Ubuntu Unity. As soon as it got mature (some last Ubuntu releases including it) it became the best desktop environment I've ever seen. I was not amazed when they gave up Gnome2 and started Unity (I've moved to XFCE for many years) but learnt to love it later and the move to Gnome3 feels a disaster to me (IMHO Gnome3 is great for tablets but horrible for desktop). Now I've reproduced an environment very similar to Unity with KDE5 and enjoy it but I would certainly love Unity to actually come back.
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
921–930 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#922Grooveshark 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 best. There had also been a similar Chinese service I used (it was not that pretty and all in Chinese but this is not a problem as soon as you learn where to click, no need to actually understand what's written there) but they have banned access from non-Chinese IPs one day.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#923Old-style Heroes of Might & Magic by NWC/3DO. Versions > 3 look fancy but don't feel this magic to play.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#924Opera Browser
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#925The 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…
Apple has ditched so many cool things in the MacBook line. 1) MagSafe. I know they really want to go all in on USB-C, but the original MagSafe connector was awesome. Even the weaker 2.0 version was nice. There were two instances where that connector saved my laptop. 2) The laser-drilled power indicator. That was so cool. It looked like the light magically appeared through the aluminum. Now there's no indication whats…
MagSafe wires insulation always breaks at both ends and the connector is too wide to fix that with a heat-shrinked tube easily.
SD Card slot is an essential thing, I can't believe they've removed it.
Lack of HDMI is not a problem IMHO, I've bought a great Thunderbolt-HDMI converter for about $10 on AliExpress, out it on my HDMI cable and forgotten about the problem.
Lack of some keys has always been a pain, removing even function keys and an ESC key looks like they really hate people that use terminal.
Removing classic USB ports was too ahead-of-time, they should have waited at least some years before doing this (BTW I actually am not sure USB-C is going to become the standard, there are a lot of problems with it).
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#926Bump. Exchanging contact information by bumping phones was fun and frictionless.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#927The 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'
Though HyperCard itself is long gone, the HyperText language did inspire AppleScript.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#928Opera presto. I only realized how "close" I was to my browser in every aspect it worked when it became unusable due to age. I was quite surprised about that discovery, since other switches I made in the past (windows to Linux for example) seemed much larger. I'm still recovering from this loss. ;)
What is your opinion of Vivaldi?
It's chrome on steroids. I use it mostly on my laptop, with chrome exclusively for google services.
While it's trying hard to please old Opera users while at the same time moving forward and introducing new ideas, it's just not feeling like home. I like that it's making "power user" features easier to access than Chrome, that's one of the things I got used to with Opera. But overall it feels a little slower, which might be attributable to the JS user interface, or just in general that it's quite fat, being based on Blink. Especially opening up new windows feels really sluggish. There isn't many pages left on the web that do that, but you run into those every now and then. I think FF and Chrome "fix" this by just opening them as new tabs, but Vivaldi tries to restore the old feel of having those simple UI-less floating popup windows; with mediocre success.
I still use Opera 12 alongside of Vivaldi and Firefox at work just for fun, it's fine for browsing status pages, cgit and similar things on our intranet, and with those simple pages it's notably faster than anything else on the market. Navigating the history is another big offender here on FF/Chrome. Clicking back multiple times in Opera will instantly restore any previous page, there is no perceieved delay or re-layouting, which just feels "right" and so much more consistent than any modern SPA that tries to achieve the same in millions of lines of Javascript.
I could come up with a bunch more examples, but that's already more rambling than anyone wants to read I guess. :-)
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#929Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try FitBit Versa, apart from the always-on screen, it has everything you're looking for. The battery life averages 4-5 days depending on usage. I personally own it and it's the best purchase I have made. Drastically improved my life.
Fitbit bought Pebble just to kill it. I will never buy a fitbit.
Fitbit bought Pebble to catch them before they swirled down the drain. If Fitbit bought Pebble to kill it, they're idiots, because Pebble would have done that on their own (sadly, says the owner of a box of Pebbles).
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#930Video game arcades. They were amazing during their heyday, but I was also young. I want both of those things back!
There are several in my little tourist town on the New Hampshire coast - on the street that runs along the beach, among the souvenir shops, pizza places and so on. They're a place where kids too young to go to the bars hang out in the evening or if it starts to rain during their day at the beach.
And then, of course, there's FunSpot a little further inland which is basically arcade heaven.