscriptions to the online music hienas. Years long curated playlists lost unrecoverably with the shutdown of the service :’(
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