PC Accelerator
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
431–440 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#432Panoramio. I used these photos in Google Earth heavily before every travel. Street view is a poor replacement, I'm missing so much stuff that was off the road. I could see what the beaches look like, what's the terrain at some point, path through wood. Heck, even just frequency of Panoramio photos at some location would tell me what's interesting to see there.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#433The 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 use it daily with zero issues. I don't know why people keep perpetuating this, but it works great, as if it were native.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#434Kifi. On similar lines to Pinterest but only for bookmarks. Picasa was the best image viewer for desktops I ever used.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#435The 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 very, very slow. Be warned.
I use it every day. It really is perfectly fine!
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#436I used to use an old Linux file manager called DFM back in 2002 to 2006 or so. Doesn't seem to be online any longer, but this looks like a copy of the original website sans graphics: http://distro.ibiblio.org/amigolinux/download/DeskTop/IconMg... I have the source code saved somewhere. This file manager had one nice feature that I haven't seen again: the use of a plain text config file to set which commands are used…
You can use Ranger (https://github.com/ranger/ranger) which is available on most Linux distros nowadays. It is fully hackable (written in Python). You can change the file association (which command to open which file) by editing ~/.config/ranger/rifle.conf. More details here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ranger#File_association
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#437Adobe Fireworks.
Easy, intuitive vector-based editor with bitmap support. Ideal for creating/editing images for UIs.
It worked the way I expected an image editing tool to work. The complete opposite of Photoshop and Gimp (I don't understand the mental model there).
Sketch is a decent replacement—although there are some UI decisions I don't agree with—and I believe Figma is also very similar.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#438Old-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.
the thing i loved with winamp was at one peak where it was fast and simple.
You wanted to queue songs? middle click the heck out of your playlist. want to stop on end of queue? that was an option
you want to add to queue on spotify it's like 2 cumbersome clicks, you can't just go gattling-gun i want "this this this to play next"
jump to song was fantastic - with a global hotkey.
audacious with the winamp skin gets close to all this, but just misses somehow.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#439The Amiga, can't remember another time when computers were that much fun.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#440The 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.
had the same transition few month ago, i can highly recommend `Square Home 2`, i was able to recreate my winphone layout 1:1 sans the hubs