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Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

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421–430 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#421

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

Enterprise software are like baby outfits you get as baby shower gifts.

They are cute, but they have lots of buttons or they have some decoration that makes them hard to wash, making them impractical to use. While no parent would buy these, every parent has them, because someone else made the decision to buy them.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#423

Amazon Alexa and the FireTV. Been around for some time now, several iterations except that the UX hasn’t changed, quality isn’t any better than couple years ago and painful/buggy 3rd party app integrations.

Have you tried any other TV OS? FireTV is the best of a bad bunch.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#424

JIRA. The most complex simple system I used. Simple in theory (Project Management) but complex in implementation.

Not to mention it is slow as molasses(on the cloud at-least) and the UI is unwieldy with way too many clicks required for the simplest of actions. I am sorely tempted to build a frontend so that I can avoid wasting so much time on it. Just a better frontend not yet another project management tool that will not be bought by management. I don't understand the slowness at all, even if their backend and architecture is F…

I would pay good money for a Jira CLI, preferably with an ncurses UI to make it easy to navigate.

(Edit: also, every program for managing Bluetooth devices ever made.)

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#425

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

Enterprise software are like baby outfits you get as baby shower gifts. They are cute, but they have lots of buttons or they have some decoration that makes them hard to wash, making them impractical to use. While no parent would buy these, every parent has them, because someone else made the decision to buy them.

original source (AFICT):

https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#426

Windows 10 Home: Ignoring all of the typical complaints about windows like bloat wear and Cortana... I would be happy is just basic things worked. For example, I often have to switch between wireless networks for my job and the wifi icon in the bottom tray just randomly disappears about 80% of the time so I have to go through the full settings menu to get to it. Also, searching for applications or documents from the…

Right click on the taskbar, select taskbar settings. Scroll down to notification area, click on "select which icons appear on taskbar" then turn on show all notification icons in the taskbar.

Should at least mean it's always there.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#427
post #107

Desktop GNU/Linux. Too much of a cost to test for and to set up CIs for the distros I'm targeting. There is little to no paying users there because of the fragmentation. But again, "paid support" will have lots of choices, versions, combinations and edge cases to cover. So I listed it as "unsupported: use at your own risk." Windows and macOS have a much sainer desktop for GUI apps to test against.

I've been using xfce for years and love it. It has basic but sufficient tiling and it very scriptable. With autorandr and hook across, it recognises different monitor configurations and automatically sets up xfce panels, docks and keyboard layouts (ie: at work or at home, pc105 gb, and when it's just the Mac monitor on it's own, use gb mac layout).

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#428

Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however. AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understa…

Disagree strongly on git. On the surface the syntax is ugly, but the data model is brilliant. Once you wrap your mind around what commits, heads and remotes are and learn to rebase you get an incredibly simple and fine-grained control. I never use stash because it's trivial to create a WIP commit and rebase later into the chunks I want to ship to permanent history. Git is like a chef's knife: extremely powerful tool…

Agree. I always hated git and thought it was so arbitrary and unhelpful. Then I sat down for 1-2 hours and read about how it works. It's not that complicated of a model that it operates on. Once you learn the model, the rest of the commands and how it works start making intuitive sense.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?

#430
post #295

Android. Truly horrible platform where I cannot even find a clock app that just works. I mean there is one shipped with a phone, but it has inconvenient timer and I do not like how time selection is done -- a lots of movements to scroll numbers to find one I need, -- but I cannot configure it to my convenience and I cannot find another clock app that works. And all this "Google phone wants to have an access to calend…

> how time selection is done -- a lots of movements to scroll numbers to find one I need

That's the worst way to pick a time that I've seen and used. It requires a lot of swiping, combined with looking for the precise moment to stop the scrolling and not overshoot.

Thankfully in some Android variants it's replaced with much better alternatives. Google Pixel's stock apps in Android 9 and 10 use a round watch face for time points—where you pick first the hour, then the minute with one tap each. However, this still requires rather precise finger work (and has animation in the middle). The best interface IMO is what Pixel and Philips' phones use in the timer: you just type the minute and the second (or the hour and the minute) in four digits, with a huge number pad on the screen. Philips did better here because its pad occupied most of the screen so the tap targets are larger. The benefit of this interface is that you easily develop muscle memory for it, practically no aiming is required.

‘Simple Mobile Tools’ make pretty good apps which are open-source and are present in F-Droid (https://www.simplemobiletools.com). Alas their ‘Simple Clock’ uses scroll spinners in the timer, but perhaps you could ask them to reconsider. I can help with screens from the better interfaces.

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