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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
11–20 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#12OS/2 my beloved.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#13Non Daw. Its breaking up each function of the DAW into its own application gave a better experience in each of those functions, especially when you only needed that aspect, you were not working around everything else that the DAW offers. The integration between the various parts was not all that it could be but I think the idea has some real potential.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#14Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.
Adobe Animate is still just Flash from a tool-standoint. Are you referring to the SWF file format?
I took it as sarcasm.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#15Midori, Microsoft's capability-based security OS[1]. Rumor has it that it was getting to the point where it was able to run Windows code, so it was killed through internal politics, but who knows! It was the Fuchsia of its time...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28operating_system%29
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#16Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.
The iPhone killed Flash, probably because it would've been a way to create apps for it, more probably because it would've been laggy in the 2007 hardware, and people would've considered the iPhone "a piece of junk".
Interesting how Flash became the almost universal way to play videos in the browser, in the latter half of the 2000's (damn I'm old...).
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#17Vine. It was already pretty big back in 2013 but Twitter had no idea what to do with it. TikTok actually launched just a few months before Vine was shut down and erased from the internet.
I've thought about this too. Imagine all the drama the US government could've avoided if Vine had won over TikTok!
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#18OS/2 my beloved.
Nah, that time has passed and there's not much to miss from the base OS. What would be interesting is for IBM to publish the source to the Workplace Shell and the underlying SOM code so it might get a new life running on one of the free *nixes.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#19It might be too soon to call it abandoned, but I was very intrigued by the Austral [1] language. The spec [2] is worth reading, it has an unusual clarity of thought and originality, and I was hoping that it would find some traction. Unfortunately it seems that the author is no longer actively working on it.
[1] https://austral-lang.org/ [2] https://austral-lang.org/spec/spec.html
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#20The IBM school's computer. Developed by IBM Hursley in 1967, it was years ahead in its design, display out to a television and storage on normal audio tape. Would have kick started an educational revolution if it had been launched beyond the 10 prototype machines.
Died due to legal wranglings about patents, iirc.