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

Some projects creep along slowly until something triggers an interest and suddenly they leap ahead.

MAME's Tandy 2000 implementation was unusable, until someone found a copy of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, then the emulation caught up until Windows ran.

Maybe ReactOS will get a big influx of activity after Windows 10 support goes offline in a couple days, or even shortly after when you can't turn AI spying off, not even three times a year.

I don't think people do, it sounds like a nearly impossible struggle, and at the end you get a Windows clone. I can't imagine hating yourself enough to work on it for an extended period of time for no money and putting yourself and your hard work in legal risk. It's a miracle we have Wine and serious luck that we have Proton.

People losing Windows 10 support need to move on. There's Linux if you want to be free, and Apple if you still prefer to be guided. You might lose some of your video games. You can still move to Windows 11 if you think that people should serve their operating systems rather than vice versa.

Apple would have inevitably done their own thing, but it would have been really nice to have two widely used, mature and open mobile Linux platforms.

Hit ctrl-f and typed Meego as soon as I saw this thread, hoping I'd be the first. Alas.

The N9 was literally a vision from an alternate timeline where a mobile platform from a major manufacturer was somehow hackable, polished, and secure. Favorite phone I've ever owned and I used it until it started to malfunction.

Had a Jolla for a bit, too. It was nice to see them try to keep the basic ideas going but unfortunately it was a pain in the ass to use thanks to their decision to go with a radio that only supported GSM/EDGE in the US. Had to carry around a MiFi just to give it acceptable data service.

I think the idea with Jolla is that if Nokia ever did an about-face, they were ready to be reabsorbed and get things back on the right track. Unfortunately, though we do once again have a "Nokia", it's just another Android white label with no interest in maintaining its own leading-edge smartphone platform.

Are you referring to the SWF file format?

I wonder why one one has managed to build something comparable that does work on a phone.

Interesting how Flash became the almost universal way to play videos in the browser, in the latter half of the 2000's (damn I'm old...).

Maybe they could have fixed all that for touch screens, small portrait screens, and more but they never did make it responsive AFAIK.

(For those unfamiliar, Illustrator is a pure vector graphics editor; once you rasterize its shapes, they become uneditable fixed bitmaps. Fireworks was a vector graphics editor that rendered at a constant DPI, so it basically let you edit raster bitmaps like they were vectors. It was invaluable for pixel-perfect graphic design. Nothing since lets you do that, though with high-DPI screens and resolution-independent UIs being the norm these days, this functionality is less relevant than it used to be.)

Just barely stopped using my CS6 copy. Still haven't found anything as intuitive.

Runs on modern Intel/AMD CPUs, but limited to 32-bit and low RAM limits. The OS/2 source is owned by IBM and IBM won't talk to you unless a number with 8 zeroes is involved.

I used it quite a bit to produce radio shows for my country's public broadcasting. Because Non's line-oriented session format was so easy to parse with classic Unix tools, I wrote a bunch of scripts for it with Awk etc. (E.g. calculating the total length of clips highlighted with brown color in the DAW -- which was stuff meant for editing out; or creating a poor man's "ripple editing" feature by moving loosely-placed clips precisely side by side; or, eventually, converting the sessions to Samplitude EDL format, and, from there, to Pro Tools via AATranslator [1] (because our studio was using PT), etc. Really fun times!)

1: https://aatranslator.com.au/

I've heard someone at Microsoft describe it as a moonshot but also a retention project; IIRC it had a hundred plus engineers on it at one time, including a lot of very senior people.

Apparently a bunch of research from Midori made it into .NET so it wasn't all lost, but still...

Seeing "Microsoft" and "security" in the same sentence makes me suspicious. /s

It's kind of in that space, and is still actively developed.

Luckily it wasn't long after Mozilla abandoned it that PWAs were introduced and I could port the apps I cared about.

That said, frameworks were all the buzz back in the day, so the language alone probably wouldn't have gone anywhere without it.

I wrote a bunch of software in Borland Delphi, which ran in Windows, Wine, and ReactOS with no problems. Well, except for ReactOS' lack of printing support.

As long as you stay within the ECMA or published Windows APIs, everything runs fine in Wine and ReactOS. But Microsoft products are full of undocumented functions, as well as checks to see if they're running on real Windows. That goes back to the Windows 3.1 days, when 3.1 developers regularly used OS/2 instead of DOS, and Microsoft started adding patches to fail under OS/2 and DR-DOS. So all that has to be accounted for by Wine and ReactOS. A lot of third-party software uses undocumented functions as well, especially stuff written back during the days when computer magazines were a thing, and regularly published that kind of information. A lot of programmers found the lure of undocumented calls to be irresistible, and they wound up in all kinds of commercial applications where they really shouldn't have been.

In my experience anything that will load under Wine will run with no problems. ReactOS has some stability problems, but then the developers specifically call it "alpha" software. Despite that, I've put customers on ReactOS systems after verifying all their software ran on it. It gets them off the Microsoft upgrade treadmill. Sometimes there are compatibility problems and I fall back to Wine on Linux. Occasionally nothing will do but real Windows.

Which reduces its innovation level to nothing more than a chest-mounted camera.

You want real B2C products that people would actually buy? Look at the Superbowl ads instead. Then watch the Humane ad again. It's laughable.

It was a fascinating protocol underneath, but the social follow structure seemed to select strongly for folks who already had a following or something.