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Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

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Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#731

Post by geerlingguy »

michaelflux wrote: post #52
cpcallen wrote: post #30

Aperture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software) I would happily pay for an update that fixed outstanding bugs and ensured compatibility with future versions of macOS. It would be nice to have some new features, too, but it is basically "good enough" as it is and I dread the day I can no longer run it. I'm really not sure what I will do. The claim that Photos was going to be a meaningful replacement for Ape…

Oh man, so much this. When Photos just came out and Apple was making the claims about how they've taken everything good from Aperture and stuck it into Photos I was pretty optimistic considering how solid of an app Aperture became over the years. Now, few days down the road, pretty clear that Photos is just a marginally better iPhoto with the vast majority of features that were useful for professionals such as Stacks…

Stacks, 2-up and 4-up comparison, the Loupe, star ratings, fast browsing of raw files... so much missing functionality. Lightroom IMO was never as good as Aperture, I really wish Apple would’ve spun it off instead of just letting it wither.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#732

Post by geerlingguy »

octorian wrote: post #689
cpcallen wrote: post #30

Aperture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software) I would happily pay for an update that fixed outstanding bugs and ensured compatibility with future versions of macOS. It would be nice to have some new features, too, but it is basically "good enough" as it is and I dread the day I can no longer run it. I'm really not sure what I will do. The claim that Photos was going to be a meaningful replacement for Ape…

Many years ago, when I was first getting into digital photography, I was faced with the Aperture-vs-Lightroom decision. Both seemed promising, with Aperture even having some advantages. What ultimately made me choose Lightroom, however, was the multi-platform support (I've always liked MacOSX laptops, but prefer to use Windows and/or Linux on the desktop). Several months later, something happened that basically reaff…

On the flip side, for some camera models Apple has added support more quickly. And while Photos is no Aperture, it does have pretty good RAw profiles and lens correction for almost all popular DSLRs, mirrorless cameras, and all the 1st-party lenses I’ve ever owned.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#733

Post by mr-ron »

lettergram wrote: post #207

Pebble - still the best smart watch at the moment. I don't want my watch tracking me, I want a long battery life and I want it to be subtle. This is one of the few times I actually watched better technology fail. Crushed by a few poor business decisions.

Amazfit bip

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#734

Post by geerlingguy »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #310
cpcallen wrote: post #30

Aperture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software) I would happily pay for an update that fixed outstanding bugs and ensured compatibility with future versions of macOS. It would be nice to have some new features, too, but it is basically "good enough" as it is and I dread the day I can no longer run it. I'm really not sure what I will do. The claim that Photos was going to be a meaningful replacement for Ape…

I'm not a pro and loved Aperture. It made my workflow so easy and it was such a fast program. I haven't found anything that lets me cruise through photos so fast and pare them down. Left/Right arrows, Z to look at details, X to flag as a reject made running through hundreds of photos a breeze. I'm trying to find an alternative and, quite frankly, everything I've tried is not great. I ended up buying AfterShot Pro, bu…

Fast Raw Viewer. It has very few frills, but it lets me do selects way faster than even Aperture. Whether processing in Lightroom, photoshop, or Photos, I always run larger batches through this app so I can quickly toss rejects and pick a few selects.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#735

Post by AtlasBarfed »

eldavido wrote: post #368
nicolapede wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect to windows phone, I really miss the tiles, the consistency of the metro style gui and other little details, like automatic do not disturb mode while driving or face recognition well before it became mainstream.

I completely agree and I used to work at Microsoft. Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps. It's an instructive story of how an inferior product can win. I'm not saying that happens all the time or that it's inevitable, but I think it's safe to say that's sort of what happened here.

Or maybe it's because your company has screwed over people and lazily abused a monopoly position for decades to the detriment of many, destroying trust and building resentment.

Must feel strange getting beaten by an "inferior" product, considering how many inferior products Microsoft dumped on the market leveraging their business practices and monopoly position.

Microsoft may be behaving better now so that people will run their linux instances on Azure.

And android may be somewhat inferior, but it is far more open and is pretty damn good. Windows phone may have had a nice intro screen and some nifty features, but who knows if/when it could have handled the massive app variety and bad actors that android does. With the security reputation of windows, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't.

The alternative phone OSs we should be mourning are PalmOS, Ubuntu mobile, and similar efforts. Microsoft's continued existence will have to be tolerated, but any product of theirs that fails or acquiesces is a victory for the consumer.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#736

Post by nawtacawp »

ekianjo wrote: post #691
imhoguy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found Pix to be the good replacement of Picasa. https://github.com/linuxmint/pix

Never heard about it before. How did you find out about that one?

Default installed on LM 19. It’s great

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#737

Post by badminton1 »

bhauer wrote: post #156

* Windows Phone. We need a third viable option in the mobile space. This week we are concerned about the loss of a browser engine, recognizing this is unhealthy for the market. Windows Phone was terrific in many ways and recent concepts by fans such as @boxnwhisker (Harry Dohyun Kim) [1] show how beautiful the Metro design could be today. * Microsoft Image Composer. A little known sprite-oriented graphic arts program…

If you resurrect those technologies they would die again right after.

Nobody cared about Windows phone and nobody noticed when it died.

It enjoys the same prestige as Microsoft Bob.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#738

Post by oneplane »

Tharkun wrote: post #314
culot wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windyws Phone's tile setup is still the best home screen setup for mobile. As I peep at my Android home with pretty wallpaper with acres of bhank space and uninformative icons, I pine for the informative, intelligent WP tiles. Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then. Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison. As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow , how i…

> I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what circumstances this would happen. I have hundreds of thousands of mails in tbird, in various accounts and folders. It's never struck me as slow. And its search (one of the features i use most) is simply fast.

It happpens under various circumstances, nothing easy to pin-point here.

Example: on two identical iMacs (4 cores, 16GB RAM, PCIe SSD) with about 100GB of local synced IMAP and the same accounts, it's slow for one user's iMac but fast on the other. Deleted TB and profile, fresh user, fresh TB install, fresh config; same result.

Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

#739

Post by nkeo »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #682
jimmaswell wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows desktop is "mostly broken"? That's news to me.

It’s broken insofar as there isn’t a complete and coherent “developer story” for building a Windows desktop application that doesn’t look like it came from the 1990s. I call it “the Photoshop test”: Pretend you’re Adobe and you just invented Photoshop in 2018. How do you build the GUI for each desktop operating system? ...considering you need to do things like OpenGL hardware acceleration, 30-bit color, support binar…

Why is the sandboxing such a big issue in the case of a “Photoshop” app? The UWP api seem to cover most OS services that the devs would need, or am I missing something?
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