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.
and GNOME 2 at that!
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
421–430 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I'm sure there were many reasons it died, but my theory is that Google strategically wanted to kill it because the User was in control of the data-sources and the algorithm. Google wanted people to migrate to Google+, News, etc. where they control what you see. This is what Facebook and Twitter did. Their feeds used to be a simple chrono sort of sources you determined, but then they slowly took control. In my…
This is by far the best explanation I've read. Thx for making my day.
It's a chilling distillation of the fact that making us happy is tangential to underlying corporate motives.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#423The mailbox that was acquired by Dropbox. They invented the “swipe your email to do things” trick and then no more. They have clients on iOS and Mac that work seamlessly. I still miss it very much.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#424Visual Basic (the original version, pre=VBA that was embedded in office)
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#425A 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…
I'd argue that today we have an even larger variety in CPUs.
They're all ARM, but they exist and almost anything can be made to run on them. Well, not trivially, but it can be done. ARM is also supported by Ubuntu, Arch, Debian etc.
The only problem is that most of ARM hardware is made just for phones etc, where *nix doesn't work great because of manufacturers and their closed-source firmware.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#426The 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…
Imo, the hubs were really what made WP special and it would've been amazing with more third-party buy-in (which realistically was never going to happen). Going to a single centralized spot for social media or whatever else, instead of browsing through a dozen different apps, is such a great idea. I was totally on board with WP but then Microsoft bungled the later WP updates (my phone wasn't supported, and it was one…
Blackberry 10 OS had the same thing -- a unified location (called the hub) where all of you communication would go. It was great, except that third-party apps rarely (and decreasingly) integrated with it.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#427The 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…
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.
> what was a live tile?
Similar to android's "widgets".
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#428Google Reader. Now I have a mix of HN, Reddit and GMail, and none of them work really how I like.
Feedly works for me
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did it do that Google Photos doesn't? I never tried it, but I know there are some die-hards who really miss it.
It would be nice to have some kind of Google-Photos-alike without the Google part. E.g. I can host on my own NAS.
Would you pay for an end to end solution? Have had it at the back of my mind for a while. No Google. No Apple. No cloud.
But all other features from machine learning like face and scene detection, convenient cataloguing, and probably apps across devices that'll help you store and access all of this centrally backed up on your own NAS.
So would you pay for it?
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#430The scripting language for the Macintosh's rolodex-type database (Hypercard) called "HyperText". I'm not aware of any more natural language scripting tool before or since. I can still write code in it, some two decades later... For example: 'put the first character of the third word of line 5 of card field "sometext" into theChar' or 'put the value of card field "typehere" * 1.25 into theValue'
Reading about hypercard/hypertalk, especially the pages devoted to it in whole earth's Signal [0], is one of those things that makes me nostalgic for an era I never experienced.