Most Underhyped Apps of 2008 | Hacker News Reader

Most Underhyped Apps of 2008

lifehacker.com

37 pointsjwilliams13 comments

Underhyped??

Songbird has been getting consistent, solid press since it was in Alpha.

OpenOffice 3 got so much traffic on launch the servers crashed for days.

I don't think I've stopped reading about Dropbox since it started it's public beta.

And Songbird was a total piece of shit for years, while it continued to get lots of pointless press. It's only become marginally useful very recently.

Lifehacker is such a bunk site. I used to love it, when I didn't realize that a good 90% of their articles are garbage. It's a shame.

VLC is incredibly overhyped: everybody that doesn't use iTunes or WinAmp seems to use it. Ubiquity doesn't do much yet, but people are talking about it a lot because it's Aza Raskin. Songbird deserves no talk whatsoever until it has a featureset that makes it noticably better than iTunes on OS X, WinAmp on Windows, or Amarok on Linux, but it gets talk because it's Mozilla and Mozilla products are always worth talking about unless it's Sunbird. Picasa's Google and gets advertised all over the place. OpenOffice is hyped too much considering Bean and Abiword trounce its word processor.

Is Dropbox underhyped? Everybody seems to love it, and I'd guess it's growing pretty fast.

VLC doesn't need hype. It's recommended to people by word-of-mouth incredibly fast.

Fedora is an app? Since when?

I certainly agree with the choice of Dropbox--it is a truly excellent piece of software. Not only does it allow me to keep important files synchronized across many computers, bridging operating systems without a sweat, it has fundamentally changed how I collaborate with many of my colleagues. Shared folders (with rudimentary version control to boot) are fantastic.

I've hit some snags playing certain media files with VLC in the past. I prefer Media Player Classic now. Not sure if the issues with VLC have been fixed, as I think it was .mkv support I had issues with, but I have no reason to switch from MPC.

Opera shouldn't be hyped. It is not for the hoi-polloi, it is for the select few, the connoisseurs, the epicures of software nourishment.

Good God. You actually used the word "epicures" to describe "people who like a lightweight, multi-featured browser." That's taking things a little too far.

You forget that the software world is not one of connoisseurs. There's a free class and there's a professional class. There's no more than that. You couldn't have a luxury class, it couldn't sustain itself. And we could have a whole discussion on why - the Internet relies on the power of networks, so closing a network off damages the potential of the system - but really, the point is more that you can't defend a web browser through elitism, not when it's a free product that's trying to get as many downloads as possible.

> Good God. You actually used the word "epicures" to describe "people who like a lightweight, multi-featured browser." That's taking things a little too far.

yes, that is it. it was silly. maybe not quite obviously silly enough though.

hoi polloi == the people

Your extraneous definite article exposes you as one of those you project yourself above. Part of being elitist is being correct: without that you're a fool.

from the apple dictionary:

USAGE 1 Hoi is the Greek word for the, and the phrase hoi polloi means ‘the many.’ This has led some traditionalists to insist that hoi polloi should not be used in English with the, since that would be to state the word the twice. But, once established in English, expressions such as hoi polloi are typically treated as fixed units and are subject to the rules and conventions of English. Evidence shows that use with the has now become an accepted part of standard English usage: : they kept to themselves, away from the hoi polloi (rather than : . . . away from hoi polloi).

(the apple dictionary being the 'New Oxford American Dictionary', just to be clear)

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