Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
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?
836 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadAirfix dogfighter
> 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?
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.
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.
So maybe it isn't fair to say the user for a bad deal.
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...
That's interesting. Can you share more about this ?
As for your pre-sass search engine idea:it's great. Very useful indeed.
But how do I get from that , to finding the bunch of separate webpages that describe how to solve my personal, niche problem( in a really good way ? Most problems are like that. Context is always different.
And yes Google is far from ideal. And SEO sucks.
But still, that problem solving capability is now available to many.
Jagged Alliance 2
Settlers 2
Heroes of Might and Magic
I think Adobe DX is supposed to be the replacement for it.
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-vic...
(Oh, and yeah, Settlers 2 was amazing.)
https://www.inquisitr.com/5163752/ea-to-remake-the-first-two...
https://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/warcraft/277402/warcraft-...
http://ja2v113.pbworks.com/
https://ja2-stracciatella.github.io/
https://www.gog.com/game/heroes_of_might_and_magic_3_complet...
Dungeon Keeper
I was going to say BlitzPlus but that's open source already.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/21/halo-online-retu...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1sxYvpNNlY
I want to say I heard that a law passed about not closing server based games anymore but I can't remember the details.
EDIT: unless you meant the video game, which someone just told me is a thing… oops.
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
2: https://airtable.com
3: https://ninoxdb.de/en/
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.
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/
Second time this has come up this morning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635799
I'm working in a spiritual replacement (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.
That's the "most official" page for the product. No source, but updated for 32bit/64bit environments.
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
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-w..., as does Mindscope on iOS, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-thought-organizer/...
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.
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.
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://github.com/Athou/commafeed
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
I didn’t know about The Old Reader and I will give it a try.
How is this (random screenshot found via image search) not basically the same as Google Reader?
http://kingofgng.com/media/20150116_inoreader.png
And that's not even the densest display option.
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.
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!
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
n-dimensional spreadsheet with a logical data model (including hierarchies) rather than rows and columns:
Net Worth := Assets - Liabilities
Amazing.
I'm collecting a pile of "good ideas"... Someday I'll do something with it.
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 :)
http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/
Webamp can also do Milkdrop visualizations, which is pretty crazy - eg 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 and https://discord.gg/248Z7QA, respectively.
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.
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 ...
I'm trying to find an alternative and, quite frankly, everything I've tried is not great. I ended up buying AfterShot Pro, but I'm not terribly satisfied with it. It runs on the Mac, but it's really hurt by the fact that it's not actually a Mac application.
Adobe is out because of the subscription model. I'm willing to buy the software, and I'm even willing to periodically buy new versions when it makes sense, but $10/month forever is hard to stomach.
Specifically, the date is December 18. There's also a (small) discount if you buy in the next 8 days: https://skylum.com/luminar
Not involved at all, just discovered this while looking around.
Several months later, something happened that basically reaffirmed my decision. Nikon released a new camera, which I bought at launch. Lightroom added support for its RAW format in a minor patch almost immediately. Meanwhile, Aperture couldn't be bothered to add support until 6 months later and a major version update.
Flash-forward, I really wish Adobe didn't become so obsessed with their subscription models. While cloud storage/backup definitely has its advantages, I'd much rather simply own my software and use my own servers. (But since the "run it yourself" options are always grossly inferior, I just put up with their new approach and make sure I have a local copy.)
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/Shotwell_(software)
https://github.com/linuxmint/pix
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.
[0] - https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/
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.
Love it for quick and easy edit controls. Like the speed and looks. Wish some remaining bugs were fixed.
After the Nth photo sharing website that I'd early-adopted decided to close up shop, I determined I wanted to own the next solution I invested time into, and I founded PhotoStructure.
I've got 20-odd hard drives from laptops and servers and backups. No software that I tried, either open or closed source, would do what I wanted: organize everything into a nice, timestamped, deduped folder structure.
Many years ago, I'd shot myself in the foot by using tools to do JPEG editing and rotation, but those tools quietly deleted EXIF metadata, so PhotoStructure applies a suite of metadata inference heuristics to heal those holes, too.
The MVP is focused on high-quality metadata extraction and inference, and has a simple web-based UI. Simple editing support, along with GPS POI and face detection, is planned.
After spending more than a decade in the ads business, and (helping build) ML-powered behavior targeting based on metadata, it blows my mind that so many of us give the most rich metadata stream, our photos and videos, for free, to the FAANG. PhotoStructure isn't just an effort of love, it's also, at least in some way, penance.
I've got a limited number of beta users trying it out right now. If you're willing to share your feedback, please consider signing up. Use of PhotoStructure during the beta period is free.
https://PhotoStructure.com
Curious about privacy aspects though. When you say it's a private cloud, does it communicate back to your servers at all?
Any goals for Linux compatibility?
I'd love something that can store the photos on a NAS or network share drive, runs its processing in a Docker container on my LAN, and serves a web app locally with absolutely no external internet access. That's basically my dream photo manager. I can connect to my own LAN remotely to access it then, without any need for the privacy/security risk of hosting my (and my clients) photos on some 3rd party server.
Your images, videos, and metadata stay yours, and are not uploaded anywhere.
Currently I've got error reporting that phones home if there are critical problems detected, but the log events only include the stack trace and possibly the path to the problem file.
PhotoStructure spins up a webserver bound to localhost by default. In other words, other machines in your LAN can't open the PhotoStructure web UI (unless you set an environment variable or use ssh port forwarding).
Sign up via the website or send me an email, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
Then I browse the pictures, star the ones I like and process them.
An no other software I have tried so far comes close in terms of speed and UI efficiency.
So I would also love to try PhotoStructure and have signed up via your landing page.
Also, I'd love to switch to Linux full-time but that's the main program I'm lacking. I've tried most the suggestions but none handle high numbers of photos without becoming intolerably slow.
The desktop experience was fantastic for its time.
All features added on Mac since it's cancellation on PC.
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.
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