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

358 points ofalkaed | 1 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.333s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.

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zaptheimpaler ◴[12 Oct 25 08:20 UTC] No.45556394[source]▶

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

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Y-bar ◴[12 Oct 25 08:33 UTC] No.45556456[source]▶

>>45556394 #

Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else.

I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.

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1. OtherShrezzing ◴[12 Oct 25 08:47 UTC] No.45556539[source]▶

>>45556456 #

Macromedia Fireworks was an outstanding piece of software.

The 20 most common things you’d do with the tool were there for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about every file extension you could think of.

Most useful feature of all was that it’d load instantly. You’d click the icon on the desktop, and there’d be the Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a coffee while it starts, it’s phenomenal performance.

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