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Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

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Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#221
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And on that note: what.cd

Oh man, I miss what so hard. Can't find anything comparable today. Those were the golden days, when I could find obscure albums that you couldn't even pay good money for.

https://redacted.ch

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#224

HyperCard. It's been decades and I've still never found a better way to make simple GUI applications.

Yeah this one surprises me. A generic card/db app... tempted to do it myself. A self-contained, no-fuss flexible thing, maybe with a few extras like calendar based events etc. Access I spose is close, buts its awful, and Microsoft.

I slowly working in something alike: A relational lang:

http://tablam.org

Eventually, the idea is have a FoxPro-like experience.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#226
post #201

Sparrow Email Client ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(email_client) ) - Simple, fast, easy-to-use email client. As good as it gets!

Still works on macOS Mojave, and I use it everyday. True email client not relying on any third-party API / company to work.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#227

The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect. Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I c…

WSL is terrible. It's basically a tech demo (look up what happens if you `cp` a file from `C:\...` to `/home/user` versus `copy` or going the other direction.

It's alright to boot up a linux "VM" using docker, but then you have to pay extra for windows pro or whatever so you can unlock hypervisor privileges.

I recently bought an extra SSD to put into the windows desktop I bought and am happily running linux, don't miss windows since I put it on there (even some steam games are quite nice and convenient).

Anyway, just look into WSL before you bet the farm on it.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#228

HyperCard. It's been decades and I've still never found a better way to make simple GUI applications.

Yeah this one surprises me. A generic card/db app... tempted to do it myself. A self-contained, no-fuss flexible thing, maybe with a few extras like calendar based events etc. Access I spose is close, buts its awful, and Microsoft.

Filemaker tried to get into this with Bento, but I think that's been 86ed as well. What I really loved about Hypercard though, was that it was so much more than a database. As a school kid in the 90s I used to make lots of interactive presentations for different classes using Hypercard (at least until I got ahold of Director).

Fun fact: some of the early versions of Myst were just Hypercard stacks with images on each card and transparent buttons to link you around the island.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#230
FoxPro.

So far, the dbase family was the best, IMHO, for make business apps.

I'm working slowly in a modern take:

http://tablam.org

Starting from a relational language (not a rdbms!) that be as usable as lua/python. Eventually, add a interactive jupyter-like terminal and Access/FoxPro like IDE environment to make forms and reports. Integrate sqlite and maybe lmdb or similar.

Yep... a lot of things!

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