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

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

#371

Post by donatj »

Quartz Composer - Apple's "patch-based" visual programming environment. Drag out a bunch of nodes, wire them together, build a neat little GUI.

10+ years ago I'd regularly build all sorts of little utilities with it. It was surprisingly easy to use it to tap into things that are otherwise a lot more work. For instance I used it to monitor the data coming from a USB device. Like 3 nodes and 3 patches to make all of that work. Working little GUI app in seconds.

Apple hasn't touched it since 2016, I kind of hope it makes a comeback given Blender and more so Unreal Engine giving people a taste of the node based visual programming life.

You can still download it from Apple, and it still technically works but a lot of the most powerful nodes are broken in the newer OS's. I'd love to see the whole thing revitalized.

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

#372

Post by GuB-42 »

Y-bar wrote: post #290
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #281

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else. I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.

Performance was way better than what we have now with modern web stacks, we just have more powerful computers.

I agree on security and bugs, but bugs can be fixed. It just shows neglect by Adobe, which was, I think, the real problem. I think that if Adobe seriously wanted to, it could have been a web standard.

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

#373

Post by dizhn »

ofalkaed wrote: post #13

Non 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. https://non.tuxfamily.org

I've never heard of this software before. Any idea why it's discontinued? There are a bunch of weird messages that point to sort of a hostile take over of the project by forking, but it doesn't say anything about why or how it was discontinued.

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

#375

Post by eterm »

bazoom42 wrote: post #283
eterm wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly It would kill the approachability of the language. One of the joys of learning HTML when it tended to be hand-written was that if you made a mistake, you'd still see something just with distorted output. That was a lot more approachable for a lot of people who were put off "real" programming languages because they were overwhelmed by terrible error messages…

If you forget a closing quote on an attribute in html, all content until next quote is ignored and not rendered - even if it is the rest of the page. I dont think this is more helpful than an error message. It was just simpler to implement.

Let's say you forget to close a element.

What happens?

Even today, after years of better error messages, the strict validator at https://validator.w3.org/check says:

    Error Line 22, Column 4: end tag for "b" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified
What is line 22?
It's up to you to go hunting back through the document, to find the un-closed 'b' tag.

Back in the day, the error messages were even more misleading than this, often talking about "Extra content at end of document" or similar.

Compare that to the very visual feedback of putting this exact document into a browser.

You get more bold text than you were expecting, the bold just runs into the next text.

That's a world of difference, especially for people who prefer visual feedback to reading and understanding errors in text form.

Try it for yourself, save this document to a .html file and put it through the XHTML validator.

    
    
    

    
      test XHTML 1.0 Strict document
      
    

    

    

    This is a test XHTML 1.0 Strict document.
    


    

    See: W3C Markup Validation Service: Tests
    huh
    Well, isn't that good

    


    

    
      valid HTML
      Gerald Oskoboiny

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

#376

Post by abdulhaq »

chipx86 wrote: post #202
jmclnx wrote: post #53

Fro me, DESQview. Microsoft tried to buy it in order to use its tech in their windows system. I wonder how things would be today if they were able to purchase it. But DESQview said "no". Instead it went into a slow death spiral due to Windows 95.

Love seeing this one. My uncle was co-founder of Quarterdeck, and I grew up in a world of DESQview and QEMM. It was a big influence on me as a child. Got a good family story about that whole acquisition attempt, but I don't want to speak publicly on behalf of my uncle. I know we've talked at length about the what-ifs of that moment. I do have a scattering of some neat Quarterdeck memorabilia I can share, though: http…

I loved the Quarterdeck stuff especially Desqview

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

#377

Post by donatj »

kesor wrote: post #306

Geocities ; It was a "put your html here" Free web hosting back when people barely knew what html was. Today you have to be a rocket scientist to find a way to host a free static "simple" page online.

GitHub pages is frankly the closest in my opinion, as someone who used Geocities to host a domain for years longer than I probably should have.

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

#379

Post by quinndexter »

geoffpado wrote: post #73
lazyasciiart wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Elon running it? He probably would have actively sold it to china.

In a world where Vine is as successful as TikTok ended up being, who’s to say they get to a point where selling to Musk even happens?

guys when you invent fictional alternate realities, you're allowed to leave people out of them completely. Anyone you like.

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

#380

Post by silcoon »

linguae wrote: post #156

I could think of many examples, but I'll talk about the top four that I have in mind, that I'd like to see re-evaluated for today's times. 1. When Windows Vista was being developed, there were plans to replace the file system with a database, allowing users to organize and search for files using database queries. This was known as WinFS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS ). I was looking forward to this in the mid…

I'm intrigued by Symbolics Genera too. It would have been interesting seeing further development of Lisp OS, especially when they would have had internet connection. Rewriting part of your OS and see the changes in real time? Maybe web apps could have been just software written in Lisp, downloaded on the machine and directly being executed in a safe environment on top of the Genera image. Big stuff.
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