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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?

#401
post #349

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.

Webamp - "A reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and Javascript" - Load any classic Winamp skin just by dragging it onto the main window. - If a skin specifies some transparent regions in its region.txt, they are respected. Features - https://twitter.com/captbaritone/status/961274714013319168 Source - https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp

But does Webamp “Really whip the llama’s ass”?

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

#403

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…

I must say, the first time in ages I used a modern windows phone was some Nokia in 2014ish, still running wp 8. I was really positively surprised how well designed it was. Pleasing to use, at least what I could judge from in a day of use. This whole tile bullshit from the desktop finally made sense and felt great. Also Scrolling felt smoother than on any Android device I ever held for some reason.

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

#404

The 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…

You should give Ubuntu an experimental try. I have only ever used Windows most my life, but for hobby projects I use Ubuntu/PopOS!. If you are doing Web development I highly recommend that over Windows. Just last night I tried to setup a Phoenix project on a fresh install of windows and after 5 hours I was still installing C++ build tools, setting up path variables etc etc. It honestly is a world of pain. I remember…

That might be true, but on the flip side I have had things go horribly wrong with ubuntu where it either took me more then half a day hacking away at it, or worse case I just reinstalled ubuntu all together. Bad upgrades that break dependencies, video card drivers failing in strange ways, a bad boot that just drops me in grub, and etc. I even jump ship on distos when they annoyed me so much I wanted them dead. I mainly run lubuntu for my desktop needs and every now and then I think gentoo wouldn't do this to me gentoo might take 3 days for a upgrade to complete, but it wouldn't fail me like lubuntu is right now. Plus systemd makes me scream at night.

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

#405

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…

I had the Nokia Lumia 920 with Windows Phone 8. That was really where smartphones peaked. I dislike both iOS and Android, they've just tried to migrate the desktop metaphor to the phone and it's not really working.

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

#406
post #355

KDE 3. I used it for years, it was a good and mostly stable desktop environment. Then with KDE 4 they added all kinds of fancy features that added instability, strange error messages and then made them non-optional.

It’s IPC system dcop was the most shell-script friendly ipc ive seen

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

#408

Windows Phone on Nokia Hardware. Have extensively used both iOS/iPhone and Android/Xperia since my last Windows Phone and neither come even close to WP usability, and although the sense of quality the iPhone gives me does match what I felt with Nokia, nothing has come close to matching the 1520,the best mobile device I've ever used.

Shame that there are no alternatives in mobile OS market. WP was a really good attempt with a realistic chance of success.

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

#409

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…

I finally "upgraded" from a Windows 8.1 phone to an Android phone because no one makes apps for Windows phone. I miss the Windows phone UI. Tiles are just a superior to Android's menu/launcher.
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