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

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

#711

Post by drusepth »

sershe wrote: post #260

I thankfully don't use it everyday, but Mac and literally everything on Mac (even the terminal started crashing on resize towards the end of the time I used it every day). Over time, I started keeping a note where I put every bug, missing feature, malicious feature, performance issue, driver issue I had with my 2 different MacBooks day to day, and it's loooong. I'll probably never organize it unless I'm forced to use…

Haha, I have a similar note. I've worked at two jobs where I was forced to work on company MBPs and it was a daily nightmare.

I scoped a few of the more generic problems with just trying to be productive up on Medium [1] to share with coworkers who swore by the OS (and were way more knowledgeable about it than me), but they never proposed any solutions to make things better. Just a lot of "you're using it wrong" and the occasional "buy this app to fix that".

[1] https://medium.com/@drusepth/multitasking-on-a-mac-sucks-and...

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

#712

Post by philipwhiuk »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #315

Microsoft Outlook - decade after decade the icons change but the suckage does not, its 1987 every day when you use Outlook. Microsoft Teams - drains my battery 1% every two minutes Slack - the original “let’s forget everything we’ve learned about communications and try to discover it again”. From the threads feature nobody wants to the inability to silence bots or plugins, Slack never fails to disappoint. They pitch…

"They pitch it as a knowledge archiving tool but unless you know exactly where, when, and who said something good luck finding it."

Really? That's the pitch? That's hillarious. That's absolutely not what I would have said it was good at.

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

#713

Post by philipwhiuk »

jacekm wrote: post #192
djinnandtonic wrote: post #105

Google Drive. I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where it is impossible to find something.

It took me years to realise that GDrive searches by file content by default instead of file name and that I need to prefix my search term with 'title:' to be able to find what I want. Now I just use their API to list all files in the terminal and then I just pipe it to `grep`. This way I can search using regular expressions.

wat

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

#714

Post by toyg »

abhgh wrote: post #501
Someone1234 wrote: post #35

Microsoft Teams. I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-window (even with the recent "pop-out" functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern trends. You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc). Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my computer…

Tell me about it. We moved from Slack to Teams to cut costs. Common story. Leaves a LOT to be desired. 1. The UI took the fun out of well, whatever, Slack was/is. For some of the common interest channels at work, I see less people going to them. 2. I'm in a group where we frequently need to share images (mostly plots) among the members. Sometimes they just disappear. Yes. You upload an image during a conversation, co…

> when I try to upload an image in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second one complains the file already exists

That's because, bafflingly, it uses a local directory-cache for files. Think of it as the "Downloads" folder for a browser. Any time you upload, Teams will try to save it to your local cache first; if it finds the old file, it will whine like that.

Any time you want to upload a file, you should really not do in Chats but in Channels, which have a separate area for each Channel (backed by Sharepoint). Except in some companies (like where I'm now) people for some reason use Chats almost exclusively instead of Channels, so the whole thing becomes awkward: go to the channel, upload, get the link, paste the link in chat.

I guess it could be worse, it could be AOL.

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

#716

Post by philipwhiuk »

tootie wrote: post #140
djinnandtonic wrote: post #105

Google Drive. I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where it is impossible to find something.

Everyone one of these cloud storage services (Dropbox, Box, Drive, iCloud, S3, OneDrive) has adopted the same mental model of file storage that computer systems from the 80s devised to mimic filing cabinets. Namely: folders. I think a folder hierarchy has some value but they should really all be using a tagging system instead. Orgs tend to have multiple hierarchies based or org charts, projects, disciplines, timeline…

This reminds me of the cancelled WinFS project.

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

#717

Post by rmccue »

nknealk wrote: post #343

Surprised not to see this here, but doing data engineering against any Adobe product in creative cloud. Specifically: AEM, AAM, Omniture, among others. My favorite is AAM’s “only Adobe could come up with such a stupid data integration” file format: https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/audience-manager/user... The omniture S3 feed comes as a 1004 column TSV. And for fields that capture user inputs, they don’t escape…

We’re building a competitor to AEM (and in the process, parts of Omniture); would love to hear more about your gripes with that. (Email’s on my profile.)

One of the things we’ve seen is similar to some of the sentiments expressed about Blackboard: the decision makers often aren’t the users, so feature lists and meta issues tend to win out. Adobe seems to target that market pretty well with their whole experience suite.

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

#718

Post by philipwhiuk »

jbay808 wrote: post #374
OliverJones wrote: post #171

Atlassian's Jira and Confluence. Why? Their search capability is just bad. To find something requires a lot of tries and tricks. I don't want to waste cognition because they re-invented the flat tire. Their inbrowser text editors are also just bad. On the level of WordPress three years ago. Markdown? no. Cut and paste from other apps? OK, if you remember to "Paste as Plain Text.

Confluence... I was floored when I realized it can't support duplicate page names in separate page heirarchies. eg. You can't have a page called Engineering > Electrical > Test Procedure and another page called Engineering > Mechanical > Test Procedure, because the two "Test Procedure" pages are considered as occupying the same namespace.

Yeah... this pissed me off. - I end up using prefixes (so "Mech - Test Procedure"

:@

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

#719

Post by toyg »

georgeburdell wrote: post #693
Someone1234 wrote: post #35

Microsoft Teams. I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-window (even with the recent "pop-out" functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern trends. You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc). Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my computer…

We use Skype internally but some people have started to use Microsoft Teams. At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, these Microsoft Teams meetings never seem to have a dial-in number (my laptop microphone is horrible). If I try to use my computer's microphone to speak, it asks for camera permission at the same time. I don't want everyone to see me in briefs, just listen to my voice. So it's apparently either…

> So it's apparently either share my video and audio, or just be silent.

Maybe in the past, or on some clients only. On the Windows client you can currently operate camera and mic independently and choose how to respond to each calls (with video or audio only).

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

#720

Post by bennettfeely »

aasasd wrote: post #430
ordu wrote: 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…

Microwaves have a perfectly usable and quick timer input method. Is there anyone who thinks swiping and scrolling up and down to pick a time makes things easier? I have no idea why they think a smartphone timer should be any different.
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