Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 912 posts

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#21

Post by MontyCarloHall »

dpcan wrote: post #11

Adobe Fireworks - easiest vector / photo editor crossover app there ever was.

It's a real shame its raster functionality wasn't integrated into Illustrator. Adobe really butchered the whole Macromedia portfolio, didn't they?

(For those unfamiliar, Illustrator is a pure vector graphics editor; once you rasterize its shapes, they become uneditable fixed bitmaps. Fireworks was a vector graphics editor that rendered at a constant DPI, so it basically let you edit raster bitmaps like they were vectors. It was invaluable for pixel-perfect graphic design. Nothing since lets you do that, though with high-DPI screens and resolution-independent UIs being the norm these days, this functionality is less relevant than it used to be.)

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#22

Post by vyrotek »

dpcan wrote: post #11

Adobe Fireworks - easiest vector / photo editor crossover app there ever was.

Did not expect to see FW mentioned here. Absolutely loved it.

Just barely stopped using my CS6 copy. Still haven't found anything as intuitive.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#23

Post by khaledh »

exp1orer wrote: post #19

It 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

Same with Vale: https://vale.dev

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#24

Post by geor9e »

haunter wrote: post #9

Vine. 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 will never forgive twitter for this catch and kill of a platform so full of life

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#26

Post by Lerc »

Boot2Gecko or whatever the browser as Operating system was called. This was a project that should have focused on providing whatever its current users needed expanding and evolving to do whatever those users wanted it to do better.

Instead it went chasing markets, abandoning existing users as it did so, in favour of potential larger pools of users elsewhere. In the end it failed to find a niche going forward while leaving a trail of abandoned niches behind it.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#29

Post by kristianc »

Nokia Maps. There was a brief period in the early 2010s where Nokia had the best mapping product on the planet, and it was given away for free on Lumia phones at a time when TomTom and Garmin were still charging $60+ for navigation apps.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#30

Post by walterbell »

kristianc wrote: post #29

Nokia Maps. There was a brief period in the early 2010s where Nokia had the best mapping product on the planet, and it was given away for free on Lumia phones at a time when TomTom and Garmin were still charging $60+ for navigation apps.

Still around as "Here Maps"
Post reply on HN