* 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/ (scroll down to see a bunch of examples)
* 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/ (scroll down to see a bunch of examples)