341–350 of 648 posts
XMPP. The entire chat landscape is a damn travesty right now. First Facebook disappeared behind it’s own walls, then google... I really miss the days where I could use one client to chat with all my contacts. I honestly think Im in contact with less people now because everyone dropped support for open protocols.
Visual Basic 6
Rewarded early participants in music discovery. Clever mechanic.
Google's Nexus 7 might qualify. A really great tablet at an affordable price that got one minor refresh then was cancelled. I see Palm already mentioned. Neo Geo. Obviously everything I have done was great--too advanced for its time to succeed.
And the Nexus 5 phone. Lightweight, durable plastic body, good hardware, not ridiculously large... I still havent seen a spiritual successor
Google Inbox. And I don’t “find my favorite Inbox features in Gmail”. If you can’t tell I’m still bitter about it :(
Just curious, which features are you bitter about? I was a long-time Inbox user and was dreading the day I'd have to switch back to Gmail. But now that I've done it, I've found that I don't really miss Inbox at all.
Gmail seems slow and cluttered by comparison.
Google Reader. I still think RSS was a better way of aggregating news than many alternatives of today, all wrapped up in a solid and practical interface.
"I still think RSS is a better way", fixed that for you.
Oculus and other VR headset. VR as a technology is fascinating and almost Sci-Fi when it came in but people quickly realized that there are still no practical applications for the technology other than mild gaming and entertainment purposes. Companies invested heavily in VR but the ROI is poor till today. VR is mostly a one time experience for people and not something they spend time with everyday.
One of the founders is a neighbor.. $20m later. They lucked out with FB/Zuck frothing over their company so early.
XMPP. The entire chat landscape is a damn travesty right now. First Facebook disappeared behind it’s own walls, then google... I really miss the days where I could use one client to chat with all my contacts. I honestly think Im in contact with less people now because everyone dropped support for open protocols.
Xmpp is a disaster, I have otp enabled and all too often messages are delivered to the wrong machine, but encrypted with a different key, so it is pure garbage and lost forever. That is on the off chance that the message is actually delivered. Trying to get omemo up and running, but some clients (pidgin) have next to no support for it, while others only support it, and it seems it is only supported on ejabberd as of…
- Pidgin: Just take a look at their bug tracker. You will not have any problems finding tickets requesting essential features which are 6 years and older (e.g. Message Archive Management). So unless the Pidgin devs get some done I would not use their client (Gajim is a much better alternative, especially since the 1.0 release last year).
- ejabberd OMEMO: Actually, I don't know what the ejabberd devs were thinking when they changed their default config to disable OMEMO. They told something about having a hard time tracking down issues with OMEMO enabled. Well, kinda makes sense from a developers perspective, but given the fact that OMEMO is end-to-end encryption, I wonder what they were expecting. Nevertheless, disabling OMEMO by default on the server is just a stupid idea.
- message delivery: I had problems with that too, but ultimately it was just a problem with some ejabberd setting (I think it was mod_stream_mgmt: resend_on_timeout: if_offline) [1].
[1] https://docs.ejabberd.im/admin/configuration/#mod-stream-mgm...
Windows Phone Zune
I still don't understand how MS managed to mess up Windows Phone. My girlfriend had one for a while and it was excellent.
Store curation was also an issue with tons of garbage in there that shouldn’t have been allowed.