
Most Underhyped Apps of 2008 - jwilliams
http://lifehacker.com/5101972/most-underhyped-apps-of-2008
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evdawg
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.

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blasdel
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.

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unalone
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.

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

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jcapote
Fedora is an app? Since when?

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naish
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.

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Goronmon
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.

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hxa7241
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.

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unalone
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.

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hxa7241
> 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.

