47 ms·

Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

478 points by geff82 8y ago

Hi all! Sometimes the best days seem to be behind us, even in software development. What closed-source, proprietary software that you once loved is not being developed/enhanced any more? What more features would you like to have it in the future? Would you pay for it to be resurrected?

vtesucks 8y ago
Roadrash Airfix dogfighter
- anotheryou 8y ago
  I don't know if it's any good, but maybe you like this one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/300380/Road_Redemption/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/300380/Road_Redemption/
  - esaysimyan 8y ago
    It's quite nice.
  - vtesucks 8y ago
    Looks pretty similar. Thanks!
alexis_fr 8y ago
After 5 years with no upgrade, software should become public domain.
- donedealomg 8y ago
  Why? Because Communism?
- brylie 8y ago
  It should be required to submit software sourcecode to the Library of Congress in order to claim Copyright. That would enrich the public domain. Aside from the fact that Copyright lifespan is absurdly long.
- gus_massa 8y ago
  Latest TeX (not LaTeX) update was in January 2014, and the change was in a quite obscure tiny corner case of an advanced feature. https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb35-1/tb109knut.pdf https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb35-1/tb109knut.pdf > The new version of TEX diﬀers from the old only with respect to the “null control sequence” \csname\endcsname, which has been a legal construct since version 0.8 (November 1982) although almost nobody uses it. Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy features including the capacity to send emails? Also, what about books series like Harry Potter?
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > Why must all software be constantly updated and bloated with new buggy features including the capacity to send emails? I think the point was not that updates are required, but that it is unlikely that they're a major source of revenue for the authors if they haven't been touched for so long.
- mhd 8y ago
  Big codebases tend to contain licensed code or at least depend on it, so you'd get code that's either illegal to publish or contains huge gaps. Getting it in a state where you can put it on github, would require quite some dev and legal work, not likely to happen with abandonware.
blowski 8y ago
Best days of software development seem to be behind us? I’m really not sure what that means or why someone would say it, other than typical nostalgia.
- geff82 8y ago
  I did not mean in general, but sometimes there is stuff that never got a better replacement.
- John_KZ 8y ago
  To be fair SaaS destroyed the previous financial model of the software industry, which was much better for the end user imo. Back then, software companies tried to make good, comprehensive products that respected user privacy, were meant to run locally, provide a complete solution to the problem, and were supposed to be a permanent solution. Better software meant more sales and more money. Unfortunately excessive piracy broke this model. Sure, today's software capabilities are much more advanced, but you no longer get a physical disk that you can load on you computer and be confident it'll just keep working for years on end without any external dependencies etc.
  - petra 8y ago
    Looking at the best software, the sass world has created, Google - it's orders of magnitude more valuable than any PC based software. So maybe it isn't fair to say the user for a bad deal.
    - John_KZ 8y ago
      Google is a jumbled mess of multiple pieces of software, and you get access to none of them, only a search service, and it is loosely defined. Also Google isn't particularly good at anything nowdays, except maybe NLP. Their ability to deliver good results is only a result of massive spying. Many researchers would be able to provide software 10x as useful as that of Google given access to the same data. Imagine a pre-SaaS Google: You get a few of LTO tapes delivered to your doorstep. They include an index of every website in existence, it's owner/creator, a short description of what it is, and a number of semantic flags. Moreover, you'd probably get a list of all identified businesses there are in every country, region and industry with their contact information and website addresses. Imagine what you could do with that...
benologist 8y ago
Adobe Fireworks Jagged Alliance 2 Settlers 2 Heroes of Might and Magic
- antjanus 8y ago
  Fireworks was a decent piece of software. I think Adobe DX is supposed to be the replacement for it.
- Svenstaro 8y ago
  Settlers 2: There is https://www.gog.com/game/the_settlers_2_10th_anniversary https://www.gog.com/game/the_settlers_2_10th_anniversary and https://wl.widelands.org/ https://wl.widelands.org/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bdz 8y ago
  Settlers 2 got rereleased along with the other titles a few weeks ago https://store.ubi.com/eu/the-settlers-history-collection/5b647011ef3aa548048c5977.html https://store.ubi.com/eu/the-settlers-history-collection/5b6... You can buy on its own too https://store.ubi.com/eu/the-settlers-ii-veni%2C-vidi%2C-vici-history-edition/5be2b34288a7e3b8170265cb.html https://store.ubi.com/eu/the-settlers-ii-veni%2C-vidi%2C-vic...
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Game-wise, Warcraft 2, 3 and Dune 2 remakes. Tho I also loved C&C. I guess nostalgia or not yet feeling burned out by the RTS genre (which nowadays is irrelevant due to MOBA). (Oh, and yeah, Settlers 2 was amazing.)
  - benologist 8y ago
    WC3, C&C and RA are getting 4K-resolution remakes soon - https://www.inquisitr.com/5163752/ea-to-remake-the-first-two-command-conquer-games-in-4k/ https://www.inquisitr.com/5163752/ea-to-remake-the-first-two... https://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/warcraft/277402/warcraft-3-reforged-remaster-2019 https://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/warcraft/277402/warcraft-...
maxxxxx 8y ago
The game Lunatic Fringe
- kanon 8y ago
  If we're talking games; Dungeon Keeper
- salgernon 8y ago
  http://www.sealiesoftware.com/fringe/ http://www.sealiesoftware.com/fringe/
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    This needs the orginal module. How would you get that?
fuball63 8y ago
Lots of old video games come to mind, especially the online ones that had proprietary servers that were shut down (medal of Honor heroes 2, halo 3). I was going to say BlitzPlus but that's open source already.
- patrickk 8y ago
  If you're not aware, a modded version of Halo 3 was released by a mod team on PC, although Microsoft is not happy about it: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/21/halo-online-returns-with-a-bang-as-the-fan-run-eldewrito/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/21/halo-online-retu... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1sxYvpNNlY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1sxYvpNNlY
  - fuball63 8y ago
    Thanks for the links I will definitely check this out.
- michaelbrave 8y ago
  In my wishful thinking daydreaming I imagine a service kind of like steam for dead MMO's call it the MMO graveyard or something. Pay a monthly fee but it works for all the games on the system, maybe an integrated friends list too if it's possible. Would be really cool for history and game design reasons. I want to say I heard that a law passed about not closing server based games anymore but I can't remember the details.
  - fuball63 8y ago
    I like this idea a lot. It would be cool with single sign on and a profile that shows what you've accomplished in each game. There are a few open source mmos to do a POC.
badrabbit 8y ago
Solaris
- SamWhited 8y ago
  Solaris was mostly open source; there are plenty of derivatives. Look up "illumos". I use Joyent's SmartOS pretty regularly and it's pretty solid. EDIT: unless you meant the video game, which someone just told me is a thing… oops.
  - badrabbit 8y ago
    I meant the OS. Afaik,opensolaris was open source but solaris itself had closed source components,illumos and the rest ate forks not maintained and supported versions of solaris
    - SamWhited 8y ago
      Oracle effectively started to close source Solaris with 10, I think and then completely closed sourced it with 11. Illumos is definitely a fork, but given that Oracle effectively doesn't work on Solaris anymore it's more or less picked up where Solaris left off, it's probably superior to the commercial Oracle version at this point.
drinchev 8y ago
I’ve been a heavy user of FoxPro [1] back in time. I would really love someone to make a better version of it. Although these days you have Airtable [2] and Ninox [3] they are having different user base than good old FoxPro. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro 2: https://airtable.com https://airtable.com 3: https://ninoxdb.de/en/ https://ninoxdb.de/en/
- davepdotorg 8y ago
  https://harbour.github.io/ https://harbour.github.io/ might interest you if you don't know it.
- ericcholis 8y ago
  I currently maintain a "legacy" VFP application that is actually quite robust. Not as modern as most languages, but desktop apps can be quite robust. The access to HTTP libraries and WebView controls can bridge some gaps. What's really missing is a better IDE with better type hinting, autocomplete, tabs, etc... VS Code would be a great base for an updated IDE. I know that Rick Strahl's West Wind has support for Visual Studio, but there's still some functionality missing.
  - gavinpc 8y ago
    I ported a FoxPro app to VFP in 2012. I had worked on the original one in DOS and ported it to FP for Windows around '96-97, so I knew the IDE's pretty well. But by that point I couldn't stand anything but Emacs. So I got xbase-mode (and patched it a bit), and just automated the project build. There was 100+ screens so I had to do some bulk processing on those SPR's. But I used WebViews for any new stuff, and that was much better (though it was basically IE7). Yeah I owe Rick Strahl so many beers for his blog. http://www.budgetbuilder.com/ http://www.budgetbuilder.com/ Second time this has come up this morning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635799
- mamcx 8y ago
  Seconded! I'm working in a spiritual replacement (http://tablam.org http://tablam.org) but with first-class support for mobile. I'm starting with a relational language, then a bridge to native UI Toolkits. Embed sqlite and good support for others RDBMS and as a larger hope, a custom RDBMS on top of LMDB or WiredTiger.
fb03 8y ago
SkiFree, which unfortunately and tragically, is not free.
- jonawesomegreen 8y ago
  Not mine, but here is a js clone. https://basicallydan.github.io/skifree.js/ https://basicallydan.github.io/skifree.js/
- jasonjayr 8y ago
  https://ski.ihoc.net/ https://ski.ihoc.net/ That's the "most official" page for the product. No source, but updated for 32bit/64bit environments.
magnat 8y ago
Windows 7
- eponeponepon 8y ago
  Strikes me that you meant this as a joke - but whether you did or not, it is not such a bad call.
  - ioman 8y ago
    Windows XP. I still miss XP.
  - ohiovr 8y ago
    Window 10 forever forced me to switch to MacOS. When Apple soils MacOS I hope linux is still a viable workstation OS.
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  I still run Windows 7 in Parallels on my MacBook Pro.
walterbell 8y ago
Ecco Pro for Windows and its predecessor, Lotus Agenda for DOS, which inspired a multimillion dollar open-source software debacle that inspired the book, "Dreaming in Code". Ecco is still being used 20 years later and has been binary patched to support Lua extensions. Written by a four person team in Seattle. doogiePIM has been resuscitated by its founder, hopefully it will carry a torch for some of the ideas in Ecco and Agenda, https://bitespire.com/details_doogiepim.php https://bitespire.com/details_doogiepim.php
- Joeri 8y ago
  I loved Ecco's outliner features. Give me cross-platform ecco pro with cloud syncing and I'll never use onenote again.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    Yes, I've bought every alleged outliner since and nothing compares. What's amazing is that Ecco had 100% reliable cross-device syncing in 1990s, both PC-PC and PC-PalmPilot. So it has enough metadata in the database. TreeSheets (http://strlen.com/treesheets/ http://strlen.com/treesheets/) is an open-source cross-platform codebase (wxWidgets) with fast graphics, since it was designed by a game developer. That's one possible starting point for cloning Ecco. NoteLynx on Android has the ability for an item to be in two places within the outline, https://www.appbrain.com/app/notelynx-pro-outliner-mindmap-wiki/com.astrodean.notelynxpro https://www.appbrain.com/app/notelynx-pro-outliner-mindmap-w..., as does Mindscope on iOS, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-thought-organizer/id901513028 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-thought-organizer/...
PuffinBlue 8y ago
I'd resurrect Headway Theme for Wordpress. It was kinda open source but had some proprietary bits in I think. And there is a fork somewhere apparently. But the software is effectively dead and not getting updated any more. But that theme builder was absolutely amazing. Literally just drag and drop design for the entire theme, not just pages or whatever. Plus control over the loop and just some awesome stuff that really let you build very very cool sites really really quickly. Elementor Pro now does some of what Headway was doing and I think Beaver Builder is moving that way, but they aren't really anywhere close to as good. Headway had graphical theme design absolutely nailed. It's a big shame it went under and I wish it came back.
- halfastack 8y ago
  Isn't Wordpress 5 kinda focusing on this? The drag-and-drop way of designing your webpage, similar to something like Wix...
  - PuffinBlue 8y ago
    No and that's the difference Headway made. Wordpress 5 is concerned with the output of the 'content' part of the page. It lets you do what you could with a page builder, but more limited. Headway is literally like creating the theme without coding anything. You build it out of blocks still but you literally just drew boxes onto the page where you wanted boxes to go (based on column system but CSS grid/Flexbox would be better now) and it would output the theme files for you. And I'm not talking the page, I'm talking the entire theme. So headers, footers, custom pages, custom loops with custom queries, custom blocks mixed in with content blocks on the same page template to allow users to output content in the right places, same with custom fields etc. It was incredibly powerful and let you effectively WYSIWYG the function of the site as well as then being able to switch over to the design module and WYSIWYG the design too. Plus managing custom CSS was easy. Later versions let you draw/build and design in the same step like Elementor and Pagelines do, but those don't give you the same control over the functionality of the theme like Headway did. As I mentioned, you can get most of the same functions Headway provided through something like Elementor Pro and combining it with something like the Toolset plugins. But those rely on integrating and there are issues (dynamically showing content generated by shortcodes currently broken for instance) which make the whole process much more of a chore. Headway really was great.
BerislavLopac 8y ago
Hypercard
- soapdog 8y ago
  You might enjoy LiveCode from https://livecode.com https://livecode.com (GPL version at https://livecode.org https://livecode.org), it is like hypercard for the 21st century
  - BerislavLopac 8y ago
    I've been looking for something that could import existing Hypercard stacks and make it possible to keep working on them, even in a different format.
- MegaDeKay 8y ago
  I'm schocked that I had to read this far down to find Hypercard. It is such a highly regarded piece of software, though I sadly never had the opportunity to use it myself. I can't help but wonder what it might have turned into had it been open sourced, made cross platform, and allowed to flourish. And while I'm here, WordPerfect 4.2. That program was a high water mark in word processing for me. What I wouldn't give to hit Alt-F3 in Word to Reveal Codes [0]. [0] https://mltshp.com/p/1EL4C https://mltshp.com/p/1EL4C
anon1q2w 8y ago
Google reader
- callmeal 8y ago
  There's commafeed: https://github.com/Athou/commafeed https://github.com/Athou/commafeed
  - Kye 8y ago
    I think what most people who still miss Google Reader in 2018 really missed was the little-known community aspect of it.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  I've been using https://www.inoreader.com https://www.inoreader.com and am pretty happy with it as an alternative. It has a lot of the same keyboard shortcuts, which is really all I want.
  - iscrewyou 8y ago
    I miss google reader because it was simply lists and lists of news. Not these new readers that love to extract an image from the article and use it to cover quarter of the screen(exaggerating here). Then 4 more articles on the next page. Then so on. Google reader was perfect for skimming through 100 pieces of news in a short amount of time and just click the articles you want to read in a new tab and done. Any new reader I’ve tried fails to understand this. They go for complexity and glamour. They need a mode for just simple long list of headlines and not waste any screen space. Edit: context
    - detaro 8y ago
      I can't think of a modern reader which doesn't have a view like this. Just a few examples: The Old Reader, Inoreader, Feedly all do.
      - 8y ago
joao 8y ago
Macromedia/Adobe Director
- ohiovr 8y ago
  Adobe gobbled up macromedia and went on a product killing spree.
y4mi 8y ago
YNAB4 (you need a budget 4) It wouldve been perfect if they'd just added an API so that users can create and share ways to get the data from various banks. And a refactor was necessary to a native library (or even electron) But this cloud native follow-up version is just not an option.
- noahdesu 8y ago
  Been using the cloud native version for about a year now, and I'm debating if I should renew. What are you using now if not YNAB?
  - slartibardfast0 8y ago
    Not original commenter, but I reluctantly switched to the cloud version and have found the improved credit card logic to be more than worthy of the increased price. I'm hoping they can add support for the EU's second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) open banking APIs when they open up to third parities sometime in 2019 too!
  - y4mi 8y ago
    I started a side project and created my own budget planner that did exactly what I wanted (and imports data from my bank). I've recently considered to refactor it into a AWS Lambda app, as the current setup with Django API, celery workers and markojs for frontend is ... Slightly overengineered
- cgsmith 8y ago
  I am not sure if you mean an API for banking or just in general an API - they have the latter https://api.youneedabudget.com/v1 https://api.youneedabudget.com/v1
  - y4mi 8y ago
    That is ynab5, the cloud native version, where your data lives on their servers. That is not an option for me.
rmprescott 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv n-dimensional spreadsheet with a logical data model (including hierarchies) rather than rows and columns: Net Worth := Assets - Liabilities
- dfee 8y ago
  > Conventional spreadsheets used on-screen cells to store all data, formulas, and notes. Improv separated these concepts and used the cells only for input and output data. Formulas, macros and other objects existed outside the cells, to simplify editing and reduce errors. Improv used named ranges for all formulas, as opposed to cell addresses. Amazing.
  - brotherjerky 8y ago
    Sounds very similar to how Coda works: https://coda.io https://coda.io
- julienmarie 8y ago
  Quantrix Modeler is a successor of Improv. I personally love it, but pricing is quite steep.
  - spitfire 8y ago
    Quantrix modeler is actually the successor to Quantrix for nextstep. Quantrix was a contemporary of Improv. Not sure I remember which came first. But Quantrix was the better of the two. I'm collecting a pile of "good ideas"... Someday I'll do something with it.
- udioron 8y ago
  I was so happy to see someone mentioned improv before me :-)
- greggyb 8y ago
  The concepts are there in Microsoft's SSAS, which also lives in Excel as Power Pivot (only the Tabular engine, not the Multidimensional).
lewiscollard 8y ago
WinAmp 2. I still use Audacity in "classic" mode to make it feel like WinAmp.. Old habits die hard :) Going further back, I think Symantec JustWrite was an extremely fine piece of software; I remember it being blazingly fast on the 486 monster I had at work. But my glasses may be rose-tinted :)
- conception 8y ago
  There is a fairly new version here btw https://www.winamp.com/ https://www.winamp.com/ that is fairly back to the roots.
- noitsnot 8y ago
  The big thing I liked about Winamp was the equalizer. It should be built into streaming apps. I think Spotify has one, but it's not advanced enough. It would help my car's mediocre settings and speakers, also.
- DDR0 8y ago
  You're not the only one - check out https://getwacup.com/ https://getwacup.com/ for a more modern version. The new offering from https://winamp.com/ https://winamp.com/ is - I think - going to be mobile-focussed? A new codebase entirely? Webamp can also do Milkdrop visualizations, which is pretty crazy - eg https://webamp.org/?butterchurnPresetUrl=https%3A%2F%2Funpkg.com%2Fbutterchurn-presets%2Fpresets%2Fconverted%2Fcope%2520%2B%2520geiss%2520%2B%2520stahlregen%2520-%2520cartune%2520(bending%2520gelatine%2520mix).json https://webamp.org/?butterchurnPresetUrl=https%3A%2F%2Funpkg... I had a link I've since lost to one which was a shader-skin, which mirrored milkdrop back into the rest of the UI. It was pretty trippy, and wholly unexpected! Both projects have good Discord servers, as well. :) See https://discord.gg/XuJPJEm https://discord.gg/XuJPJEm and https://discord.gg/248Z7QA https://discord.gg/248Z7QA, respectively.
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  Depending on the use case (mine is really simple--play music with basic playlist management), QMMP is also a really good replacement and is well-maintained. http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/ http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/
cpcallen 8y ago
Aperture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(software) I would happily pay for an update that fixed outstanding bugs and ensured compatibility with future versions of macOS. It would be nice to have some new features, too, but it is basically "good enough" as it is and I dread the day I can no longer run it. I'm really not sure what I will do. The claim that Photos was going to be a meaningful replacement for Aperture was obviously a lie at the time it was released and even nearly five years later it is still not true. I'd have moved to Lightroom had Adobe not moved to a subscription model.
- michaelflux 8y ago
  Oh man, so much this. When Photos just came out and Apple was making the claims about how they've taken everything good from Aperture and stuck it into Photos I was pretty optimistic considering how solid of an app Aperture became over the years. Now, few days down the road, pretty clear that Photos is just a marginally better iPhoto with the vast majority of features that were useful for professionals such as Stacks, never coming back. The dumbification of professional apps to the lowest common denominator continues ...
  - geerlingguy 8y ago
    Stacks, 2-up and 4-up comparison, the Loupe, star ratings, fast browsing of raw files... so much missing functionality. Lightroom IMO was never as good as Aperture, I really wish Apple would’ve spun it off instead of just letting it wither.
- wgoodall01 8y ago
  Iirc, you can buy Lightroom 6 perpetually, no creative cloud needed. Might be worth looking into.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    That's what I still use but it's getting long in tooth and you're starting to notice lack of support for new formats and the like. I wouldn't really recommend someone who isn't already using it to switch. I don't really mind the subscription because it's software I use frequently but I need to get around to cleaning out my catalog before I switch over.
dcminter 8y ago
Picasa (desktop app). It hit a sweet spot for me - linux compatible, very easy to do the majority of simple edits (crop, rotate, colour tweaks), and a few other nice features. The only significant failing was that it couldn't handle removable media at all well. Shotwell is the best I've found so far, but it's not quite the right feature balance for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotwell_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotwell_(software)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- imhoguy 8y ago
  I have found Pix to be the good replacement of Picasa. https://github.com/linuxmint/pix https://github.com/linuxmint/pix
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    Never heard about it before. How did you find out about that one?
    - nawtacawp 8y ago
      Default installed on LM 19. It’s great
  - jopro 8y ago
    any info on a port of Pix to Mac OS? Looks great?
    - imhoguy 8y ago
      That might be interesting, you may try to compile it on Mac like any other glib/gtk app.
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  I used picass for one thing and one thing only: image organization. I could point it to a directory and it would read all the images. It wouldn’t copy them to it’s database, it wouldn’t try to change their format. It would simply read them as fast as I’ve ever seen and show me what’s in that directory. Then it would keep the directory hierarchy in place. I haven’t been able to find anything similar. I search for a similar piece of software every now and then but nothing shows up. Lightroom is close but it’s god awfully slow. I just loved how fast Picasa. I actually did some cleaning on my computer last night and found the last Picasa dmg. Maybe I run it and see if it still works.
leetrout 8y ago
IRIX The desktop experience was fantastic for its time.
- linuxlizard 8y ago
  Agreed. Was fantastic. And their man pages were super complete and easy to read.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  NextStep.
- jvagner 8y ago
  I had an SGI Indy on my desk for a while... yes.
Jemm 8y ago
Old flight sim dogfighting game called Flying Circus.
interesthrow2 8y ago
Emagic Logic on Windows. All features added on Mac since it's cancellation on PC.
pgrote 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor) Sprint was a powerful, capable word processor. It was lightning fast and darn near impossible to lose files. Alas, it lost out to WordPerfect and was quickly dropped by Borland.
- stevoski 8y ago
  Sprint was so far ahead of its time. It took many years for Sprint’s “always be saving” technique to be widely adopted by other word processors.
snarfy 8y ago
Numega Soft-ICE.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  IDA Pro
  - selimthegrim 8y ago
    It’s not still a thing?
    - lytedev 8y ago
      I think he was recommending it as a modern alternative?
      - Fnoord 8y ago
        Both kinda. Yes, it is still a thing. It is amazing software yet also amazingly expensive [1] for those trying to get into the field, or not from a first world country. [1] https://www.hex-rays.com/cgi-bin/quote.cgi https://www.hex-rays.com/cgi-bin/quote.cgi
eitland 8y ago
Google Desktop Search and the plugins.
- pcunite 8y ago
  Give FileSearchEX a look
soroso 8y ago
sidekick - the TSR app for DOS
- jtoledo 8y ago
  That was great!
projektfu 8y ago
Word 5.1 for the Mac but multiplatform. AbiWord is close.
furicane 8y ago
Windows XP
ioman 8y ago
Microsoft MapPoint. This was a phenomenal piece of mapping software and had features I haven’t been able to find in any of the online map replacements. When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”. You could map all sorts of census data. Want to colorize the map based on crime rate divided by median home price? No problem. You could import lots of data from a spreadsheet and do useful things with it. I used this when looking for my first house. I scraped the data from realtor.com and made maps where the icon changed on the number of bedrooms and the color changed based on the price. You could make drivetime zones. Want to see how far you can drive in 30 minutes from your office? No problem. You can probably do a lot of this with ArcGIS, but I don’t know since its way out of my price range. I keep hoping that Microsoft will bring some of this to Bing Maps. I would pay to use these features again and adding them to Azure would definitely differentiate them from Google Maps.
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  > When getting directions, you could designate a number of areas on the map as “avoid area”. It's noteworthy, because I've only seen this feature in Rolls-Royce navigation in recent times.
  - zentiggr 8y ago
    OSMAnd and Navigator on Android allow you to "disable" road sections. Not an area feature, but for things like the I-74 Bridge project where construction blockages change sometimes almost weekly, it's a big help to toggle individual blocks/intersections individually.
    - gpvos 8y ago
      Not very discoverable, this is the first I read about it.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
    It does seem somewhat paranoid. Might be useful to exclude certain routes with an easy interface, but tremendously harmful by seemingly legitimizing the myth of “no-go” areas that has recently become a favorite talking point of the alt-right in my (perfectly safe) country.
henry_flower 8y ago
Presto browser engine (from Opera 12) for a lightweight Electron alternative
- superkuh 8y ago
  I couldn't agree more. On this subject, I'm still seeding the leaked Opera 12 source w/presto. http://superkuh.com/opera12v15presto-source.torrent http://superkuh.com/opera12v15presto-source.torrent (full torrent dl'd is 222.6 MB) But... browser engines are no longer browsers like they were in Opera's prime. They are operating systems with all the complexity that brings. I don't think presto could fill that role. That said, it'd make a great actual browser.
lostmsu 8y ago
I actually did it for GridMove -> Stack. https://losttech.software/Stack.html https://losttech.software/Stack.html
- staz 8y ago
  404. I think it's due to the capital S
- lostmsu 8y ago
  Casing error: https://losttech.software/stack.html https://losttech.software/stack.html
wtmt 8y ago
Games on iOS: Flight Control, Flight Control HD and Flight Control Rocket, all by Firemint (later Firemonkeys after being bought by EA). I have an old device on which I can play a couple of these until those devices die. Features to add: I wouldn’t really add anything more than what they had. Pay for resurrection: Yes, I’d certainly be willing to pay for their resurrection. But EA is a lousy company for games. So I have no hopes of this happening.
- bdz 8y ago
  Flight Control was ported to Mac and PC. Yeah I know touch controls are different but it still works great https://store.steampowered.com/app/62000/Flight_Control_HD/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/62000/Flight_Control_HD/
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  Flight control!!! I would pay for that game again. I wish I could query apps in App Store that are from a certain year. I would go all the way back to early 2010s.
davidgould 8y ago
Battlezone. This was a great game on Windows 9x, but never got updated to work on the NT based Windows. Of course, a Linux port would be even better.
- bdz 8y ago
  Got a HD remaster with multiplayer, it's really good https://store.steampowered.com/app/301650/Battlezone_98_Redux/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/301650/Battlezone_98_Redu...
- VLM 8y ago
  My advice is the PS4VR "Battlezone" game is more of a re-imagining of "Arctic Fox" than a faithful remake of battlezone. Luckily I really enjoyed both games the first time around. I find it hilarious that the main difference in experience over 30 years apart is the resolution is a bit higher and the game is un-necessarily over complicated. Un-necessary overcomplication "because its possible" is a likely outcome of every suggestion in this entire discussion, unfortunately. "Lets do a cool new CP/M" turns into "Windows 11", unfortunately.
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    The PS4VR Battlezone is a reimagining of the original 1980 Atari arcade game that the 1998 Activision game was based on.
ArtWomb 8y ago
This is a great thread! Am currently porting some old school gamedev techniques used in classic Sega games such as Hang-On, Turbo Outrun and Space Harrier to modern WebGL. Specifically, super scaler "billboarding" of 2D sprites and pseudo-3D terrain projections. It will be interesting to see if accurate physical simulations are possible ;) Internet Archive's Arcade is preserving a museum's worth of retro games via Emularity and Emscripten https://archive.org/search.php?query=emulator%3A%2A+collection%3Ainternetarcade+addeddate%3A2018%2A https://archive.org/search.php?query=emulator%3A%2A+collecti...
ryancnelson 8y ago
I really miss the simple, powerful feature set of Cricket Graph, Mac data graphing software from ~1988
- jeffreportmill1 8y ago
  I am trying to revive a free version of this for the web, but I only vaguely remember it - I just remember I really liked it. Give it a try and send me suggestions at jeff@reportmill.com if you remember more: http://reportmill.com/rmc/ http://reportmill.com/rmc/ I've only been working on it for a month, and I particularly don't have the data entry working well yet, but it's coming along.
- vondur 8y ago
  I think I still have my box with floppies sitting around. It made making charts from data easy.
mhd 8y ago
MacOS 9
Kye 8y ago
So many old 32 bit VST instruments trapped on Windows. Most 64 bit DAWs will bridge them, but they're never going to see a port with the new Linux SDK. You can run Windows VSTs on Linux with various WINE-based solutions, but they take a huge performance and stability hit.
geff82 8y ago
I personally would really like the game LHX back again, with slightly upgraded graphics, but without the bloat most modern games come with. Also, Stunts 4D driving was really a time killer for me and my friends.
- drivingmenuts 8y ago
  Jet Moto. All it needed was a track editor.
- juststeve 8y ago
  trackmania is not the same...
agentultra 8y ago
Workbench or the Turbo * IDEs.
- linuxlizard 8y ago
  Turbo Pascal was my first. You never forget your first. Turbo C then Turbo C++ were also amazing. My fingers still remember the copy/paste ^KB ^KC.
  - linker3000 8y ago
    Oh boy - I've literally just come out of Turbo Pascal 3.0A on a Z80 retro rebuild - I've hacked together some code to run a 7-segment clock/timer board I made for my Commodore 64 in about 1984. https://twitter.com/linker3000/status/1071459121210290178 https://twitter.com/linker3000/status/1071459121210290178
- EliRivers 8y ago
  Turbo C++ 3 is still popular in parts of the world. There is a steady trail of people on the various C++ forums asking why modern code they copy and paste fails to compile on Turbo C++, and why code that works on Turbo C++ fails so miserably when fed to a compiler less than twenty years old.
wanda 8y ago
FreeHand
- gardaani 8y ago
  Many old FreeHand users have moved to Affinity Designer. You should try it, it is available for Mac and Windows.
  - latexr 8y ago
    I’m one such user. I’ve been using Affinity Designer since the first public betas, and I curse it every time I use it. If you do any kind of precision work, it’s an abomination. It can’t expand strokes correctly; it’s imprecise as hell when using boolean operations; it can’t do vector patterns (nor are they planned); it can’t even correctly join two specific points from different shapes! I stick with it for the price point and because I ethically dislike Adobe, but the software as is is utter junk if you care about precision in your work.
InGodsName 8y ago
I want an app which let's me design webscrapping workflows visually. Then once workflow is completed, upload it to cloud and run N instances of this workflow. There was a software called SpiderClimber for this. Unfortunately, the author disappeared and software too. Edit: i want to extract ad banners from websites, think Google ads or any other ad network ads. Pop ads etc... Including redirect sequence and page's screenshot and source. This task is not simple as extracting a table as CSV from a webpage. I've struggled to find anything which is flexible enough to: 1. Visit porn/torrent and other shady websites 2. Save the banner image 3. Click the banner link and save the redirect sequence 4. Screenshot the page which appears after clicking the banner and save its HTML source. Why i want to do this? To extract scam ads run by scammers. I want to create a directory of all ads which can be queried to see what ads are running. If anyone is running fake news ads or spreading hate speech, they'll caught using this method. Not for adfraud. My profile contains my email, if you want to discuss, just email me.
- phuff 8y ago
  Have you seen http://helena-lang.org http://helena-lang.org and Ringer? The author has been building tools for doing what you are describing I think.
- djhaskin987 8y ago
  Mozenda does this: mozenda.com
- MrStonedOne 8y ago
  data toolbar is a modified version of chrome, it includes visual workflow selector method, content grabbing, automated tasking, and exporting/importing workflows as xml documents. I used it to auto-renew craigslist ads at a company I used to work for.
- robbiemitchell 8y ago
  You can build this with scrapinghub.com — IIRC it’s a portia project. Kimono was the best for this until it went through a quiet exit to Palantir.
strayamaaate 8y ago
Norton Commander. https://bit.ly/2SBnriS https://bit.ly/2SBnriS Nothing since has ever made me feel so in control of my file system. There have been a few clones, but never quite hit the spot.
- bdz 8y ago
  I think Total Commander is pretty nice and much better than NC ever was. Obviously that comes from the different platforms https://www.ghisler.com/ https://www.ghisler.com/
  - mtarnovan 8y ago
    I second this. Total Commander is excellent.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Which clones have you tried? MC worked well for me (TUI), as does fman (dual pane file manager for GUI).
- neko_koneko 8y ago
  FAR Manager is really great, you should give it a try: https://www.farmanager.com/screenshots.php?l=en https://www.farmanager.com/screenshots.php?l=en
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- RomanPushkin 8y ago
  I use the clone (Far) on my Mac. It runs pretty well. Also works on Linux https://github.com/elfmz/far2l https://github.com/elfmz/far2l
- altmind 8y ago
  For linux there are mc, my #1 thing to install on a new server. If you want the gui version, there is double commander, available in both gtk and qt(how do they support 2 frameworks?)
linuxlizard 8y ago
Brief, the text editor, from Underware. It's still the best code editor I've ever used. Super fast, underpins written in a Lisp-y dialect (later C-ish). The ^G feature would pop up a list box listing all functions in the file and I could select where I wanted to jump to. It's still a feature I wish I had in any modern editor.
- jmarcher 8y ago
  This is a common and basic feature in most modern editors. Sublime, VSCode, Emacs (with ibuffer), IntelliJ*, VIM (with ggtags?), etc.
- alecr95 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure sublime text 3 has a similar feature -- http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/file_management/file_navigation.html#supported-operators http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/file_management/file_... The shortcut is slightly different (ctrl + shift + r), but function is the same
- fredsanford 8y ago
  Brief was also on my mind. I met David Intersimone a few times and asked him about un-retiring it or open sourcing it. Obviously a no-go. :(
- mikerg87 8y ago
  Man I miss Brief. I even used it on OS/2. I wish Embarcadero would bring it back. The way you could split Windows amazing. And fast. The column based operations were great when maniplulating input files. VSCODE et al are OK but it can’t compete with character mode.
rzr 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canoma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canoma
drivingmenuts 8y ago
Microsoft Word 5 Mac edition. Just redevelop it, no additions or changes, except a conforming UI. That was the last good word processor before it all went to hell.
- copperx 8y ago
  As noted in another comment, AbiWord is pretty close.
brightball 8y ago
Privateer. It’s an older game that I always thought could be a great MMO game these days.
- bloopernova 8y ago
  Which one, the bitmap-based-ships version, or the later 3D-based-ships with the Clive Owen acted videos? I know what you mean, though. Elite: Dangerous is good, gorgeous looking, and utterly massive, but very light on RPG elements. EVE is/was too full of people whose enjoyment of the game was predicated on spoiling yours. I haven't played Star Citizen, really not sure if I ever will. (Elite is something I will be going back to when I can afford a good VR headset. That game screams out for VR, and by all accounts looks and feels sublime with a headset.)
  - enobrev 8y ago
    The later version of Privateer is the reason I'm a Clive Owen fan
  - ehnto 8y ago
    Star Citizen is going to be interesting. I used to think the holy grail of gaming was going to be in-depth RPG elements with crisp and visceral first person experiences. Now it's finally happening in many games, the granularity of gameplay mechanics and detail of real world representations coupled with the need to manage RPG elements and economy and maintainence of your bank account, character loadout and vehicles and all the minute details. It's all just a bit much. What I have found so far with SC Alpha, which has no RPG elements yet, is that by the time I run around the stores to get my character geared up, requested my ship from it's hangar, boarded and prepared it's loadout, got my destination waypointed, begun and completed the travel to my mission... I am out of time or no longer engaged in the game and I tap out.
linguae 8y ago
I have a few software packages in mind: 1. The Genera operating system for Symbolics Lisp machines. Ever since I've gotten bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp machine bugs, I've been wanting to use Genera, but I was born at the beginning of the last AI winter, and unfortunately the operating system is still proprietary, with no word about whether or not it will become open sourced. It's regrettable that the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater when Lisp machines lost out in the marketplace to RISC workstations and the x86 running Lisp on other OSes; there are a lot of interesting lessons we can learn from Genera in today's operating systems and programming environments, and an entire generation of computer scientists and software engineers are unfortunately completely unfamiliar with Lisp machines. 2. I've heard wonderful things about the productivity software developed by Lighthouse Design for NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. I haven't used them myself, but I've read that many NeXTSTEP users were devoted fans of Lighthouse Design software, and the presentation tool that the company designed influenced the design of Apple's Keynote.app. Unfortunately when Sun acquired Lighthouse Design, Sun hasn't done much with the Lighthouse Design codebase. It would have been nice had these programs been updated and further refined for Mac OS X. 3. I would love for someone to resurrect the ideas of Apple's OpenDoc platform, which allows for component-based development of GUI applications, much like how pipes and redirection in Unix allows for different command-line utilities to be used together. My dream is an operating system where all objects can be inspected (like Smalltalk or a Lisp machine OS), where there is a component framework similar to OpenDoc that allows for component-based GUI application development, and where there's a REPL that allows power users to have complete control over their applications (both command-line and GUI). All applications would adhere to some type of well-designed usability guideline (I'm thinking about the classic Apple Human Interface Guidelines from the pre-OS X days), and the interface would be reminiscent of Mac OS 8.
- mietek 8y ago
  I share your sentiments. With regards to Genera, have you seen this? https://static.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html https://static.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html
  - armitron 8y ago
Finnucane 8y ago
I’d still like to have FrameMaker for OS X and/or Linux.
- dahart 8y ago
  Oh man I loved FrameMaker, I used it to write my thesis after spending a couple weeks fretting over and trying various features in Word and LaTeX. FrameMaker blew both of them away in terms of ease and ability to manage styles and table of contents, bibliography, equation editing, everything that normally makes writing a book hard. I just went and read the history, and hadn’t realized that FrameMaker used to be UNIX and Mac only. Windows support was the last platform to be added, and after that UNIX and Mac support faded out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker#History
- zerealshadowban 8y ago
  barring its revival, is there a macos tool to open/convert old FrameMaker documents? my PhD thesis and years of notes were archived in that format.
ToFab123 8y ago
Kai's Power Goo https://youtu.be/xt06OSIQ0PE https://youtu.be/xt06OSIQ0PE
- jvagner 8y ago
  i never would've remember this. thank you.
Fnoord 8y ago
macOS (aka Mac OS X).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
yoshyosh 8y ago
Google Wave, really wish they just had it as a toggle mode for gmail as they built up adoption
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mistrial9 8y ago
Mac OS 9 Finder
- twic 8y ago
  I'd say System 7, maybe 7.5, but i think it went downhill consistently after that!
phaedrus 8y ago
VALDOCS. I had an Epson QX-10 with a Z-80 processor, 256K, and green monochrome screen when 486's were out and the 1st gen Pentium was coming out, but with VALDOCS I was able to do all of my homework the same as anyone using the Microsoft Office Suite. (VALDOCS could do word processing, spreadsheets, and charts and graphs.) It was more responsive on an 8-bit computer than modern bloated Office software, and so much easier to use. We also used WordPerfect for DOS at my high school. In my opinion, VALDOCS > WordPerfect > Microsoft Word, but guess which one won out in the market - I've despised having to use Office software for that reason ever since. Looking this up again caused me to find this very nice article about the people who made VALDOCS: https://www.electronicdesign.com/blog/rising-star https://www.electronicdesign.com/blog/rising-star
- andrepd 8y ago
  Nice read!
- copperx 8y ago
  The video in that article is great!
  - aasasd 8y ago
    I'm only five minutes in, and the vid has everything: vague sense of hype typical for television and supported with random imagery, nonspecific glorification of tech, first-rate new-agey babble mixed with self-righteous entrepreneurship, confusion of the two sorts of magic, padded shoulders that make a businesswoman look like a bouncer. My brain is additionally confused by the appearance of one of Nino Rota's themes from “Amarcord.” For the circusey feel, you know.
- pmarin 8y ago
  It looks similar to the Amstrad PCW. It become the most selled CP/M machine but most people bought it as a word proccesor running only LocoScript.
- bdamm 8y ago
  Can't speak for VALDOCS but +1 on WordPerfect. One major feature it had forever was the edit symbols feature where you could basically access the underlying DOM and tune it to your liking. This solved a lot of problems. Why Word doesn't do such a thing is a mystery, especially given how often Word gets into weird quirky states.
bredren 8y ago
Carmen Sandiego
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- afturner 8y ago
  I've always wanted to write an grown-ups disney musical about her. A few years ago I even called up the IPO and said that if I had the money and the right team, he'd consider it. I have neither. Alas.
  - bredren 8y ago
    That would be a smash hit.
Noumenon72 8y ago
Microsoft Money. I didn't have to give access to all my accounts to some website, or pay an annual subscription for upgrades. I got keyboard shortcuts and reports and I could search for things to find out how old my computer is or when I went to Vegas. It seems like in the physical economy, if you create something of value and you aren't making money off it, you will sell it and someone else can make money off it. With software like Picasa, it's just gone. Some programs release a sunset version, but you never know how long it will work and you can't promote it because they might take it down.
- napsterbr 8y ago
  The interface may not be the same, but I highly recommend http://plaintextaccounting.org http://plaintextaccounting.org. I've used ledger and currently am using beancount. Both are great! There's also gnucash, never used but its interface may be similar to Microsoft Money (which I also never used).
  - sleavey 8y ago
    I've found Beancount [1] to be a nicer version of Ledger. It is similar syntax but it enforces rigid rules to ensure you don't make as many mistakes. You can also use Fava [2] as a nice local web-based account browser. [1] http://furius.ca/beancount/ http://furius.ca/beancount/ [2] https://beancount.github.io/fava/ https://beancount.github.io/fava/
  - jen729w 8y ago
    I’m a tortured Gnucash user. The best I can say of it is that it’s free, and it works. I would not recommend anyone start using it if they are not already.
- mpnordland 8y ago
  My Dad used Money 99 for years until he wasn't able to run it any longer. He switched to gnucash and seems to like it well enough.
- ksherlock 8y ago
  I use MS Money (2004 edition) in a Windows 2K VM. Unless I write my own finance software, I don't believe I'll ever stop.
marmot777 8y ago
Archie.
- trimbo 8y ago
  Such simpler times, back then.
  - marmot777 8y ago
    How about Veronica. :-) I first started using the Internet just after these weren't in use anymore but I worked for a local ISP/web host (remember those), and the boss and others had used things like Archie. The ISP still ran a BBS at the time I started working there (and people were quickly switching to the Internet). We offered dial-up Internet access for people with Mac, Windows, and NT who wanted to use a Netscape, Eudora, Pegasus, et al. :-) There was a service called Unix Internet where you could get an inexpensive account to dial in and explore the Internet from the command prompt, which was surprisingly fun. These were the services I recall: BBS, dial-up Internet, dial-up Unix Internet, web hosting, co-location (i.e., we'd put your server in the basement/server room), ISDN, and T1.
stblack 8y ago
Tornado Notes. A TSR program that I once used to organize my life. It got me through university and the first few years of my career.
trollian 8y ago
macOS
bsenftner 8y ago
Shake: the first accelerated graphics compositing software; Fuck the Apple Shake travesty, the PC & Linux versions rocked. Cool factor 12: your compositing node "scripts" were C disguised by macros, and gcc would hot compile them into so/dlls and hot link them in. Meeting the developer of this software was a major inspiration to my software to follow.
- dahart 8y ago
  I almost added this comment, I wasn’t expecting anyone else to say it. Shake was so awesome before Apple killed it. I clung to my old working copy for many many years, until it wouldn’t run anymore. I never ever understood what the plan for Shake was supposed to be, did you? I remember hearing rumors it would turn into something bigger and better in a different Apple product, but it doensn’t seem like anything ever materialized.
coffeefirst 8y ago
Sparrow. Yes, still.
ilmiont 8y ago
Windows Phone. To this day no Android phone I've used ever as fast, reliable or plain refined as WP8 was. Unique design and many genuinely useful features, and it reflected a time when smartphones could have been vibrant and diverse, not our current two mega-platforms or nothing.
- sheepybloke 8y ago
  My first major phone was a windows phone and I loved it! My favorite was the tile app design. My phone's Bluetooth also had a crazy long range. I could have my phone in one area of the house and use my Bluetooth on the other side.
- stamina67 8y ago
  Why doesn't Microsoft just open-source the windows phone OS as an android alternative ?
  - rincebrain 8y ago
    In part, I would imagine, because IIRC they were trying to do the same concept that Apple did about shipping one OS built for desktop/phones with different flags, so that would require opening a large swathe of the Windows source tree.
  - toast0 8y ago
    I don't think open sourcing it would help much at this point. It's not as if it's impossible to find a Windows phone to use, but the ecosystem is falling apart too. The biggest problems in my mind for using a Windows phone today are really that what apps there were are going away (which open sourcing the os isn't going to help), and the browser is bad. On Windows phone 8, the browser is bad because the rendering engine of mobile IE isn't very good / workable with modern web; on Windows mobile 10, the browser is bad because Edge frequently delays responding to user input and it's uterly unusable at times. Plus or minus when the browser locks up the phone and the watchdog timer reboots it.
  - cbanek 8y ago
    A lot of the Windows Phone OS is ported from the Windows code at the time (networking stack, libraries, UI) with fixes for multiple architectures (ARM/MIPS), power, and performance. Source: I worked on it.
AckSyn 8y ago
BeOS
projectramo 8y ago
Google docs but private. (So back when it was private which I assume it was at some point)
- csdreamer7 8y ago
  Look at Libreoffice Online https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
  - projectramo 8y ago
    It’s funny that right after my post I was experimenting with Microsoft one drive with libre office locally. Thanks for the tip. This looks selfhosted. I need to convince a like minded friend to host it for a split of the fee. Edit: found this https://civihosting.com/collabora-online-hosting/ https://civihosting.com/collabora-online-hosting/
- ohiovr 8y ago
  Collabora is just like libre office. It is essentially a libre office thin client. The downside is that it loads an entire libre office on the server with every open window on it. I would like to try OnlyOffice sometime as the developers say it is a client side webapp. They also say they aim for maximum compatibility with MS Office. I am surprised it gets little mention on HN.
  - projectramo 8y ago
    It’s a toss up between paying someone $20/mo to host it or paying Google $3/month not to read your info.
EamonnMR 8y ago
Mostly game engines I enjoyed. The Escape Velocity Engine for one, though clones exist. The Tiberian Sun/Red Alert 2 engine is this crazy mix of voxels, dynamic lighting, height-mapped terrain all in a fundamentally 2d environment which is really cool. I would have loved to read Starcraft's source code, but I imagine that'll never happen now with Remastered.
- pippolong 8y ago
  Ambrosia Software just vanished. Escape Velocity was one of the finest game concepts ever made IMO. Could have become an epic MMO game.
- laaph 8y ago
  You should check out Endless Sky for a good open source remake of Escape Velocity. http://endless-sky.github.io http://endless-sky.github.io
  - EamonnMR 8y ago
    I have put many hours into that fine game. There's also NAEV https://github.com/naev/naev https://github.com/naev/naev
croisillon 8y ago
Zenbe, the email system that made me using email again.
sbhn 8y ago
Microsoft Encarta
rrggrr 8y ago
Hypercard Harpoon (game) Drop.io Quickkeys
- twic 8y ago
  Request nuclear release! Request nuclear release! Request nuclear release!
n0n 8y ago
I‘d love to have Haxials KDX back. Spend endless nights lurking trough
epc 8y ago
MS Word 3.2 for DOS. Only word processor which could keep up with my typing speed.
MildlySerious 8y ago
I would love something like Apophysis 7x that is fully capable of utilizing modern hardware setups
protogenes 8y ago
PalmOS (the original one)
- slartibardfast0 8y ago
  did you see the exciting new PalmOS 4.1 m515 emulator? I'm especially looking forward to an emscripten build of it, for iPhones! https://github.com/meepingsnesroms/Mu https://github.com/meepingsnesroms/Mu
- dmitrygr 8y ago
  Working on bringing this (os5) back on modern cheap microcontrollers. For fun. So far, I have it booting on an STM429 Dev board. I post occasional updates in /r/palm (I'm the guy who was palmpowerups)
- vram22 8y ago
  Ha ha, good one. I had a Palm V and a Palm Zire. Both were very good devices. One of the best features was the instant-on and you're back in the app you were last using, after power-on. No booting period of even a few seconds. And of course, the Graffiti handwriting system (with the stylus) was great too. I even tried using Pippy, a port of Python to the Palm. Would have been great for writing small snippets of code on the go, at a restaurant, bus stop, train station, beach, etc. Unfortunately it was buggy and crashed a lot.
  - foreigner 8y ago
    I still use Palm Graffiti as shorthand when playing Boggle.
    - vram22 8y ago
      TIL about Boggle. Seems like an interesting game, thanks. Must check it out. For anyone else interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggle
renaudg 8y ago
Timeful. An amazing iPhone todo / calendaring app that was bought by Google and shut down.
- harryf 8y ago
  Also Sunrise Calendar. Bought by Microsoft and shutdown.
- johnnyo 8y ago
  I really liked this one too. I still use the idea, just don’t have as smooth of a UI to execute it.
codewritinfool 8y ago
Microsoft Image Composer
- copperx 8y ago
  What a brilliant piece of software. I had an artist friend who used it years after its discontinuation. I need to investigate whether it runs under Wine.
bhauer 8y ago
* Windows Phone. We need a third viable option in the mobile space. This week we are concerned about the loss of a browser engine, recognizing this is unhealthy for the market. Windows Phone was terrific in many ways and recent concepts by fans such as @boxnwhisker (Harry Dohyun Kim) [1] show how beautiful the Metro design could be today. * Microsoft Image Composer. A little known sprite-oriented graphic arts program. Combining its sprite model with the necessary several years of modernization it would have enjoyed had it not been abandoned would be impressive and easy to use. * High-performance lightweight desktop email clients. I was especially fond of one named AK-Mail in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Blisteringly fast on PCs of its era, a modern incarnation would seem incomprehensibly fast compared to today's bloated apps that have difficulty keeping up with keystrokes on 8-core 3.5 GHz monsters. Of course, back in the day, desktop apps were built in systems languages and not in JavaScript. * As a broader concept, a return to prevailing use of on-device processing and computation. Today the too-facile argument that data must be shipped off-network to a third-party cloud in order to be processed efficiently means this happens all the time without users paying it any attention. [1] https://twitter.com/boxnwhisker/ https://twitter.com/boxnwhisker/ (scroll down to see a bunch of examples)
- michaelbrave 8y ago
  I was just talking about how it was a shame windows phone didn't catch on last night, I really think they should have doubled down on it at least as hard as they did on the original X-Box, it really felt like they gave up on it too soon.
  - thisacctforreal 8y ago
    I'm feeling the same way about Edge.
- krackers 8y ago
  >Windows Phone In a similar vein, Palm webOS. I still maintain that it was several years ahead of its time with the whole "mobile apps using javascript" Enyo framework.
Quequau 8y ago
Sim Earth
iscrewyou 8y ago
Oh geez. I can’t remember the name of the browser. It was portable/usb based. I think it actually came with my usb back in 2008 or 2009? Any page you went to, it would show you the media of the page on the right hand side in a column and you could simply click and download it. It essentially kept a running tally of media elements on the right side.
- lostgame 8y ago
  The Web Inspector in Safari or Chrome can do this - it’s not a simple feature as it takes a couple clicks to get to, but it works a treat!
omg_ketchup 8y ago
Flash.
jagger27 8y ago
Eudora
- wanderr 8y ago
  Yeah! It's not closed source anymore (finally!) but as far as I can tell nobody is working on it.
epeus 8y ago
Hypercard - specifically the version that was combined with QuickTime so that it understood audio and video media too, and ran on every OS.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I was also going to say HyperCard, or a successor like HyperLook. For a brief moment in the 90s users were able to make their own tools in GUI form and the future of computing was bright. Then the programmers of the world abandoned the idea of enabling users with computing in favor of locking them into stores and subscriptions to line their pockets. Ok so the sales people and Steve Jobs in particular had a lot to do with it too.
- oldmancoyote 8y ago
  As I have posted above, try running Mac OS 8.1 or lower on BasiliskII.
- tomcam 8y ago
  See LiveCode. Runs n all platforms has community edition
shubidubi 8y ago
Blockchain (too early?)
iamcreasy 8y ago
Norton GoBack [1] I remember this software runs before the OS and allows you to revert the enter HDD in a different time. It can even fix the OS if it stopped working for some reason. I thought it was pretty cool. Anybody know if similar tools exists? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoBack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoBack
- bluedino 8y ago
  Isn’t it basically restore points?
- Aspos 8y ago
  DeepFreeze https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze
- q3k 8y ago
  If you run ZFS, you can use ZFS snapshots.
- __michaelg 8y ago
  ZFS, Btrfs, etc. essentially provide that with filesystem snapshots; LVM snapshots probably also works for that. Not sure whether any easy tooling around it exists though.
sheepybloke 8y ago
Is no one going to mention Pebble? It's the only smartwatch I've ever wanted, and I was so sad that it got bought and died right when I had enough money to spend some on a smart watch. It just had the perfect combo of good design, long battery life, and usability.
- gegtik 8y ago
  although its no pebble, the amazfit bip is the closest contender available today
  - ixwt 8y ago
    Holy crap, I've been looking for something to replace my pebble... This product can't be real... 30 day battery life?!
    - jvagner 8y ago
      Me and my girlfriend been using the Bip for a month now. We run every day. The battery life is pretty phenomenal, the step counter and weather bits are handy, the GPS just works, you need the AmazTools app if you want to share your runs to Strava (but it works great), I have an alarm set to shake my wrist every morning at 7am, and if I destroy the watch.. it was all of $70. The continuous heart rate monitoring is also handy for our gym and zone workouts. I wish it had multiple levels of heart zone alarms, like the TICKR FIT app -- which is amazing for more refined zone training, but it will tell you when you pop out of zone 2 on a run, so it's still useful. Sleep tracking works great for my girlfriend, doesn't work great for me. So I turned it off and that doesn't bother me. I think it's a great starter watch, I can see upgrading to the Garmen vivoactive 3 Music, since I'm not very interested in an Apple Watch.
      - StavrosK 8y ago
        I just preordered the Amazfit Verge. I've tried smart watches in the past, and I never could find any use for them, as I'm the type of person who silences all notifications, but now I play tennis and maybe it'll be useful there. It was mostly just an impulse purchase, but I hope I don't regret it.
Bayart 8y ago
Opera's Presto engine. I quite miss it.
mattkevan 8y ago
Magic Cap from General Magic. What a lovely, odd little operating system. I read an article saying there was an effort to get it open sourced after General Magic folded, but unfortunately all their IP fell into the Sarlacc-like maw of Intellectual Ventures. While we’re on the topic of failed, over-ambitious mobile OS’s, Newton OS would be great too.
- blacksqr 8y ago
  Handwriting recognition on the last iteration of Newton was pretty fantastic. Is there anything comparable for phones today?
  - mattkevan 8y ago
    MyScript Nebo [0] on an iPad with an Apple Pencil is astonishingly good. I have a Newton and Nebo beats it hands down. (With almost infinitely more processing power and 20 years one should hope so, but it’s not always the case.) [0] https://www.myscript.com/nebo https://www.myscript.com/nebo
amelius 8y ago
It would be cool if the UX designs of old software were archived somewhere.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  https://guidebookgallery.org/ https://guidebookgallery.org/
iscrewyou 8y ago
Truecrypt. But even if it comes back now, I would have a hard time trusting it.
- krylon 8y ago
  There is a fork, VeraCrypt - https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html
- MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
  Try VeraCrypt.
pmarin 8y ago
edit.exe I think Windows 10 needs to have a standard text editor in the console.
- culot 8y ago
  Absolutely! I use Nano, and while it's okay, it's silly non-standard GUI and shortcut key combos are a mess. Something like MS DOS Edit or Borland TC++ IDE for DOS would be killer for Windows console - also for Linux as well, which has a similar problem of only bizarrely-designed editors available.
- Marc_Bryan 8y ago
  PFE - Programmers File Editor. Was way more advanced then any of the editors available now. Could handle GB sized files easily. Had macro that can record your operations and playback. Was very nifty and virtually consumed no memory and was simply superb. I still use it though as it is available in 32 Bit version. https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles.htm https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles.... Would love to see a 64 bit version and with some more advanced features. Still loving it and it's one of my main stream editor which just works with just one executable and part of my big list of portable apps collection which mostly consists of single executable based tools for almost any task!!!
- JdeBP 8y ago
  It was actually edit.com. (-:
steveeq1 8y ago
Hypercard. A much, much better implementation of programmable hypertext than our current browser/javascript paradigm.
unoti 8y ago
Lotus Notes. Easy to put together multi user databases with multiple views, security levels, authorization, and signatures.
- stan_rogers 8y ago
  It still exists, and version 10 was recently released.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Notes is great as long as you don't use it for email.
lettergram 8y ago
Pebble - still the best smart watch at the moment. I don't want my watch tracking me, I want a long battery life and I want it to be subtle. This is one of the few times I actually watched better technology fail. Crushed by a few poor business decisions.
- mr-ron 8y ago
  Amazfit bip
lucideer 8y ago
The Opera 12 browser, for umpteen reasons: - UX-wise, it solved many issues browsers today are still struggling with. Vivaldi is working in a similar direction, but they've basically started from scratch again so aren't close to the point of development Opera had achieved by version 12. - These HN posts from today's frontpage [0] [1] give some idea of why we really need Presto today. Not only would it just be good to have more competitors in the space, but also, for most of its existence Presto was ahead of its competitors in every detail (except for the one important, and very political, issue of "site compatibility", a.k.a. making badly written websites work). It also, similarly, got many UX points working at an engine level that modern browsers still get wrong, like text selection of html content and link text, responsiveness of scroll and of page links during navigation, etc. - M2 will never be surpassed by Thunderbird, and quite possibly will never be surpassed full stop (though I really hope I'm wrong about that). ... so many other things [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626316 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18622516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18622516
- userbinator 8y ago
  The Presto source code was leaked not too long ago, so legal issues notwithstanding, you might actually see this one happen. Some Russians and Chinese have already managed to build and patch it with new features.
  - avar 8y ago
    The commit SHA-1 at the tip of the leaked presto.git repository is 8cd9aeda16e82d5babc1070a0791f0ef2de6fad5, which helps to find it in various places.
- aasasd 8y ago
  Just FYI, you can select link text in Firefox and, I think, Chrome if you hold Alt. Learned that rather recently even though I'm practically living on the web.
  - anotherevan 8y ago
mv4 8y ago
MS Money.
Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
MacWrite Pro. Intuitive UI, just-right feature set. Best word-processor I ever used, but sadly Word had the market sewn up before its (much delayed) release.
IloveHN84 8y ago
Windows Phone above all, then Symbian and some nice closed source games such as Fallout, to port them on Linux
mcv 8y ago
Choo Choo Steam Trains, for iOS (http://www.apptism.com/lifestyle/chillingo-ltd/choo-choo-steam-trains/ http://www.apptism.com/lifestyle/chillingo-ltd/choo-choo-ste...) This was a brilliant train game that vanished from the Earth. We used to have the paid version on an iPad, but I think it vanished after an iOS update. My dad has the limited free version on his old iPad that he doesn't update to preserve this game. I think it's a shame that this game disappeared (also because I paid for it), and I've considered whether I might be able to make a clone of the game.
- freehunter 8y ago
  Speaking of railroad simulation games, Sid Meier's Railroads! is still one of my favorite games of all time, even though it doesn't work on any system with more than 2GB of RAM. Everything about that game was perfect. Nothing has matched it since.
  - froindt 8y ago
    How does Sid Meier's Railroads compare to Railroad Tycoon? Growing up I played Railroad Tycoon II and Monopoly Tycoon a lot, which actually gave pretty good lessons in business. Issuing bonds at 7% are annoying to pay back, understanding overhead costs, etc. Also, for what it's worth, Railroads seems to be on Steam for $9.99. Pretty sure it'd work with more than 2 GB of RAM. There's also a bundle with Railroad Tycoon II and 3 for $14.99.
    - mcv 8y ago
      I've also seen some version of Railroad Tycoon on gog.com. They're great with older games. But all of those are pretty complex games. Great for me, but not so much for my kids. Choo Choo Steam Trains was aimed at a younger audience; still challenging, but soon perfect for my 4 year old train nut.
    - freehunter 8y ago
      Railroad Tycoon is a more advanced game. Railroads was very easy to get into and more fun-oriented than Railroad Tycoon. I could never get into Railroad Tycoon. It's also a nicer looking game, being newer than any of the Railroad Tycoon games. Before you fork out any money for Railroads, make sure you research the crashing [1]. This link is from 2015 with the latest update being two months ago with people still discussing crashing and (IMO) some sketchy ways to fix it. The game just flat out doesn't work well on newer systems. Being distributed by Steam doesn't mean it will actually run, my library is full of games that I've never gotten to open. [1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/7600/discussions/0/622954023416871417/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/7600/discussions/0/6229540234...
tomp 8y ago
Liero. Fun game. Apparently the source code has been lost.
- rincebrain 8y ago
  Anything you particularly don't like about the open source remakes/successors people have made?
twic 8y ago
Acta, an "outliner", which means a hierarchical text editor: http://a-sharp.com/acta/ http://a-sharp.com/acta/ I ended up writing most of my school essays in it. You could start with a high-level outline and recursively flesh it out until you had a complete document. The tree structure made it really easy to reorder sections at any scale. There is a successor called Opal - the last version of Acta was in 1993, and the last version of Opal was no later than 2007, so it's dead too.
- Lukasa 8y ago
  Have you considered OmniOutliner for this use case?
  - Veen 8y ago
    OmniOutliner is one of my favorite applications. I use it every day as a planner/outliner. OmniFocus grew out of OmniOutliner, and I used to be an OmniFocus user. But since I started using OmniOutliner I've completed the circle and use it for just about everything, including todolists. Only big limitation is that it's Mac and iOS only. No web or Windows version (also, the Pro version is a bit expensive)
- jvagner 8y ago
  Have a look at DynaList (https://dynalist.io/ https://dynalist.io/) and Workflowy. There are apps, too.
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  Some years ago i wrote this: http://runtimeterror.com/rep/ol http://runtimeterror.com/rep/ol I still use it at works for notes, etc although under Windows is really needs a custom lnk file to setup a fixed window size. At some point i plan on rewriting the UI bits to use a GUI instead.
- jacobkg 8y ago
  You should definitely check out WorkFlowy (https://workflowy.com https://workflowy.com). It is a next generation outliner. People use it to write books and screenplays among other things.
jvagner 8y ago
Qmodem Not really, except: I was thinking the other day that massive communities like Facebook and Reddit suffer because EVERYONE's allowed in, to an unlimited degree. Everything reverts to the newbie state and every sh*t post can define the threads. Remember dial-up? BBSes had limited lines and you'd have to set your (non-multi-tasking) computer to redial so you could visit your BBS. Moderators, paying members would get a smidge more time, but rarely unlimited. Then you had 10/20/30 minutes and the BBS would hang up on you. It might have been a civilizing force for communities, the sort we still could use in social...
- VLM 8y ago
  BBSes have a sense of locality in that everyone is either in your LATA, or is spending a lot of money on long distance (remember that?) to visit. BBSes also were not primarily fedgov privacy harvesting honeypots (mostly...) and that had interesting social interaction effects when the sysop was just some dude down the road instead of some NSA spook or marketing droid. I also remember door games like TW2000 were a lot more fun than the modern "you must send us microtransactions of cash because your friends do" modern social games. Inherently slow empire building is also more social than spending money on a fake farm or the tired old FPS model.
- armitron 8y ago
  I think what you describe has more to do with the population in general than the artificial limits of the various mediums. In BBS and early Internet days (pre-95 or so), people who were using computers were highly intelligent. Certainly above average. These days, everyone and their dog is on the Internet. The masses have moved in and thus the medium shifted to accommodate them, by dumbing itself down to the lowest common denominator. With the shift away from a knowledge repository to advertising and consumerism ("the spectacle") the SnR has dropped significantly. In cybernetic terms, during the early years of the Internet, the space acted upon you, by programming you. Thus, if you lacked knowledge, you had to put in the time and educate yourself in order to explore and learn to use this new space efficiently. Cyberspace forced you to get better. These days, the opposite happens. The masses act upon the space and dictate its evolution, downwards. Looking back, I can't help but mourn what could have been but I also feel enormously lucky to have lived through it all.
iamgopal 8y ago
Picasa.
gooseyard 8y ago
Microsoft Comic Chat
rcarmo 8y ago
The Psion S3a application suite. I've yet to come across anything as simple, useful and unfettered.
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  Three of them, Agenda, Data, and Notes, are currently being ported to Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Planet+Computers+Limited https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Planet+Compu... They're designed for use with the Planet Gemini and/or Cosmo, the spiritual successors to the Psion, but I think they work with any Android device.
LeoPanthera 8y ago
HyperCard. It's been decades and I've still never found a better way to make simple GUI applications.
- brassattax 8y ago
  Microsoft's PowerApps is pretty neat and reminded me of Hypercard. It's Office365 cloud-only though.
- bane 8y ago
  It's an absolute mystery to me why this hasn't happened even through the open source community. For a tour down memory lane: https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive-celebrating-30-years-of-hypercard/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive...
  - badsectoracula 8y ago
    There have been a bunch of attempts, but nothing takes off really. I think the closest is LiveCode which used to be proprietary but was open sourced some time ago. Of course there is also https://vipercard.net/ https://vipercard.net/ Also i made this some time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rshZHDDruAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rshZHDDruAE (the URL at the video is outdated, the code is now at http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lilcard http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lilcard but note that after i made the video above i lost interest).
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    Simple point and click programming tools are not a stable state. The problem is people start using them. Then they have collective needs. Then the tool adds complexity to make those needs go away. Thus begins the slow process towards the tool no longer being simple and/or maintainable. You could do it, but you’d need a Craigslist-like “we’re not adding anything, it seems to work ok” attitude. That attitude is totally incompatible with VCs, who generally set the tone in this industry.
- oldmancoyote 8y ago
  Oh yes! I keep BasiliskII installed on my Mac so I can run HyperCard (AppleWorks too).
cm2187 8y ago
Skype.
vram22 8y ago
Turbo Delphi Explorer. It was a free version of Delphi 6. They still do have a Starter Edition, of course, with some restrictions, which TDE had too. But IIRC, TDE was available in both Win 32 and .NET versions. Borland Sidekick, a pop-up TSR productivity utility. Turbo C 2.x MS QuickC Probably a few others I need to remember.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  Have you tried FreePascal/Lazarus[0]? It seems like a spiritual successor to Delphi. [0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
  - vram22 8y ago
    Yes, I have, thank you. I like both of them (I was a heavy Turbo Pascal user many years earlier, and have used Delphi some, too), and have written some small programs in them (FPC [1]/Laz). (Commented earlier on HN in some relevant thread, about relative binary sizes of a few langs' EXEs, like C, D, Go, FPC, etc., too - FPC's are quite small.) Mean to do more with both over time. [1] I call Free Pascal FPC for short (for Free Pascal Compiler) to distinguish it from the common use of FP to mean Functional Programming). Here's a digital clock I created with Lazarus: Digital Clock created in FreePascal / Lazarus: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/04/digital-clock-created-in-freepascal.html https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/04/digital-clock-created-in... Also feel free to check out these other clocks I created earlier, both in Python: A simple alarm clock in Python (command-line) - this one has a good real-life use, see the post for details: https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/11/a-simple-alarm-clock-in-python-command.html https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/11/a-simple-alarm-clock-in-p... Jal-Tarang, and a musical alarm clock in Python: https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/12/jal-tarang-and-musical-alarm-clock-in.html https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/12/jal-tarang-and-musical-al... Here are two more I created earlier: Digital Clock v1.0 - in 3 lines of Delphi code: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/08/digital-clock-v10-in-3-lines-of-delphi.html https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/08/digital-clock-v10-in-3-l... A digital clock for Windows: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-digital-clock-for-windows.html https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-digital-clock-for-wind...
- 8y ago
quickben 8y ago
Macromedia Fireworks.
- misterkolaz 8y ago
  Fireworks is still in my heart. I use a very old version from time to time, but i really wishes adobe released it as open source instead of killing it
vram22 8y ago
Opera Mini browser 2.x for Android, so that I could use one of my older Android phones, of a lower OS version. It is the Samsung Galaxy 551 and had a hardware keyboard.
tnsittpsif 8y ago
BBOS 7 and 10. I just want a BlackBerry Passport with modern internals and a business and developer friendly OS. I can't stop fantasizing about a BlackBerry Passport with Pure OS / Postmarket OS and all the modern hardware specifications. That would make for an awesome portable developer computer.
kazinator 8y ago
Apollo Domain/OS.
- trimbo 8y ago
  How come?
vax425 8y ago
Yahoo Pipes
coolgoose 8y ago
Windows Live Mail
chongli 8y ago
MacOS classic, preferably system 7.6. I would love to see it resurrected with modern features (protected memory, preemptive multitasking, a decent network stack) but without all the complexity that comes with OS X. I really miss the spatial desktop, the icons designed by Susan Kare, the way the whole system felt intuitive and understandable for a single person. I don't think I would pay for it. I'd rather take a shot at developing it myself.
- oldmancoyote 8y ago
  BasiliskII can run System 7.6 . I don't know wether it meets all of your requirements though.
tylerscott 8y ago
Macromedia/Adobe FireWorks. Still miss that despite how rad Sketch has become.
coleifer 8y ago
Old-school visual basic, but maybe powered by python or another modern scripting language.
- zubairq 8y ago
  I'm building this at dannea.com, but powered by js
- api 8y ago
  Agreed. Best visual GUI editor ever made. A modern reboot of similar concepts with modern look and feel would be something I would pay for, especially if you could target both desktop and mobile.
  - hsitz 8y ago
    The VB GUI editor and IDE generally were a fair ways behind that of Delphi, back in the 90's. With current Lazarus/FreePascal open source Delphi clone you can get a feel for it
- jakear 8y ago
  What do you mean by old school? Isn’t it powered by .NET, why would you change that? Genuinely curious, I don’t know much about msft’s developer tools.
  - topkai22 8y ago
    No, Visual Basic was its own development stack direct to the OS. It had some pretty nice tooling for creating GUIs in a drag and drop manner. The last version was 6 and that was initially released in 1998. That being said, the VB6 runtime is STILL in Windows 10, and therefore will be officially supported to a degree for at least 5-8 more years. How’s that for backwards compatibility.
    - topkai22 8y ago
      In the early 2000 MSFT released VB .NET (a different language and platform) as a successor, which is what you are thinking of. What the OP misses is the tooling surrounding VB6
api 8y ago
Old Windows 3.1 era MathCAD before the company ruined the UI. Extremely easy to use and powerful symbolic math engine and helped me learn calculus. My dad used to model a lot of analog signal processing and acoustic stuff.
brassattax 8y ago
Courier (formerly Calypso) Email, a Windows email client. I loved the way it handled multiple accounts, filtering, and auto-replies. Worked with POP3 and IMAP and had features that other clients lack such as blind send, configurable notifications per account, and export (which put any emails selected into a single text file, and dumped attachments to the file system and foldered them according to email ID.) Also, all account settings, filters, etc. and emails were stored in a ".box" file, so you could move or copy that single file from system to system. It lacked SSL/TLS which was the final death knell for it I think, as most email providers started requiring it.
anonlawyer 8y ago
Tweetie. Then again, with the way Twitter is today, I don't miss Tweetie as much as I used to. Sparrow. Aperture. Picasa.
elygre 8y ago
Lotus improv: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
CosmicShadow 8y ago
MSN Messenger
- jagger27 8y ago
  With Messenger Plus
bitcrusher 8y ago
BeOS... but modernized. Haiku doesn’t hit the right notes and BeOS was so freaking amazing for its time.
- artificial 8y ago
  Completely agree, I'd dive in with both feet. The lame hardware support still bothers me. I remember being amazed at being able to restart servers, like say if the sound died. I've been watching Haiku and the progress...
shurcooL 8y ago
Re-Volt Classic on iOS. It was a very high quality and authentic port of one of my all time favorite childhood games. They released it in 2012 as a 32-bit iOS app. By the time 64-bit became a requirement for iOS apps, the publisher abandoned it and it never got updated. :(
karmakaze 8y ago
NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP Everything about the operating system, application platform and tools were simultaneously rich in features and minimal in surface area without being dumbed down. It would have been great to have seen this evolve on its own rather than get rolled in with Apple. Xcode is so extra compared to the original Interface Builder.
submeta 8y ago
Netmanage's EccoPro. That was/is a Personal Information Manager (PIM), outliner, database that was abandoned in 1997 after MS gave Outlook for free. - I haven't seen a better information manager ever since (outliners like OmniOutline or task managers like OmniFocus are good, but don't even come close to EccoPro)
- gmfawcett 8y ago
  You beat me to it. :) EccoPro was an incredible tool. I loved it the way that people slightly older than me loved Lotus Agenda, another legendary PIM. These days I get by just fine with Emacs + org-mode, but Ecco had some amazing usability features that I've never seen matched in another product.
  - submeta 8y ago
    Isn't it crazy? Twenty years later there ain't no product that has all the capabilities of EccoPro. I used Emacs/Org several years myself. And several other tools (Toodledo, Todoist,...)
talonx 8y ago
* Windows Phone. Fantastic UI, and coupled with the Lumia, it was an awesome user experience. * The old Winamp, with all the intricate shortcuts that I had memorized. * Windows XP itself. I have been on Linux for years, and XP was the last Windows I used alongside it (for MSOffice). XP had reached the peak in terms of being able to control the desktop using the keyboard. And then the downslide started.
- freehunter 8y ago
  I know a lot of people who loved Windows XP, but I always hated it. Especially compared to Ubuntu, it felt like the past. Having to hunt down drivers and install them before any hardware started working was a pain, and after I tried Ubuntu and it auto-detected my wifi card and sound card, that was the end of any respect I had for Windows XP. And that's not even mentioning the number of times I had to call the phone number and read my license key to the robot to get my activation to work. It wasn't until Vista came out before I could go back to Windows and not feel like I was taking a step backwards in time.
  - badsectoracula 8y ago
    Well, people who like XP and older versions of Windows in general tend to like the UI, not the kernel :-P. I know many who would love a version of Windows 2000, XP or 7 (depends on the taste) with the Windows 10 kernel. It is a problem with Windows that you have to take all of it or nothing. At least on Linux you can use whatever UI you want with the latest kernel.
  - talonx 8y ago
    I liked XP for the UI. Ubuntu is still ages behind, although with Gnome again it seems to be getting better. Unity was a disaster.
kgwxd 8y ago
Resurrected as closed-source and proprietary, destin to be abandoned again?
wenc 8y ago
* The Borland Turbo IDEs, but modified for modern languages. * Paradox for DOS (with PAL = Paradox Application Language), but with SQL backends.
- dleslie 8y ago
  Do you mean the TUI interfaces? I love those, still. If you can get setedit or RHIDE working then you can revisit the experience on Linux.
  - wenc 8y ago
    Yep, that's what I meant. Thanks for the RHIDE and setedit recommendations.
- fsloth 8y ago
  Anders Hejlsberg (the original author of turbo pascal) developed C# and it integrates really nicely with visual studio.
travisgriggs 8y ago
Interleaf word processor. It was like LaTex met a (zany) UI written in Lisp. Only word processor I’ve ever used that had a great balance between WYSIWYG and all the structure of the document.
glenrivard 8y ago
Google Reader
valeg 8y ago
Final Cut Express and Color IBM Lotus Symphony (pleasant and convenient GUI) and ofc Google Reader
- freehunter 8y ago
  I never used Google Reader, but iGoogle was my homepage for more than 5 years before it was ripped from me. I still miss it.
covercash 8y ago
Starseige:Tribes - the slightly broken physics in that first of the franchise really made for a fast paced and fun game. Update the models and textures and it could be a great modern day esports game to play and spectate.
donarb 8y ago
DabbleDB, this YouTube video gives a great introduction to this online spreadsheet-like database. Sadly they were bought out by Twitter, never to be seen again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY
- jpswade 8y ago
  Sounds a bit like airtable
tptacek 8y ago
Knox, the macOS menu-bar encrypted DMG manager.
- markonen 8y ago
  Hey–the original maker of Knox here. Thank you for this trip down the memory lane. We launched the app in 2005 and sold it to AgileBits (makers of 1Password) in 2010. I just had a look and people are still discussing Knox on the AgileBits forums today! Here's what has changed since 2010: – Apple introduced FileVault 2 in late 2010, making full disk encryption of both internal and external drives simple and straightforward. Knox was always about convenience over the built-in tools in the OS, and for the simplest cases, the OS finally caught up. - It was a time when a small menu bar utility could go for $34.99… Before the AgileBits sale we were exploring some cool new stuff for Knox: - App Vaults: swizzle some NSFileManager calls and have apps such as Mail or Safari direct all their reads and writes (including for preferences and Keychain access) to a vault. Multiple independent, encrypted, secret app instances. - Online Backups: Knox Vaults were already encrypted and block-based, so many of the hard parts of backups were already taken care of. Backing up incremental Vault changes to an online block storage seemed straightforward enough, but in 2010 we just couldn't make the math work. (for example, in early 2010, S3 was $0.15/GB/mo and AWS still charged for inbound data transfer at $0.10/GB.) In the end, it just wasn't sustainable. 2010 saw the launch of iPad and iPhone 4, and demand for Cocoa devs was becoming red hot. The opportunity cost of working on a niche Mac product like Knox was just too high.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Full disk encryption and individual encrypted DMGs ("vaults") have radically different use cases! Most encrypted DMGs aren't mounted (or "unlocked"), most of the time. They address a threat model where an attacker might have file read access to your running machine. At Matasano, standard operating procedure was just to have the whole Mail.app library directory inside a Knox vault, "locking" mail cryptographically until you explicitly unlocked it. Apple's existing tooling for encrypted DMGs is very cumbersome. I script around it, and that's OK, but Knox had a much better UX.
Myrmornis 8y ago
80 or 160 Gb 5th/6th gen iPod w/ Rockbox!
faizshah 8y ago
Nitrous.io they had the best online IDE I have used. They were going to put a standalone version up as open source but never did.
itsyogesh 8y ago
With all the comments regarding the resurrection of Windows Phone, I really want to know the developer experience that came with developing WP apps. I haven't had a chance to work on it, but was there any way something like flutter or react-native could have saved the ecosystem.
kevindong 8y ago
Mailbox. The cross platform email client bought and abandoned by Dropbox. To date, I have not found a cross platform (or really any single platform) app that's as fast as Mailbox. I don't know how they did it, but everything felt truly instant. All of my devices would simultaneously ring when an email arrived. Archiving/deleting/snoozing emails instantly synced across all platforms (including the web Gmail client). The aesthetics of Mailbox remains unmatched by any email client available today.
anoother 8y ago
- Amapi 3D - trueSpace
justaaron 8y ago
Orion Platinum (a virtual synthesis studio app Richard Hoffman designed and released as Synapse Audio, who only make VST plugins these days.) Cool Edit Pro (win-only audio editor with some interesting effects and processes.)
- dep_b 8y ago
  I know a lot of people that used Cool Edit Pro until it just fell apart on later version of Windows. I loved it too. It...just worked? But it's still being developed by Adobe under the name of Audition.
viburnum 8y ago
The old Byline iOS app
skrebbel 8y ago
Jasc Paint Shop Pro - before Corel picked them up and gave the software a horrible identity crisis. It had all the right features for graphics editing targeted at the web. Mixing vector layers with raster layers, both fully featured, is still something many modern programs either don't have, or half-ass. And it was dirt cheap, compared to the competition.
- dleslie 8y ago
  I have 6 installed on Windows 10.
- altmind 8y ago
  i did not expect anybody remember paintshop. it was incredibly easy and productive for me. how many years have passed.
- mappu 8y ago
  Fireworks (Adobe/Macromedia) was in this category of mixed vector/raster editors. I'd love to see it return, but a 2019 version would have to be somewhat different to survive. Krita is making serious moves in this direction.
  - wwweston 8y ago
    It'd need to be somewhat different, yes, but... the biggest problem Fireworks faced in its last years at Adobe was basically who it was owned by. And what else they owned. Photoshop is the rare application with language warping household mindshare. It didn't matter that Fireworks was a better screen design tool on several level, Adobe almost constitutionally couldn't ever have really done enough with Fireworks without pitting it against their flagship title.
- david_p 8y ago
  I still have PSP v7 installed. Using it as an image viewer and photo editor almost daily. I'm also using it to draw in vector mode. It's so fast, so lightweight, and so fully featured.
mhh__ 8y ago
Richard Burns Rally!
sm01 8y ago
I would love to use KBMS and IQ again, from AICorp. I also loved developing software for OS2.
sm01 8y ago
One tool that has not been surpassed yet is KBMS from AICorp.
armitron 8y ago
* Symbolics Genera. Nothing like it today. I hope it happens some day since it's not exactly dead and abandoned. * NuMega SoftICE. Those that used it know. * Nextstep as it was before Rhapsody. Revolutionary. * Lost Treasures of Infocom for IOS. Abandoned since Activision won't recompile it for 64bit.
suyash 8y ago
Apple's Quartz Composer: This is the best tool to do different types of creative coding projects such as VJ'ing, IOT Prototyping, Music MIDI Controller etc. It's sad that development stopped on this years ago.
jmartrican 8y ago
TacWarrior. It's a strategy turn based tactical RPG for IOS. Like Fire Emblem. I think it's my favorite game. My kid deleted it from my old iPad 1 and now it's not available for download. Would love to port this to Steam. http://tacwarrior.wikia.com/wiki/Tacwarrior_Wiki http://tacwarrior.wikia.com/wiki/Tacwarrior_Wiki It was so well balanced and just hard enough to keep you hooked. Also, so much variety in ways you can win, by having different warrior types. Also, various weapons. IMHO a masterpiece.
nicoburns 8y ago
Adobe fireworks. There's still nothing that comes close to it's ergonomics and power for working with both vector and bitmap graphics while also allowing you to do layout reasonably effectively.
- jlu 8y ago
  Came here just to say this! If anyone knows any app that could replace fireworks, please shed a light!
- gibatronic 8y ago
  Same for me, it had many killer features: * Shared symbols * 9-Slice scaling tool * GIF * Bitmap tools * Batch scripts
dvtrn 8y ago
The original Crimson Skies games, great story, great voice acting, really fun dogfights, and stunning graphics for the time.
jroid 8y ago
Google Desktop. I haven't yet seen a good, cross-platform alternative to search within documents on my PC, with a browser interface.
cimmanom 8y ago
Eudora mail.
danilocesar 8y ago
MeeGo. While most part of it was opensource, the UI/UX wasn't. And it was GREAT. I turn on my N950 from time to time to see if still works and I get a bit sad that I'm not able to use it anymore.
mitchtbaum 8y ago
Kapow Robomaker https://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/kapow-technologies-releases-ondemand-saas-web-data-services-005677.php https://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/kapow-technologies... Dapper http://blog.pansapiens.com/2007/03/19/dapper-the-screen-scraper-for-everyone/ http://blog.pansapiens.com/2007/03/19/dapper-the-screen-scra... Yahoo Pipes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes
tyoma 8y ago
Visual Basic 6. Fantastically easy to learn and let you make extremely useful GUI apps quickly. And the edit and continue debugger is still a dream compared to some of today’s debugging setups.
- nwhatt 8y ago
  You can still find VB6 jobs. Overwhelmingly successful platform that continues to drive Windows market share. Binary compatibility sucked but COM was ultimately worth it.
- ransom1538 8y ago
  Wow. To this day. I can only find IDE's that do 1/2 of the features VB6 had. But yeah. After .NET hit, all the VB6 devs I know, bailed.
  - petepete 8y ago
    I'd say exactly the same for Delphi 5 and 6.
    - snaky 8y ago
      Delphi was much more productive, but VB6 was more broadly present on US enterprise market.
    - scottlocklin 8y ago
      Out of curiosity what happened to Delphi? It always seemed quite good to me.
      - badsectoracula 8y ago
        Borland got greedy. Up to Delphi 5, the IDE was something anyone could afford at $99.95 with the cheapest option and going up from that up to $1000+ for the "architect" version. In Delphi 6 they made the cheapest option only for non-commercial use, still at $99.95 and the next tier was a few hundred. In Delphi 7 they made the non-commercial version free, but then they got distracted by .NET and started rising their prices hard to the point where the $1000+ version was the cheapest one until a few years ago. Then a few years ago they made a "cheap" $350 version but the license allowed only for $5000 annual income or something silly like that (they changed the limit a couple of times IIRC) and then you had to buy the next most expensive option which was several hundred dollars more. Lately they made that version free but the limit is still there. To add on that, most of the community doesn't really believe in the free versions since ever since the Delphi 7 Personal Edition they keep discontinuing them (they made another in 2006, based on the slowest and most buggy version which wasn't exactly a great idea) and then bring them back years later with different limitations (and always the reason for discontinuing them is that it didn't work - as if they'd magically become popular in a few months for releasing a free yet extremely limited version). Add to that that after Delphi 7, which by many was considered the most stable and generally best version, they got distracted by .NET and Linux (with a very hacky project, Kylix, that never got any traction in the Linux community) and decided to make Delphi a .NET product, rewrote the IDE with a highly unpopular (at the time) interface with a lot of bugs and generally a much worse experience for developers and you get the idea. They basically did the worst thing they could ever do at every single front: abandoned their core audience (Delphi was very popular with smaller developers, especially in Europe) to go after enterprise customers, closed the gates to new blood by increasingly rising the prices, created a sense of unreliability by changing their minds every few years, replaced a stable product with a buggy mess and drove a lot of their skilled people to leave over the years. The same stuff apply to C++ Builder too, btw. They actually lost a chance here - C++ Builder could have been a the IDE to use for tools in the game industry that relies a lot on custom tooling and some developers did try to use it (e.g. Bioware and i personally worked on another company that also considered it) but Borland/Inprise wasn't very cooperative and they left their C++ compiler stagnate (in our case the compiler simply couldn't build the codebase due to outdated standards support). Delphi and C++ Builder are products that you can't help but wonder what they could have been at the hands of a company with more competent management.
prepend 8y ago
Front page and iWeb (or even bbedit/homepage). Trying to teach kids simple html site design with core principles (you own the html, you put it where you want) is harder because you have to plunge them into code and file transfer and what not. Earlier kid had a much easier way with iWeb basically making word docs and pushing them out to any web server. The web based kits are great if you want a web site, but terrible for learning how to build web sites.
- jonahss 8y ago
  Have you looked at neocities.org
coreyp_1 8y ago
If I could buy a good Windows phone today (e.g., current technology level, not used), I would immediately. I refuse to own an Apple product, and I don't like Google knowing so much about me (I've had multiple bad experiences with romhacking, so that's a no-go).
- mirceal 8y ago
  how is Microsoft different? just curios. also, why not Apple?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sambeau 8y ago
- iChat - Garageband - iPhoto - iTunes - Microsoft Expression Design
ptbello 8y ago
Interesting how the top comments are about Microsoft products discontinued years ago. Nowadays google's the one shutting down products people love (reader, inbox...). Looks like an inevitable phase in the unicorn lifecycle.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  It is an awful lot of Microsoft stuff, now that you mention it. Kind of surprising on hacker news, but then I guess the open source stuff can't ever be called discontinued.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
samblr 8y ago
Good old google talk or gmail chat. gmail is yuck these days - such a shame after all these years.
dcooper8 8y ago
The ICAD System. Common Lisp based knowledge based engineering platform, including solid modeling kernel. Started on Symbolics machines and ended up on Allegro Common Lisp. Purchased by Dassault Systemes (800 lb gorilla of the CAD world) and shut down.
dawnerd 8y ago
Zune. Yeah technically hardware too but it was an amazing music player with some good software too.
BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
Microsoft Excel for Mac. I know, I know, but I'm only half joking. I wish Microsoft had even a tenth of the bug reporting options for their proprietary offerings that they have for VSCode. Without being able to get any kind of engineer eyes on serious performance regressions it may as well be abandoned.
zapzupnz 8y ago
ZZT. I think a modern ZZT would make for a great educational tool to teach coding. A lot of existing, popular tools exist at either end of the spectrum of difficulty: too easy or too hard. ZZT was simple to design, fun to draw in, and the coding wasn't too complex. Megazeux, a spiritual sequel by another lot of people, I always found far too complicated. It's not that different to ZZT, it just manages to be fiddly without a good enough pay-off in my view.
- DanBC 8y ago
  I posted a link about ZZT a while ago, and I learned some stuff from people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17656822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17656822 And a friendly person emailed me this link: https://github.com/jdque/char https://github.com/jdque/char
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    Neat to see how many fellow coders cut their teeth on ZZT.
bradnickel 8y ago
ClarisWorks/AppleWorks - Thought the integration of all office suite functionality in one pallet was brilliant.
thesunisonfire 8y ago
Lotus Improv
lunchables 8y ago
AOL. No, seriously.
baumgarn 8y ago
Macromedia/Adobe Director (1985-2013) was a really cool authoring environment. You could drag and drop animations and interactive experience together really fast. It was an animation software first but had its own scripting language. Even kids could create complex experiences and games with it. Today I need to code everything first before I am able to see anything. I miss this easy direct wysiwyg way of doing things. I think the development processes for the modern web platform are very limiting creatively. The end of Flash is also a huge loss in that regard.
- ohiovr 8y ago
  I miss that for the times of easy money authoring cdrom titles with it. Lingo was an incredibly easy language to learn and satisfying to use. It just had no place in the web era. Adobe just didn’t know what to do with it besides shockwave.
crazy_monkey 8y ago
Windows 95, the only good Windows Microsoft ever made...
erikpukinskis 8y ago
Caligari trueSpace
- ohiovr 8y ago
  My first real 3d program was impulse Imagine 2.0. Was intrigued by the caligari ads though.
beefman 8y ago
Firefox that ran Tree Style Tab properly Excel for Mac before it became a cartoon Google Reader so there would still be blogs to read Eudora so e-mail wouldn't suck a dozen or so iOS apps that stopped working after iOS 10 a dozen or so niche Windows apps that haven't been updated Reddit's redesign is probably the most destructive redesign of anything I've ever seen, and that is saying a lot. But kudos to them for (so far) supporting the old version with a sticky setting you can choose.
- procinct 8y ago
  I’m curious about which iOS apps you’re missing
  - beefman 8y ago
    DiagnosticPADD, Tafl, HexChess, SolChess, Spirits, C64 Paint, Quill, Fractile Plus, Toontastic, Jukebox, Etude, Soundbrush, Organ+, Harmonizer, SSquares, the microTone, and about as many again that I've forgotten.
- smt88 8y ago
  Firefox is not proprietary
- nsm 8y ago
  I'd be curious to know what about the new webextensions based Tree Style Tab doesn't work for you? I use it all the time. For Google Reader, I am using BazQux and really like it. No ads, no smart "suggestions", just a very simple UI and reading experience.
  - acemarke 8y ago
    Agreed. BazQux is worth every penny of the $20 annual subscription, and a lot more. The current TreeStyleTabs extension mostly works, although it occasionally exhibits weird behavior (dropped tabs ending up under other tabs instead, etc). Still, I can't live without it.
- 8y ago
coredog64 8y ago
Irix. I often have this fantasy that if I were to hit one of those monster PowerBall jackpots I’d see about buying the IP behind Irix to open source it. For a while there was a guy who was replacing the CPU on r5k O2 workstations. These days, pretty much everyone has a super fast MIPS cpu in their router/WAP. I’d love to see 4dwm running on that level of CPU.
anticensor 8y ago
Google+.
ThinkBeat 8y ago
Blackberry. I have never had a more efficient handheld for doing what I need to do most, emali and chat/text messages. The version with the thumbwheel, enabled me to race through messages. I would expect slack to do great on it as well. It was not very good for web, apps, games, like my current smartphone is, but I think my current smartphone is clumsy and slow when it comes to message and email.
- anonu 8y ago
  Old school. I don't think theres enough demand out there to bring it back tbh. Even though there are still many passionate ex-users - and maybe current users. Touch screens have proven to be far superior as they serve both input and output purposes.
  - cgsmith 8y ago
    I agree that touchscreens are more prevalent but disagree that they are superior. Having something tactile for a phone is useful and should be brought back. I was discussing the same thing with how cars are moving to only touchscreens. The problem ends up being you don't know where to touch without looking at it. Imagine having a touchscreen keyboard on your laptop. You'd have to look down to verify where you were.
    - lostgame 8y ago
      If you’re as unlucky as me to use a Touch Bar MacBook Pro, you already at least partially have this problem.
anonu 8y ago
Surprised to see so much longing for Microsoft products on here!
- ohiovr 8y ago
  Window 2000 4ever!
rpeden 8y ago
Microsoft Bob. Not because it was great, but because I think we need more exploration into alternate ways to interact with computing devices. I've seen plenty of people - even young people - doing things wrong because their mental model of how their devices are supposed to work is inadequate or incomplete. I've seen more than one person with hundreds and hundreds of browser tabs open on their iPads and smartphones, because they just don't seem to be able to incorporate the "tab" concept into their model of how their web browser works. And so they're constantly clicking and opening new ones without realizing they can switch back to ones that were previously open.
joe-collins 8y ago
Google Inbox. It's really a task management/reminder tool that just happens to pull in and bundle your new emails, too. Not sure where I'm going when the axe falls next year.
anotheryou 8y ago
* usable, flash-like animation editing tools for the web. (could work great with the material design guidelines)
- ohiovr 8y ago
  This might be what we’re after https://proandroiddev.com/how-to-flare-a-flutter-app-part-1-create-animation-3829fb2ed72a https://proandroiddev.com/how-to-flare-a-flutter-app-part-1-...
jslabovitz 8y ago
MacDraw and Freehand. I know there are modern vector/bezier-drawing alternatives, like OmniGraffle and Sketch and Affinity Designer. But both MacDraw and Freehand balanced functionality and simplicity and directness so well. In MacDraw, I could make technical drawings really quickly. In Freehand, I could do everything I could do in Illustrator, but with much better grid-snapping and typography. And I loved its 'morphing' tool (it wasn't called that), where you could take two objects (even type) and it would interpolate them and make these beautiful shapes.
yourapostasy 8y ago
Newton's soup data structure implementation [1], inside a phone OS, with Pimlico's DateBk from PalmOS [2] taking advantage of that soup data structure. DateBk isn't abandoned yet even though PalmOS effectively is. That is, DateBk is still actively sold for an essentially abandoned OS, which gives you an idea of how incredibly effective that app is. DateBk has a linking feature that would be ideal for soups interoperating with other applications on the device, without explicit coordination between different app developers. DateBk is the result of a responsive developer listening to lots of users [3], and the kind of PIM that I've yet to find in modern phone OS's. The massive 130-page user manual [4] covers a UI that is relatively discoverable for new users and highly customizable for expert users. Some teams have tried to reproduce the functionality on iOS, but no one has yet to come even faintly close to the smooth workflow I experienced on it. It seems PIMs in general are still stuck in some innovation black hole; there is still so much left unimplemented. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple) [2] http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6.htm http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6.htm [3] http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6details.htm http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6details.htm [4] https://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6-v61a-manual.zip https://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6-v61a-manual.zip
wotwot42 8y ago
dBaseIV modernised for webapps.
anotherevan 8y ago
Xmarks Being able to pretty seamlessly synchronise bookmarks across browsers was awesome. Its shuttering was the final impetus that made me move away from the decaying mess that is Lastpass. (Hello BitWarden!)
- hrez 8y ago
  https://www.xbrowsersync.org/ https://www.xbrowsersync.org/ Optionally you can host your own server.
  - anotherevan 8y ago
    Yes, I am using xbrowsersync now. It is the next best option, however there's a lot of rough edges to it compared to Xmarks. Thanks.
cagey 8y ago
Keyboard-driven DOS Outliner Software: * Borland Sidekick Plus[1] (not to be confused with the earlier Sidekick) OUTLINER applet(?). I loved the features (and key-bindings) of this more than ... * Grandview 2.0 by Symantec (before it became a purveyor of software I despise) [2] The closest I have come to finding a replacement for the following is Outlook email (which isn't saying much). Seemingly viable alternatives fail to meet my needs most immediately due to ineffective key bindings. A hardy soul did yeoman work using vDos to allow Grandview 2.0 to be run on any recent Windows version with more than expected amounts of integration with Windows (clipboard)[3]. I used this for a few months at work but the relative inability to share my work led to me discontinuing it's use, though I never found a satisfactory replacement; I use plain text files today. [1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/sidekick/Sidekick_Plus_Owners_Handbook_1988.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/sidekick/Sidekick_Plus_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandView_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandView_(software) [3] https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291 https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291
sumnole 8y ago
Jasc Paint Shop Pro. I've always found it incredibly intuitive to use.
- cgsmith 8y ago
  It takes a bit of time to get used to but GIMP replaced JASC for me.
markdown 8y ago
Adobe Fireworks. The perfect marriage of vector and bitmap design tool. There's never been a better tool for web design.
macintux 8y ago
Microsoft Musical Instruments was a delightful application that used to grace my local Children’s Museum. It allowed you to browse and listen to musical samples of instruments from around the world. I believe it was eventually absorbed by Encarta. It shouldn’t be difficult to create similar software, but assembling quality samples would take a fair bit of work.
80386 8y ago
Flash. The transition to JS + canvas wasn't too bad for games, although JS games can't be distributed as single files, but for animation I don't think there's anything like it anymore. And we forget how much of early internet culture was driven by 4chan's Flash board, which you can only have with things like .swf files - relatively small single files that can contain an entire game/animation.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  Agree 100%. In one sense, the barrier to creating and distributing software is lower than ever before… but in another sense, it's much higher. Pre-teen me would have had a much harder time grokking the modern web tech stack or Unity than learning how to make basic animations and games in either of those two apps. Sure, the runtime sucked. But not in any way I cared about as a kid! Plus, this is a hypothetical scenario, so we can have it be good :)
- simion314 8y ago
  I would also want to see Adobe Air opened sourced if Flash gets open sourced or re-implemented, Apache Flex is already opened. I think Flex4 and Microsoft WPF are the best way to create GUIs for apps
- Eridrus 8y ago
  Flash still exists as an authoring tool that exports JS/HTML5, does it not work well for animation?
  - GauntletWizard 8y ago
    No. Many of the things that made flash interesting just don't work when you're disturbing as HTML5, not the least of which is distribution - flash animations are one file, whereas HTML5 has at least a HTML file and a JavaScript object, but in practice doesn't ever get distributed that way at all. More often it's simply turned into a movie and distributed through YouTube... Which ruins much of the charm. Not just from resolution/compression issues. Flash animations, being vector based, scaled to any monitor, and even YouTube's 1080p just doesn't look nearly as good, because of compression algorithms optimized for live action video - if they actually compressed properly, they could get similar quality, but the price would still be way higher. Flash animations were typically sized mostly for their audio track - 3-4 MB of mp3 and 400k of animation code. Then there's the whole thing about interactivity. Many of flashes best moments were Easter eggs. Most SBEmails have two or more. There's something about the hunt and realizing you "discovered" the extra bit that makes it so much more fun than a stinger. Last but not least: flash is now much more... Hard to pirate. Much of flash animation was created by students and kids who were working with a tool they wanted to learn and with zero budget. It was an act of creative rebellion. It's hardly impossible, but it's not the same as it was. The other large part is that flash is no longer as new and impressive and pioneering as it was. That bit can't be reclaimed, no matter what, but is also a shame. Exploration and boundary pushing was a huge part of all of what made flash so amazing - people realized that it could do "anything" and so did. That pioneering spirit lasted for a very long time, considering - the indie game scene is still riding the wave that flash started - but for animations, that hump is past and not least of which because it ran into the brick wall of iOS Safari.
alanh 8y ago
Meat Gone Bad, an old Mac game. For nostalgia. Would pay a modest amount.
robodale 8y ago
Microsoft Money.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
JdeBP 8y ago
Both of the ones that spring immediately to mind have reservations. Interix, the second POSIX subsystem for Windows NT, already had all of the things that the Windows Subsystem for Linux is gradually reinventing, and Microsoft already owns it. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17773681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17773681 Some of the softwares involved were in fact open-source. Unfortunately, the SUA Community disappeared years ago, and there is no trace of the software packages that it used to provide. I haven't kept up to date with Blue Lion (ArcaOS) and eComstation; so it is tricky to nominate OS/2.
rkagerer 8y ago
CircuitMaker 2000
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wirrbel 8y ago
I heard a lot of good things about FrameMaker for text processing. For development environments I am deeply sorry that smalltalks are not a thing anymore. I know we have pharo, and that's great, but nothing with traction like let's say Lua or ruby or scala. Next thing I miss would be Dylan as it was planned for the Newton. We have opendylan now, but I would like to have it at the heart of a OS/platform.
- MrMorden 8y ago
  FrameMaker is still a thing, but it's very targeted now (and no longer cross-platform).
lkrubner 8y ago
HyperCard , and the whole eco-system around it.
fwguru 8y ago
Edit.com - Windows command promt text editor I also wish linux had such an editor.
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  It isn't exactly the same, but mcedit tends to be very dos editor-like (and as a sidenote, i always find it weird that Linux/Unix console programs look so primitive compared to similar programs for DOS).
  - fwguru 8y ago
    Thanks I'll check it out, when I get back to my Linux machine. I agree with you that linux file editors look very primitive compared to what was available on DOS.
- godot 8y ago
  I might be wrong, but I think that program predates Windows and was widely used in pure DOS days. I remember using it to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat to tweak settings to run DOS games, before Windows days. (It could be because having Win 3.1 installed on a machine brings the program along in DOS though) The amazing thing about it was that even in pure DOS, with no Win 3.1 running, it lets you use your mouse too in the editor (provided that you have drivers set up right in config.sys etc.), I guess in a similar way as how DOS games use the mouse.
lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
WeeWar - I thought it was very well done and the user generated maps were a great feature. Still can't believe they simply switched it off.
oblib 8y ago
Avid Videoshop. I never understood why they quit making it, but it had the easiest to use interface of any video editing app I've used.
ImprovedSilence 8y ago
Winamp. It kicks the lamas ass.
TsomArp 8y ago
Lotus SmartSuite + Organizer
adambyrtek 8y ago
Sunrise Calendar was so much better than anything else on mobile. Unfortunately it got acquired by Microsoft and sunsetted (no pun intended).
augbot 8y ago
Aldus/Macromedia Freehand
cyberferret 8y ago
Back in the late 80s, early 90s, there was an integrated package called "Smart" by SmartWare Inc, which was a competitor to Lotus Symphony (pile of junk) and other 'integrated packages' (i.e. all in one word processing, spreadsheets and database). Smart was the first system I saw that had the concept of different levels, i.e. you could set the system to be Basic, Standard or Advanced, which would change the menus and complexity of the package accordingly. It was also the first database system I saw that had the option of variable sized data records (remember, this was in the days of dBase III/IV). But the killer feature of Smart for me was the absolutely powerful macro/scripting language, which let you customise the system to be almost anything you wanted it to be. I wrote a lot of custom 'apps' with it, with the crowning glory being a Constituent Management System for our local government which let member of parliament record data against their constituents and communicate with them (a bit like a CRM) plus plan walk lists when they went out doorknocking and campaigning. I was sad that Smart never made the marketshare that other lesser featured competitors did, and eventually faded away. Would love to see such an integrated system online these days.
rsync 8y ago
mondomouse from http://www.atomicbird.com/mondomouse http://www.atomicbird.com/mondomouse ... It was a simple, but working and well-done "focus follows mouse" add-on for OSX. It is not maintained and will not work on modern versions of OSX, unfortunately. AFAICT, there is no option for focus follows mouse on recent OSX, such as El Cap, which I am running. It appears, however, that High Sierra has an interesting option hidden deep in the accessibility preferences pane that achieves FFM, but I am not running High Sierra anywhere and cannot test that out ...
nuxi 8y ago
Electropaint, the SGI IRIX screensaver. And yes, I'd pay for it, iff it were a complete experience - not just the dancing squares/triangles, it would have to include the script recorder/player and the configuration panels built into the original. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StA81MNuqB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StA81MNuqB8
stevenicr 8y ago
MusicMatch Jukebox 7.5 Awesome before yahoo bought it and added their drm like stuff to it and it disappeared later.
zerr 8y ago
Visual FoxPro.
mevile 8y ago
Textmate. It was such a great native OS X editor, I don't know what happened to it, but although VS Code is very nice and what I use now, it's not a native mac editor and I miss that.
- gregoriol 8y ago
  I think TextMate is a little bit alive: it had 3 releases in 2018 ("rc" for v2.0), but it indeed is not as amazing as it was and could be.
scottlocklin 8y ago
I'd pay for a copy of Macsyma. Not the open source Maxima version, which is based on its development stage in 1982. The latter is all right, but Macsyma was extremely good. I can still buy a copy ... for WinXP... http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Macsyma-1.htm http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Macsyma-1.htm For a while you couldn't even get that. Macsyma was one of those things where proprietary software can end tragically. Otherwise, I'd pay for a J compiler that could make fast tree structures, but that never existed, and the market is probably 1.
- mepian 8y ago
  You can also get the version of Macsyma that runs on Lisp machines, and it's possible to run it without owning a Lisp machine.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nemoniac 8y ago
After scanning the answer here I have to wonder, would we have been that much worse off if all of the closed-source, proprietary software suggested here had never existed?
nlstitch 8y ago
Mediachance Multi Media Builder 4.9.7 : Its an IDE meant to build dvd menus and simple programs in, but I actualy made my first (distributed) software with it. (Was a quiz program for school, served on a floppy)
sli 8y ago
Do games count? I would love to bring an old OS 9 game called Barrack to modern machines.
MrMorden 8y ago
Bryce. The Ambrosia Software games (Handsome Harry, the Escape Velocity series, ...).
snaky 8y ago
OneNote (PC version). https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-windows/suggestions/32737648-include-onenote-for-desktop-in-office-2019 https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-wind...
- marcoperaza 8y ago
  I wonder if this is still the case following https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/microsoft-suspends-development-of-touch-friendly-office-apps-for-windows/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/microsoft-suspends-d...
kozmonaut 8y ago
Google Reader or the Microsoft Courier
Zelphyr 8y ago
I’m not a Windows user anymore but for nostalgia sake I’d love Macromedia (née Allaire) HomeSite.
mitchbob 8y ago
I loved Dave Winer's MORE outlining app for the Macintosh. It was such an amazing tool for organizing ideas and plans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_(application) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_(application)
CarolineW 8y ago
RiscOS !Draw Vector drawing package that was neat, clean, fast, versatile, user-friendly, and powerful.
jccalhoun 8y ago
Startup monitor is a program that I still install on every windows computer I own and it mostly still works but it hasn't been updated in years and years. https://web.archive.org/web/20131113154828/http://www.mlin.net:80/StartupMonitor.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20131113154828/http://www.mlin.n... Basically, when you install a program that tries to have something run at startup it Startup Monitor pops up a window saying "this program wants to run at startup. Do you want to allow it?" Startup Monitor has no settings or icon or anything. It just works. Unfortunately, because it is so old, I worry that each update to windows will break it. Additionally, because it is so old, it doesn't catch everything that tries to set itself to run at startup so I have to run Autoruns from time to time to turn shit off.
sterlind 8y ago
Midori, the secret operating system incubation from Microsoft. Midori was based on Singularity (written entirely in M#), but went so much farther. It was twice as fast as Windows, had capability security, Rust-style borrow checking, a full GUI, browser and even Windows compatibility. But there was no future - the OS wars were settled - and now the code languishes inside rather than being open-sourced.
serialjoy 8y ago
A desktop app for Jira - I want a global hotkey that allows me to add an issue and one that allows me to search an issue - just like 1Password.
charlesism 8y ago
"SoundMaker" by Alberto Ricci http://www.riccisoft.com/soundeffects http://www.riccisoft.com/soundeffects Every audio editor I've used since then makes the user click too many times when dealing with multiple tracks. As far as being full featured, it wasn't. I still miss it.
aj7 8y ago
HyperCard.
elbybasolis 8y ago
Fallout 1&2. These games are classic, and without GOG, basically relics of the past. The isometric turn-based gameplay would be perfect for a mobile port. It would be great to add new assets and content. It would be quite fun to design sprites in the 90’s style the games have. I’d be happy if Bethesda made a mobile edition, assuming they had the publishing rights to it. I’d pay whatever the going rate for a good mobile game is now adays (without micro transaction). The trademark of Fallout is probably too valuable for anyone to be able to get away with making a ground-up port to a modern system in an open source fashion.
tezza 8y ago
* SmartDraw 6.5 nothing quicker for prototyping GUIs * Adobe Illustrator without Creative Cloud subscription. Occasional use just too expensive now
acrophiliac 8y ago
WordPerfect. Loved the simple typewriter model for a document.
2bitencryption 8y ago
The Zune desktop software music player was, hands down, the best desktop music playing experience I've ever had.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
hybridwebtech 8y ago
Project Gotham Racing 1-4
swlkr 8y ago
1password before the cloud only version
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  You can still buy it. The cloud version is optional.
  - swlkr 8y ago
    Is this true?! I bought 1password 4 for $99 and I upgraded to 6, but from the website I can’t tell if I now have to pay $2.99/mo or I can download the next version for $99 again...
  - newscracker 8y ago
    It’s almost impossible to buy the standalone (non-subscription) version. When I (re)checked a few months ago, there (still) was no link or support article about how to buy this. AgileBits follows a dark pattern of keeping this hidden. If it wants money from people who like the standalone version, it shouldn’t make it next to impossible to figure out how and where to buy it or upgrade to it. As far as I’m concerned, this version might not as well exist.
apapli 8y ago
MS Access. It was still easier to build quite powerful apps covering the UX, controller and model than the commercial alternatives today. In many aspects cloud application development is only just catching up with 20 year old declarative frameworks of yesteryear.
- will_pseudonym 8y ago
  MS Access is still around. Did it change for the worse from previous versions?
  - benjohnson 8y ago
    It's been stagnent or arguably losing features over the last ten years.
apapli 8y ago
In terms of games - Mechwarrior and Spyhunter are still my favourites. I’d love them to be resurrected. (I can’t wait for MW to come out next year)
zoom6628 8y ago
VMCS Manufacturing solution from NCR. It was an entirely que based solution that ran on VRX (mainframe environment). Blisteringly fast. Why? Intelligent use of queues, single programs that read a que, did something, put results on a que, is how bank software was done, retail software, and many more. Its a simple model that predates OOP but actually entirely consistent with OOP principles. I had privilege to see this in 80s with NCRs manufacturing and retail software, at NCR (my first job) and at there biggest user in NZ (Farmers Trading Co.).
gesman 8y ago
Norton commander
WillPostForFood 8y ago
Norton Commander - I use Mac and PC daily, and managing files has never been as fast and powerful as it was with NC. Windows Explorer and Finder are pretty weak file managers.
- Sillzen 8y ago
  You may be interested in fman[0]. Dual pane file manager, actively developed. I don't believe it has feature parity with Norton Commander, but it's a good modern alternative. The developer is also active on HN. [0] https://fman.io https://fman.io
sgoel 8y ago
3D Movie Maker by Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Movie_Maker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Movie_Maker I had a blast making cartoons as a kid with this program.
- mr-ron 8y ago
  As with all things like this there is still a vibrant community at 3dmm.com
zephyrfalcon 8y ago
The Miranda programming language: http://miranda.org.uk/ http://miranda.org.uk/
bitwize 8y ago
Framework. Technically still maintained, but a shadow of its former self. In a word, it was more or less Emacs for the office -- built around a unifying metaphor of "frames" rather than buffers. A frame could contain anything: text, graphics, numbers, even other frames, and on this basis was built a word processor, spreadsheet, database, graphing facility, and a powerful outliner that was as close as an 80s PC got to org-mode. Tying it all together was a sort of mouseless GUI that let you open and manipulate documents visually, and a scripting language that was essentially Lisp disguised to resemble Lotus 1-2-3 macros for familiarity.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Opcode's Studio Vision.
starik36 8y ago
Professional Write for DOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfs:Write https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfs:Write) was such an efficient little world processing program. It also had an internal contacts application so that you could mail merge your documents. Another one is QBasic/QuickBasic. I have yet to see a modern programming language that lets you get started that easy.
paradoxparalax 8y ago
First of All, The living-dead waiting impatiently to get out of the grave named - Myth , The Fallen Lords - or TFL, and the Myth family, if possible, except for the not-suicidal dwarf, let it in the grave and bring the suicidal on. And then maybe Brice4, was fun to make the landscapes, if it could export to Unity3d's skyboxes then it would be even useful. The Basic Programming language's chatbots were magic, with so limited resources, if one want to get nostalgic.
dsirola 8y ago
I'm surprised that nobody mentioned Winamp yet. It is amazing that it was possible to build such a customizable GUI back then...
- insign 8y ago
  it was mentioned.
cylinder714 8y ago
Windows 2000. That was the last version of Windows I used seriously, and it ran Firefox, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Pine (email) just fine with just 512 megabytes of RAM. Upgrading the machine to one gigabyte of memory made no difference I can remember. When XP was released, I felt no need to upgrade.
eb0la 8y ago
Ldap Browser/Editor by Jarek Gawor. Small tool with all you needed to manage your LDAP servers. Much better than the bloated GUI from Sun, Netscape, Redhat... Now it is almost unusable on a high DPI screen :-(
rurban 8y ago
Singularity The only OS and language (Sing#) for the future. Everything else is severely limited and broken, and not scalable. Pony took over some features, Distributed Pascal was also nice, but Singularity had so much more.
hampo 8y ago
Softimage XSI. The best ever 3D Animation Software.
JacobiX 8y ago
Softimage|XSI : 3D animation, modeling and rendering. It was used in the film, video game and advertising industries as a tool to generate digital characters, environments and visual effects. It has a unique user interface with some pretty awesome features. Autodesk acquired the Softimage brand and 3D animation assets from Avid for approximately $35 million just to kill it some years later. Edit: add info about Autodesk
zzo38computer 8y ago
There are many abandoned software projects that I would be interested in, although I would like such abandoned proprietary software to be released as FOSS in order that they can be developed/enhanced more.
- zzo38computer 8y ago
  One such thing would be the "Pharaoh's Tomb" and "Arctic Adventure" games from Apogee. If there would be a FOSS version of that, even with the original graphics and keyboard controls and so on, but possibly also with added stuff such as time limits and new pieces, that can be good.
HNY1 8y ago
Aardvark Chat by Google Labs.
vladivstok 8y ago
No one's gonna mention Bloackberry 10? In my opinion it was years ahead of the competition with its gesture based UI and Hub. Also, it felt like something that was truly different from the ios and android phones everywhere.
bobak 8y ago
I've used a few later versions of rule-based tools like https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/knowledge-engineering-review/article/comparative-evaluation-of-three-expert-system-development-tools-kee-knowledge-craft-art/008CC6CCEE4436E18688B26647753423 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/knowledge-engineerin... but never got to try the original Lisp ones. Merging ART or one of the other ones in Common-Lisp with some semantic-web tools like allegrograph would be interesting.
peach 8y ago
Interestingly enough I haven't read anyone suggesting this: Macromedia Freehand. Before Adobe acquired Macromedia and killed it in favour of Illustrator, it was probably the best vector drawing program you could get at the time. I'd love to resurrect it and make it open source.
wprapido 8y ago
- FreeHand - QuarkXPress - Delphi - HyperCard - Clipper - Aperture - DeLuxe Paint - WordPerfect - Access - Picasa - Google Talk - Eudora Mind you, not all of them are officially abandoned.
raarts 8y ago
Wordperfect. The speed of working with it was unparalleled, even compared to current Word. The 'reveal codes' or 'underwater' key was the superfast option to fix layout problems (who hasn't wrestled with tabs and indenting in Word), and it even worked on very large documents. Would pay for it.
pharaohgeek 8y ago
I'd have to say OS/2. I remember vividly asking -- BEGGING! -- my parents to buy me a copy of OS/2 2.1 for Windows for Christmas when I was a teenager. (It was OS/2 that used a copy of Windows you provided, rather than its own internal Windows runtime) I thoroughly enjoyed running it on my PC, much more than I did Windows itself. A modern version of OS/2 -- one that focused heavily on user experience, security, and integrating cloud-based services -- could really give Windows, macOS, et al a run for their money.
lacoolj 8y ago
Total Annihilation
transfire 8y ago
Display PostScript
n2dasun 8y ago
AlertBear
vishalsharma 8y ago
I missed LiberKey , there has been no active development going on it. Its a kind of portable application provider that gives all sorts of small/big apps to your catalog.
ern0 8y ago
Cakewalk 3.0 - it's the only MIDI sequencer which represents MIDI tracks as a grid, not as bars. I can draw it! Now, all sequencers (rather: DAWs) paints MIDI this way: ch [======] [===========] - bar may contain empty regions, so the bar does not really represents notes - if you want to copy only one beat, you have to split the beginning of the beat, split at the end of the beat, copy the beat, and paste as many time as you want, then you probably want to join them together - it even worse, when you want to copy more than one track (channel) Cakewalk 3.x style grid: OOOOO...OOOOOOOOOOO... You can select notes on beat boundaries, even more tracks. Then paste it to anywhere: there are merge-paste (pasted notes will be added to existing ones) and replace-paste (affected beats will contain only pasted notes). Anyway, handling upbeats in this grid-style editing is not comfortable, but still better than using bars.
zadkielmodeler 8y ago
City of Heroes' an MMORPG by NCsoft. It was really good. Unfortunately, they made it a fremium game, whcih then tanked and then closed the whole thing down a few months later. I wish they had open sourced it and gave it to the community instead of just shutting down and doing nothing with it.
zadkielmodeler 8y ago
Wakan - an free Chinese and Japanese editor and dictionary. I strongly preferred it over the windows IME. And honestly I don't know why it was shut down either. It was freeware to begin with. They should have just open-sourced it. I would pay $20 maybe even $30 as a one time payment for software that does what it does.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
the1andonldave 8y ago
NewtonOS
the1andonldave 8y ago
NewtonOS OneNote is ok. Windows is a terrible touch OS. android and iOS are ok touch OSs but terrible with a stylus. Newton was the only OS that was handwriting and touch from the ground up

PaulHoule 8y ago

I've thought about it (more than) a bit. Part of the problem is that only a small fraction of the population needs a high-performance photo manager. Most of the market has always been for "color snaps" and that has just gotten worth with the proliferation of cell phones. If you are handling lots of RAWS and you care about speed then you have to start with hardware. For instance, if you care about performance you just can't use a mac. Forget about it. An application that cares about performance might tell you to ditch the hard drive on your computer for an SSD if you want to run it and that we'd rather give you your money than just give you the same bad performance you expect from Lightroom, Photos, etc. Having your images on a RAIDed network server could be good but if you are using WiFi performance will be bad. If you feel entitled to keep using your 100 Mbps Ethernet hub on your DSL modem than performance will be bad. Wedding photographers spend $5000 for a camera and would probably get much more than $2500 of value from a $2500 photo management suite, particularly if you factor the lower blood pressure from not staring at a spinning beach ball all day and the lower health care costs and extra years of life they could get. Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil" might have made since back in the 360 mainframe day when you couldn't get N very high so an N^2 algorithm wasn't as bad as it is today. People today have the wishful thinking that they can find the "one" bottleneck and open it and that was sometime true in the past for prototype projects (eg. less so in the age of networking, deep cache hierarchy, ...) but in real-life systems there are usually 5-10 bottlenecks that all need to be cleared if you want to make a difference in performance that people will feel. Most people think they can clear two or three of them and will spend a lot of effort for it and will argue until they are blue in the face and bankrupt that they don't need to fix the other ones.

AsyncAwait 8y ago

I really hope Purism's Librem5 pans out for this very reason. A third alternative. I don't want Windows Phone, since that would not buy me much more privacy than Android with today's Microsoft, so having an open 3rd party mobile platform would be the solution here, I think.

gardaani 8y ago
There's SailfishOS, which is an alternative to Android and iPhone. It's a mobile Linux OS with an optional support for Android apps. It's not the world's most advanced mobile OS, but a good way to escape the Apple and Google ecosystems. It is possible to purchase the OS and install it to Sony Xperia phones. https://shop.jolla.com https://shop.jolla.com
- Operyl 8y ago
  I guess it’s not even available for viewing in my country (the United States). Coincidentally, this must be close to what it’s like in the UK (just on a much much smaller scale) after the GDPR stuff.
redwards510 8y ago
I agree it is an exciting phone, but what are the privacy gains versus an android phone with lineageOS and f-droid foss apps? AFAIK it's just the baseband code. Convincing regular users that opensourcing the baseband will solve any problems seems pretty DOA when you have the very visible google play services tracking issue and no on cares.
- arendtio 8y ago
  It is not just about privacy. With Android phones, you will sooner or later end up in a position where you can't install newer LinageOS versions, simply because your kernel is too old and the required binary drivers cannot be ported to newer kernel versions. Maybe project Treble helps to solve that problem, but it will still take a few years until we will find out (unless Fuchsia kills Android). Nevertheless, I hope that Purism will be able to deliver a product which is as easy to use as a "normal" Android device with those privacy/sustainability features as a bonus. That way I might be able to give the people who ask me which phone they should buy next some good advice.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > what are the privacy gains versus an android phone with lineageOS and f-droid foss apps? Google oozes from every part of Android. I very much doubt that installing LineageOS with closed-source blobs for most of the hardware makes Google/NSA/OEMs completely unaware of your activity. Moreover, Android is such a critical piece of software that probably every significant 3 letter agency in the world has some sort of a backdoor in/to it. Android suffers a security fiasco quite often and the update situation is quite awful. Lineage is also often not as stable as one'd like and the update process from one major version to another can be itself nerve-wrecking. On the technical side, it is running ancient, out-of-tree kernels that lack a lot of the security work going upstream, which is especially concerning considering there's a new Spectre variant patch in practically every release. Lastly, having the full GNU/Linux experience in my pocket is something I've always wanted. Whether 'regular users' care about this is not particularly concerning to me, as I think the 'enthusiast crowd' is large enough to get the ecosystem started and once we feel comfortable recommending this to our 'regular' family members and friends, they need not to be aware of any of the additional benefits - it would be just the new smartphone that they have.
mprev 8y ago
I hate to be so blunt but it won’t pan out in any meaningful way. Why would it succeed where FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Mobile could not? Not enough people value openness to make the trade off versus iOS and Android. Does iOS not provide the privacy you need?
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > Why would it succeed where FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Mobile could not? I think Purism would be satisfied with much less initial adoption on the overall market than somebody like Mozilla/Canonical. In short, they'd probably consider it a success much sooner. Also, both FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Touch were essentially adopting the same philosophy as Android in terms of having a closed-hardware approach and a software stack that while open in principle, was largely restricted on-device to run just the apps available in the respective app-stores, made for the platform specifically, which weren't that many. Purism is making it so that practically any Linux app can be installed out of the box and with a small amount of work, any GTK3/4 app can be made touch friendly as well. I think this could provide them the app ecosystem head start they'd need. > Not enough people value openness to make the trade off versus iOS and Android. I think you're, sadly, right. However if PurismOS becomes a solid choice in its own right and then you have the privacy advantage on top, it might sell. > Does iOS not provide the privacy you need? Kind of, that's what I use now, however I have to trust Apple on keeping its word, which may be difficult considering they're moving more and more into "services" == rent seeking. Also, I have serious problems with the war on general purpose computing Apple is involved in and the closed nature of their software, where they have the ultimate say in what I can run on a piece of hardware I paid thousand pounds for to own, not rent.

culot 8y ago

Windyws Phone's tile setup is still the best home screen setup for mobile. As I peep at my Android home with pretty wallpaper with acres of bhank space and uninformative icons, I pine for the informative, intelligent WP tiles. Ms Image Composer was unbeatable for digital and web stuff back then. Photoshop was rather clumsy in comparison. As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite.

nicolapede 8y ago
With respect to windows phone, I really miss the tiles, the consistency of the metro style gui and other little details, like automatic do not disturb mode while driving or face recognition well before it became mainstream.
- culot 8y ago
  Dark mode was nice as well. To toggle from light/dark and have alnost every app follow suit was luxurious. On Android it's such a hodgepodge of light and dark, an affront to the eyes at times. Also being able to select text from most anywhere was useful.
- eldavido 8y ago
  I completely agree and I used to work at Microsoft. Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps. It's an instructive story of how an inferior product can win. I'm not saying that happens all the time or that it's inevitable, but I think it's safe to say that's sort of what happened here.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    A platform without users or apps and years late is not one I'd call superior. Good ideas are not nearly enough, as they often say around HN.
    - JamesBarney 8y ago
      I thought it was pretty clear from the poster's message he was talking about product sans network effects.
  - robocat 8y ago
    > Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps I wonder how much of it was because they had a sorry arse mobile browser? Not supporting ontouchstart etc events must have been a killer. MSPointerEvent was awfully buggy in the initial release, and what dev wants to rewrite their web app/page to use PointerEvent? Why wouldn't you make sure Hybrid apps (Cordova etc) work well? Why not just copy WKWebView (20/20 hindsight now!). Their equivalent of WKWebView is some sort of zombie IE11 version (not edge, with different features and flaws than IE11 desktop). Hideous. Disclosure: we developed a Hybrid app for Windows Phone (based on Xamarin).
    - gregopet 8y ago
      Not just the browser, the whole platform was crap to develop for. My company ported a bunch of apps by a major app publisher to various versions of Windows Phone and the documentation was shitty, the APIs were shitty, everything shifted with each new version and everything was buggy. We kept asking our local Microsoft branch for help (backed by the publisher we were porting for) and more often than not they were powerless to help. A far cry from developers, developers, developers.
      - guitarbill 8y ago
        Even Microsoft themselves dropped the ball, when it took over a year for them to release Skype - which they owned - for their own mobile platform (if I'm remembering correctly, i had a Windows Phone and rather liked it).
  - AtlasBarfed 8y ago
    Or maybe it's because your company has screwed over people and lazily abused a monopoly position for decades to the detriment of many, destroying trust and building resentment. Must feel strange getting beaten by an "inferior" product, considering how many inferior products Microsoft dumped on the market leveraging their business practices and monopoly position. Microsoft may be behaving better now so that people will run their linux instances on Azure. And android may be somewhat inferior, but it is far more open and is pretty damn good. Windows phone may have had a nice intro screen and some nifty features, but who knows if/when it could have handled the massive app variety and bad actors that android does. With the security reputation of windows, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't. The alternative phone OSs we should be mourning are PalmOS, Ubuntu mobile, and similar efforts. Microsoft's continued existence will have to be tolerated, but any product of theirs that fails or acquiesces is a victory for the consumer.
  - mtgx 8y ago
    An inferior product can win because this inferior product you talked about had already won by the time this superior product came along. Microsoft just didn't want to admit it.
- Pmop 8y ago
  Typing on Windows Phone was a delight, for a touchscreen-based keyboard. They had their typing game on point. Now with an Android device, I find myself switching keyboard software often.
  - ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
    I'm cursed with thumbs that are not compatible with touch screens. Not because of my thumbs themselves, and obviously touch screen keyboards work for most people so it can't be the keyboards. I don't have abnormally fat thumbs, or any physical deformities.. touch screen keyboards just hate me, to the point where it's a running joke among family and friends. Every post I've ever made is a relentless struggle against typos that even the best autocorrect can't seem to help with. I've tried every major keyboard on Android, and have owned iPhones and every other device imaginable. Windows Phone though? Absolute pleasure to type on. I've never used any device that was easier to type on than my old Lumia 920.
Tharkun 8y ago
> I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow This is a frequently heard complaint, but I can't imagine under what circumstances this would happen. I have hundreds of thousands of mails in tbird, in various accounts and folders. It's never struck me as slow. And its search (one of the features i use most) is simply fast.
egypturnash 8y ago
Have Android’s “widgets” been removed? That’s a thing I still miss sometimes on iOS, most of my Nexus One’s homescreen was taken up by my calendar.
- nsriv 8y ago
  They haven't been removed per se, but fewer apps tend to have them. Most Google apps have high quality widgets.
- culot 8y ago
  That's still a thing, it's just the design of widgets from app to app is disparate, usually visually clashing if multiple widgets are used. Not as clean and uniform as Windows Phone tiles. There is an Android launcher (launcher 10, i think) that offers tiles, and some of them even live tiles. It's okay, not quite the same slick experience though.
- nine_k 8y ago
  Widgets are alive and kicking.
mixmastamyk 8y ago
> As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite. I don't have either of those problems, using TB for a decade. Not sure what your issue could be but first thoughts would be to compact your folders and if that doesn't help, vacuum the sqlite files.
- culot 8y ago
  It turns out my scrolling lag and rendering issues disappear when I disable smooth-scrolling. Simple fix. :)
80386 8y ago
>As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite. I leave Thunderbird open in the background and come back to a notification that some component or other crashed. Happens all the time, no clue why. Email is common enough that I'd expect there to be a half-decent client for it, but I don't know of one... (IRC is also common, at least among people who write code, but I don't know of a free client that isn't worse than running irssi in cygwin.)
- subway 8y ago
  Google killed the need for a decent mail client. The entire PIM space on Linux has gone through a major regression since 2012, when I shut down my XMPP/IMAP/SyncML/CalDAV/CardDAV services and started using google. It seems like a lot of folks jumped ship to web based tools about that time.
Eridrus 8y ago
I had a Windows Phone, it had a lot of good things about it, but I have no desire for anyone to resurrect it. There was just not enough developer interest/market share to sustain it. I still miss having my next appointment on my lock screen. The Pixel gets this mostly right with calendar info on the ambient screen display, but still seems a bit shy about showing it.
lgunsch 8y ago
>As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite. Compared to Gmail or Microsoft Outlook online it's very very fast. Gmail lags severely compared to when I use Thunderbird.
- ajdlinux 8y ago
  Thunderbird struggles with managing and searching large mail archives in a way that Gmail doesn't. I use Thunderbird for a work email account, and its GUI thread regularly gets blocked while trying to search or open messages. To be fair, my work email account is an exceptional case - it's got somewhere around ~1 million emails. Gmail, particularly with the new Gmail interface launched a few months ago, also sucks performance wise, but in different ways from Thunderbird.
- huehehue 8y ago
  The new Gmail interface is slow. Man, it's just so freaking slow. The fans get whirring, the network calls are probably blocked by the UI and if you delete a message and quickly close the page it never goes through.
- erichurkman 8y ago
  > Gmail lags severely compared to when I use Thunderbird. The number of times where I am typing an email and somehow trigger hot keys is absolutely ridiculous. Mid-word and suddenly I've deleted the draft, changed labels, and muted & archived a critical conversation is absolutely infuriating. It's Outlook level bad.
ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
>Windyws Phone's tile setup is still the best home screen setup for mobile. As I peep at my Android home with pretty wallpaper with acres of bhank space and uninformative icons, I pine for the informative, intelligent WP tiles. So download widgets to show what you want?
- culot 8y ago
  I've invested a lot of time trying to find solutions in that manner and have always ended up with hacky results, usually hideous as well. There is no cohesive solution for that Android that I've been able to find.
jcranmer 8y ago
> As for email clients, I do keep wondering how Thunderbird can be so slow, how its rendering system can be so shite. It's effectively single-threaded, with all the I/O running on the same thread as the GUI (oh import is so fun). And you need to load the entire metadata database for a folder into memory at once. I have looked into fixing it before, but it does require redoing pretty much the entire API, which means its several man-years of developer work. And Mozilla has never invested enough in Thunderbird to let that sort of work get done.
kashyapc 8y ago
Speaking of e-mail clients, come to the bright side and use blazing fast tools like `mutt`. Thanks to such tools, my day-to-day "computing experience" has become far more pleasant for the past five years.

cztomsik 8y ago

electron eats so much cpu & memory simply because it's still a web browser, it has to support all those 20 years of HTML/CSS history and it was designed to do so for 10s of tabs, so it has a lot of caches and other things. and while javascript is certainly one of the worst choices if you care about performance, it's also one of the best choices if you need to iterate really quickly (which I believe is very important in overall, especially for new projects) I hope there will be lighter electron one day (I'm actually working on something like this already) but it's unlikely that people will start doing UIs in systems languages.

zmix 8y ago
> electron eats so much cpu & memory simply because it's > still a web browser, it has to support all those 20 years > of HTML/CSS history and it was designed to do so for 10s > of tabs, so it has a lot of caches and other things. XULRunner does the same thing, includes, in addition, a full XML GUI language and assorted technologies and the full runtime distribution, on my Windows10 system, including debugging, crash-reporter aids, VC libraries, D3D libraries, consumes 72MB.
- marktangotango 8y ago
  I often wonder why/how xulrunner has descended into obscurity while electron has blossomed. Anyone have input on that?
  - zmix 8y ago
    If I'd give you an honest answer, I'd be downvoted to hell ;-)
    - zmix 8y ago
      See?
      - roywiggins 8y ago
        Comments about downvoting are nearly always downvoted.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        You didn't give an answer; your post was downvoted for not contributing anything.
      - dang 8y ago
        Would you please review the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?
  - cweagans 8y ago
    I tried building something with xulrunner a while back and the experience was awful, IMO. I was up and running with Electron within an hour. xulrunner may be a superior technology, but if it's a PITA to work with, then nobody is going to want to use it.
  - drblast 8y ago
    I haven't used electron, but in 2007 xulrunner was such a pain in the ass to write code for it wasn't worth the effort for anything where you didn't absolutely need an embedded browser, and even then there were better options. Documentation was poor or non-existent and IIRC the API was based on the half-baked XPCOM because COM and CORBA were all the rage at the time it was created.
    - zmix 8y ago
      > Documentation was poor or non-existent That's absolutley not true. "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" has been published before 2004. It is still online: http://mb.eschew.org/ http://mb.eschew.org/ XUL (and assorted technologies) is/were broadly documentet on MDN.
      - Rondom 8y ago
        Not to mention xulplanet.com which had been very helpful as well.
  - zerkten 8y ago
    Wasn't xulrunner based on XPCOM which Mozilla deprecated? I think this is one of the technical reasons for its decline, but I think the biggest reason was timing. When xulrunner was being developed there wasn't the same interest in desktop software. It seems like Chromium reached a point where you could build desktop-class software, but the distribution model wasn't right. Someone then decided to adapt Chromium to solve the distribution problem and you have Electron. If Firefox had evolved to allow the tipping point experience that Chrome did, then you might well have seen xulrunner be that thing. It was years ahead of itself, but perhaps you could question the focus of the folks on the Mozilla side who were spread across so many concepts/ areas compared to the folks at Google - but I think that's for a different thread.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    JS had nowhere the popularity it had today. At the time, creating a desktop app in Javascript was not regarded as serious. The reason electron became popular is because so many people from other fields (designers, integraters, students...) learn programming through copy / pasting JS and wanted JS for everything. Hence node. And now electron.
    - zmix 8y ago
      Firefox, Thunderbird (and their spin offs) were all considered serious desktop apps. They all were written with XPFE/XULRunner.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        They didn't advertise that much, though. I only learned about XULRunner when I was trying out a keyboard-driven browser (Conkeror). Unlike Electron, XUL wasn't promoted.
        zmix 8y ago
        And that is the main reason, IMO. Mozilla Inc. never wanted to do more with it.
    - cztomsik 8y ago
      uh, I wouldn't say electron got popular because of copy-pasting newbies. webapp development is a lot of work and SPAs are actually even harder... and so is server development with node. I love javascript, yet I don't think it's suitable for everything. electron got popular, because companies could reuse code and tooling, only for the cost of cpu & memory
  - zmix 8y ago
    In the early 2000's there many people, who'd want to develop with XUL (especially Intranet solutions were often done this way by people, who wanted an alternative to Microsoft technologies). Several people started creating IDEs or addons for Eclipse. Mozilla Inc. never showed any interest (or support) in this. There never has been an official schema or DTD for XUL, for example. I don't know the reasons, Mozilla Inc. hated their own (technical) identity so much, back then, all the rage was promotion of Firefox on the web (Firefox coffe mugs, Firefox BBQ parties, community videos, etc., cheap, superficial themeing (Personas)). So, they dealt with identity on the social level. The CEO, back then, was a female lawyer. It was very clear, that Mozilla Inc. didn't want XUL to become more important. If we compare the addons, that existed for Firefox with those, that exist now for the Chrome/Firefox type of extension API, they were hugely superior. Now it seems, that half of those apps in the app stores are being used by the marketing teams of some companies, to place their logo somewhere, so people can see it.
    - pimlottc 8y ago
      How was the gender of Mozilla’s lawyer a factor in this?
    - pvg 8y ago
      The CEO, back then, was a female lawyer. Really?
- cztomsik 8y ago
  I wonder what do you think about this: https://github.com/cztomsik/node-webrender https://github.com/cztomsik/node-webrender node+react+servo, consumes ~30M ram on my osx (if you precompile typescript files) it's nowhere near to XUL but it's also little more powerful because of react (vdom is more dynamic than XML, it will be possible to use react-devtools and it should support HMR too)
  - zmix 8y ago
    I am actually only interested in scriptable XML technologies, so pretty much like Mozilla's XPFE (XUL) was.
nojvek 8y ago
Why is JavaScript the worst choice of you care about performance ?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

eldavido 8y ago

> As a broader concept, a return to prevailing use of on-device processing and computation I don't think anyone ever liked developing for the web. It solved three problems pretty well: - Data portability: log in from anywhere, have your data at your fingertips. - App model: no broken installations of programs into desktop environments, dependency problems, DLL hell - No concern about the mostly broken Windows desktop: viruses, etc. (1) is mostly a solved problem even on desktop, the web just got there first. We have everything from Dropbox to various data APIs. (2) is largely solved in mobile app development. It's instructive to consider how: very locked-down app APIs to the operating systems (e.g. no dumping files all over the place), standard packaging formats and distribution channels (.apk, .msi), etc (3) is also mostly solved on mobile. I would go as far as to say that in 2018, software should be native-first. And indeed it is, in mobile. The major shift is desktop->mobile. Mobile development has much more in common with native desktop development than web development. The reason desktop isn't likely to come back is because it's a niche market. Everyone has a phone but if you aren't in tech circles, it's surprising to see how many people barely use computers at all, especially those who don't work in offices, older folks, and the less well-off. A mobile device does about 99% of what they need -- most people aren't "creators", they don't author websites, write code, edit videos, design buildings, etc.

jimmaswell 8y ago
The Windows desktop is "mostly broken"? That's news to me.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  It’s broken insofar as there isn’t a complete and coherent “developer story” for building a Windows desktop application that doesn’t look like it came from the 1990s. I call it “the Photoshop test”: Pretend you’re Adobe and you just invented Photoshop in 2018. How do you build the GUI for each desktop operating system? ...considering you need to do things like OpenGL hardware acceleration, 30-bit color, support binary plugins, and access certain low-level hardware features (e.g. supporting TWAIN, Pro-level broadcast media devices and interfaces, etc). On Windows it’s an unfortunate situation because all of the “new” application frameworks since 1998 are unsuitable: WPF is .NET only, UWP requires your application to run in a sandbox, you can’t even use MFC because it’s tightly coupled to User32 with its lack of support for 30-bit color. The only choice is the long hard road of doing almost everything by yourself through low-level interfaces with the DWM. Not pretty. The sad thing is that UWP is very capable - if it weren’t for the sandboxing then it would be perfect (that, and you would need to build your own widget library as UWP’s stock set is almost entirely touch-first controls that are utterly inappropriate for a mouse-first desktop UI)
  - nkeo 8y ago
    Why is the sandboxing such a big issue in the case of a “Photoshop” app? The UWP api seem to cover most OS services that the devs would need, or am I missing something?
    - DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
      UWP with its XAML framework forces you to use Direct3D, there’s no way to use OpenGL efficiently - you also are forced to surrender a lot of control to the OS, for example, all Windows Store games must use Direct3D and were forced to use VSync until very recently. As a developer it means you can’t do anything cutting-edge until after both Microsoft and NVIDIA/AMD say-so and officially support some feature. This is the unfortunate consequence of UWP’s style of API sandboxing (compared to, for example, a hypervisor approach with end-user approved red-pilling). If you were Adobe it would be difficult to maintain your reputation as the leading vendor for desktop graphics and media software if you were artificially constrained by other companies who haven’t demonstrated commitment to supporting novel platforms beyond a couple of release cycles (see: WinJS, WinRT, Windows 8 XAML, etc).
- eldavido 8y ago
  What I meant was, if you look at the state of non-expert users' PCs, they're unusable by power user standards. There's so much malware, anti-virus that slows down all I/O, browser toolbars, etc. Just open Internet Explorer and see how long it takes. On my computer it takes <1s. On many computers I've used in peoples' homes, small offices, etc. it's more like 10. Calling that anything but "broken" seems like a misnomer. Look at the 99% of computer users, not the 1% power users/people at companies with good IT groups.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    This is an exaggeration, especially on modern Windows. I have a decent anecdotal sample size of average people whose PCs run fine and have no apparent infestations, including someone in their 70s with a laptop running Vista.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> It's instructive to consider how: very locked-down app APIs to the operating systems (e.g. no dumping files all over the place) But this is precisely the problem. And also why mobile apps aren't really native, nor becoming native. Developers think, "since our app is just a thin wrapper on our web service, why not just make a webview and do everything through the web?". APIs being opaque to the system means you don't own the data. Saving actual files in actual filesystem is still much better for user freedoms. > A mobile device does about 99% of what they need -- most people aren't "creators", they don't author websites, write code, edit videos, design buildings, etc. True to some extent, but how many of those things they would be doing if the mobile platform wasn't limiting them? Users don't imagine the hypothetical things they could be doing, they choose from what's available.
80386 8y ago
>Everyone has a phone but if you aren't in tech circles, it's surprising to see how many people barely use computers at all, especially those who don't work in offices, older folks, and the less well-off. I work in a warehouse, and the specific thing I do requires a laptop. They've tried to train backups for me, but they have a hard time finding people who know how to use a computer. Most people don't - they only have a smartphone.

modeless 8y ago

Over two years after Pebble shut down I am still wearing my Pebble Time Round every day and it works just as well as the day I got it. There's really good community support with Rebble. You can still find Pebbles for sale in various places and I'd recommend getting one over any of the Android Wear watches. They're just that much better.

SyneRyder 8y ago
Same here with my Pebble Time Steel. It still gets 7 days battery life, works with the latest Android, and the weather & speech services all still work after subscribing to Rebble. I keep looking at the Fitbit Versa, which is clearly Pebble's spiritual successor, but it doesn't have an always-on screen or the Time Steel's 7 - 10 day battery life. I just hope Fitbit keeps the Versa around by the time I need to replace my Pebble.
Improvotter 8y ago
My Pebble Time Steel has been in my drawer for 2 years I think. I bought it on release and didn't really use it for that long because I honestly didn't found it useful. What do you use it for? Most of the time I just find it easier to take out my phone.
- modeless 8y ago
  Bluetooth Smart Unlock makes taking out my phone easier, since I don't have to put in a code or fiddle with the fingerprint reader. I've really gotten used to it. But the killer feature to me is notifications. I can keep my phone completely silent with no vibration and never miss an important call or text or calendar reminder. I never have to pat my pocket to see if my phone is vibrating. I can decline spam calls and decide whether to respond to messages without taking my phone out. I can even leave my phone in silent mode on the counter across the room and not miss calls or texts. I also love the Google Maps integration (third party app). Being able to see my next turn on my wrist is very useful and the navigation screen is more informative and easier to read than the native Google Maps Android Wear integration. When I get in my car that doesn't have Android Auto, I can still say "OK Google, navigate to X" and without taking my phone out of my pocket I get voice directions through car Bluetooth audio and visual directions on my wrist. It's also just a good watch. There are lots of faces to choose from, some with extra information like weather or stock prices or step count or whatever. It's far thinner than any other smartwatch and you don't have to flick your wrist just to turn on the screen and see the time.
- Cookiesaurusbex 8y ago
  I use it for as few things as possible and it does them very well. I only want notifications for things that may be immediately relevant (phone call, text msg, calendar event reminders) so when I walk away from my phone I'm not worried about missing something important. It works with Smart Lock on Android so my phone stays unlocked when I'm close and locked when I'm not. Vibrating alarm clock that won't wake the whole house, sleep & exercise tracker without needing to carry my phone. I don't actually "use" it very often, but it is a very passive yet essential part of my routine and keeping myself on track. I am very forgetful and used to have entire weekends pass by where I forget to check my phone unless something reminds me to and the Pebble helps make sure I get only the essential information when I need it without unnecessary interruption. It also shows time and weather at a glance ;)

vram22 8y ago
>Note that Turbo Delphi Explorer was a free version of Delphi 2006, not 6 (which was released in 2001). Okay, I must have got that wrong. Thanks for the correction. I must have mixed up 6 and 2006, likely, since that Delphi Digital Clock v1.0 I mentioned elsewhere in this thread was written by me in 2010. >TBH i think it made more harm than good overall since it disallowed installing custom components (which defeated a big reason for using Delphi) Could be so. Yes, even the current Starter editions of Delphi 10.x (code named Berlin, Tokyo etc.) disallow that, IIRC. Or don't have the DB-bound controls (I forget which of the two it is, or whether both). I get your point about not being able to install custom components, which was/is one of the big plus points of Delphi, like VB before it (VBX and then OLE controls). It hugely increases the ecosystem and potential, and was one or the main reason for the runaway success of VB (the other reason being the drag-and-drop GUI creation and ability to hook up procedures to events by clicking on an event in the event list of a control, and writing a snippet of code that reacts to the event, in the window that popped up, so I've read (I did some VB projects earlier too)). But I do think that even the limited versions of Delphi are useful, to let beginners get entry to such a good RAD tool. Price is an issue for the full tool, I know. Of course, I'm somewhat aware of the meanderings and corporate missteps that have troubled the product over the years, every now and then, as it transitioned from Borland to Inprise to Codegear to Embarcadero to ... >and it was based on perhaps the buggiest and slowest versions of Delphi ever released with a convoluted setup procedure (that among others required an obsolete version of .NET). Didn't know that stuff. (Heard about the varying bugginess of different Delphi versions over the years, though.) IIRC, I installed and used the Win32 version of Turbo Delphi Explorer, since I prefer non-managed EXEs in general, having a background in compiled languages like C and Pascal from earlier.