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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?

#381

Post by pflenker »

10/GUI did some deep thinking about the limitations and potential of the (then-fairly new) multi touch input method. I wished something more had come out of it, instead it stayed a niche concept art video that is mostly forgotten now.

I’m not arguing the solutions it outlined are good, but I think some more discussion around how we interact with touch screens would be needed. Instead, we are still typing on a layout that was invented for mechanical typewriters - in 2025, on our touch screens.

https://youtu.be/zWz1KbknIZk?si=LWGsLQjFTWBOvzN-

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

#382

Post by portaouflop »

watwut wrote: post #318
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.

Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.

Kids now create games in Roblox. More constrained, more commercial, more exploitative- but there is still a huge scene of non-developers creating games if you care to look.

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

#383

Post by Geee »

AnonC wrote: post #176

Sandstorm: it seemed quite nice with a lot of possibilities when it launched in 2014, but it didn’t really take off and then it moved to sandstorm.org. The creator, kentonv (on HN), commented about it recently here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44848099

Sandstorm was a great idea, but in my opinion it was targeted wrong. It should have been a platform and marketplace for B2B SaaS, not B2C SaaS. Specifically, all the third-party services which typical web apps use could have been Sandstorm apps, like analytics, logging, email, customer service etc.

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

#384

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

watwut wrote: post #318
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.

Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.

There is still a way to run flash apps via https://ruffle.rs/ You can probably still make flash games and run them via ruffle.

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

#385

Post by portaouflop »

jwpapi wrote: post #77
BirAdam wrote: post #68

Google Wave. Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It…

Discord is function wise the best now...

I don’t get the downvotes. Discord for all its flaws is amazing. I never experienced wave so maybe the comparison is not a good one?

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

#386

Post by silcoon »

kesor wrote: post #311

Skype ; Because my R.I.P. grandma was using it to talk to her relatives overseas just like she would use a phone, but it didn't cost an arm and a leg (unlike phone calls).

One of the best P2P software at the time. It was so simple and effective and allowed people to call real phones with Skype credit.

A genius product ripped my Microsoft. Have you used Microsoft Teams recently? Bad UI, hard to configure external hardware and good level of incompatibility, missing the good old "Echo / Sound Test Service". At a point I even installed Skype of my old Android but was sucking up too much battery.

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

#387

Post by electroglyph »

bxparks wrote: post #37

A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…

Google G Suite offered a free option after initially saying it was ending. just logged into my Workspace account: https://ibb.co/99jBLJnD

still have many domains on there, all with gmail

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

#388

Post by Timwi »

Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

The reason XHTML failed is because the spec required it to be sent with a new MIME type (application/xml+xhtml I believe) which no webserver did out of the box. Everything defaulted to text/html, which all browsers would interpret as HTML, and given the mismatching doctype, would interpret as tag soup (quirks mode/lenient).

Meanwhile, local files with the doctype would be treated as XHTML, so people assumed the doctype was all you needed. So everyone who tried to use XHTML didn't realize that it would go back to being read as HTML when they upload it to their webserver/return it from PHP/etc. Then, when something went wrong/worked differently than expected, the author would blame XHTML.

Edit: I see that I'm getting downvoted here; if any of this is factually incorrect I would like to be educated please.

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

#389

Post by donatj »

hshdhdhehd wrote: post #187

Elm programming language. Arguably not dead but somewhat incomplete and not actively worked on.

It's been a number of years but my understanding was they kind of killed all the momentum it had by removing support for custom operators which broke everyone's code?

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

#390

Post by youngtaff »

dewey wrote: post #324
alance wrote: post #309

I liked del.icio.us, it was online bookmark sharing, but with actual people I knew, and it had genuinely useful category tagging. I guess it was basically replaced with https://old.reddit.com and maybe twitter.

Isn’t Pinboard (Who bought delicious) very similar? I also see bookmarks of my friend there, recently switched to Raindrop though as it’s much more maintained.

it is but people are switching away due to lack of maintenance and the founders political views
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