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

Scrolling through the top few dozen posts here, I see a bunch of commonly used development software. IMO, all of those do have some issues, but none are remotely comparable to the horror show that is internal software at medium-large corporations. I've used a bunch of these, actually worked on improving a few, witnessed the development process for others. There's no point in naming them, because people outside the company will never use them.

These types of programs are uniquely terrible for reasons described in other posts - the people doing the development, and setting the priorities for development, have no connection to the people who need to use it day to day. Different offices, rare personnel crossover, systems specifically designed to discourage direct communication. They're usually big and complex enough that a ground-up redesign is either impossible, or will inevitably gather enough poor management decisions to be about as bad as before by the time it becomes remotely practical to use.

I recall one place where a critical application required to record data and deliver it to clients in a realtime application was based on an X-Windows application running in Windows XP using the one X-Windows manager that sort of worked there. Yes, really. I know it's a super weird combo, but it's what we had. I ended up moving into a related software department, and got some behind the scenes info. Turned out that there was just one guy left who was still actively coding for it, already past retirement age, but kept on anyways out of desperation, because nobody else was willing to touch that codebase. There was a project to build a more modern replacement application, with all of the usual corporate bloat and ever-slipping deadlines. It wasn't great, but at least it ran natively on Windows 7 and had a better UI. I think they moved over to it entirely after a while, but I left that place before that move was finished.

try cloudsearch.google.com

It encompasses Drive, Mail, Calendar, etc.

Spotify on Mac.

It’s Chromium-based, so, of course, it’s slow. Specifically, search is excruciatingly slow, removing an album from your library redraws the whole page, and—most frustratingly— as soon as you lose internet connection, your perfectly nice and readable page get replaced with “Artist pages are not available offline”. It’s a list of tracks and albums which is updated (at most, on average) several times a year, why require connection to continue showing it?

Not Mac-specific, but extremely weird: sometimes Release Radar playlist has tracks by wrong artists with the same name. I don’t think a recommendation model would use names instead of IDs, so it probably means that track was first ascribed to a wrong artist, and that’s... even worse?

My university has been a Blackboard customer for awhile, and so I've used it since 2011. My sense is that the software has gotten marginally better in some ways, marginally worse in others, and overall still sucks.

They redesigned it, in what is apparently an attempt to make the software more usable from a mobile phone. So (on a laptop), less stuff appears on the screen at once. This was billed, as usual, as an "improvement".

Also -- and quite frankly, this is ridiculous -- when I need to merge two sections of my course, I need to ask IT to do it for me. (Example: a big calculus lecture, which is broken up into multiple TA sections that have different course numbers.) It used to be that I could just do it myself, no problem. Then the option silently went away. I was informed that we used a plug-in (??) made by a third-party vendor (????) that enabled individual instructors to merge sections, but the third-party vendor went out of business and so this is no longer possible.

Makes me speculate that the codebase is a giant pile of spaghetti.

Macs are weird in that you have to surrender to “The Mac Way” before they make any sense. If you try to fight it, it somehow manages to mess with you.

That being said, does sound like something else was going on with your Macs.