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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?

#721

Post by teleforce »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #85

Basically most web apps. They are a clunky, laggy imitation of native apps. For a couple of historical reasons we are all using them, but still there is an enormous abyss between web apps and real native apps.

This.

Not sure how the harmless and cute "Gizmo" web Netscape Navigator becomes the Gremlin monsters of today's web applications.

Perhaps the innocent desire of the developers to make their applications usable in different platforms but because of the laziness or budget constraints make them feed the cute Gremlins after midnight.

Hopefully the likes of cross platform native applications, e.g. Flutter will flourish in the near future and vanish the Gremlin monsters forever.

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

#722

Post by toyg »

jimnotgym wrote: post #585
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…

I am going to go against the grain and say I rather like Teams. Video calls work really well. Voice calls are clear. Screen sharing occasionally doesn't work as some have noticed, but restarting the call seems to fix it. It is so much better than Webex though. I think it is still suffering from the teething troubles of trying to bring so many things under one umbrella, Sharepoint (which already had groups), Skype for…

Some of the skepticism around here might be a bit outdated. I tried Teams about 4 years ago and found it bad; I was recently forced to use it again and now the experience is fairly pleasant overall. I don't understand why they split "Chats" from Channels though - or rather I have suspicions about causes, I just think the better way forward (from an UX perspective) would have been to keep everything in Channels.

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

#723

Post by philipwhiuk »

jimnotgym wrote: post #639

OSX/MacOS This should be popular It seems so aimed at the consumer market, with everything set up to help with integrating with Apple services. But what about the enterprise features? It is very common for companies to be running Active Directory networks, why do macs work so hard not to fit in? Why not have some kind of AD support for mapping print queues, network drives that kind of thing? Maybe respecting password…

> It is very common for companies to be running Active Directory networks, why do macs work so hard not to fit in?

Active Directory is licensed and patented.

You're literally complaining that someone isn't signing up to vendor lock in.

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

#724

Post by chrisfrantz »

SN76477 wrote: post #631
lloydatkinson wrote: post #370

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…

My company wanted me and the rest of the marketing team on Jira. Immediately I was like wtf is this. We were back on Trello after just a few weeks.

Yeah don’t let that happen. Same thing was tried with me a few years ago and I noped out quickly.

Notion is great for marketing teams though.

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

#725

Post by rpedela »

ivalm wrote: post #476
pachico wrote: post #316

Jira is my daily nightmare. I guess the "no CTO was ever fired for choosing SAP" applies to Jira too. It just does the opposite of that it tries to do, which is making development tracking easy (not to mention those silly ideas coming from agile coaches to use Jira to measure wrong things, which makes of it a horrible combo).

So what is like Jira but good? I use jira at work and I like it. But our use case is maybe more limited/liberal. For us it is: 1) list tasks to do and how tasks are linked 2) archive discussion about issues and integrates with butbucket (so in commit it will link to ticket to read about why something was done; similarly from issue discussion I can see the relevant commits; this also goes well with history either by l…

Clubhouse.io

Jira recently overhauled their UI to make it more similar to Clubhouse, but it still isn't as good. Jira is still slow and buggy. Clubhouse also has seamless integration with Github which makes it feel like I am using GitHub issues when tagging PRs, etc. There is also a BitBucket integration, but haven't used it. To me Clubhouse does something that no other similar tool does: make PMs and engineers happy.

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

#727

Post by glenneroo »

nprateem wrote: post #37

Finder on Macs. I've used a Mac for over 5 years and it still amazes me how unintuitive it is for basic tasks like copying and pasting files, creating new directories, etc.

A few years ago I lost several GBs (thousands of rendered images) when I stopped a long move action midway. I tried to resume the process by just repeating the directory move, unsuspectingly expecting that the existing files in the destination directory would be left alone and new files just would be appended, ala Windows (since at least 95). I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that on OSX "Warning: This action will overwrite existing directory" means the destination directory will be wiped out prior to starting the move.

Talking to other Mac users, this seems to be common knowledge - I guess only Windows users moving to OSX should be wary.

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

#728

Post by monkpit »

nwatson wrote: post #648
lloydatkinson wrote: post #370

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…

Hmm, I think (Atlassian) Confluence is quite awesome. While you can still replicate the mess you'd naturally have in Google-Docs or OneNote or other places, at least with Confluence if you have a coherent vision for how your organize your information you can create a very useful body of work. I've never seen a Google-Docs, OneNote, SharePoint, or other unstructured-info solution that doesn't devolve into turds-in-gel…

> (you can stage/unstage/undo fragments of files in the UI)

To be fair, this has nothing to do with SourceTree. You can do this with any git tool, since it’s a feature of git.

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

#729

Post by symlinkk »

rvz wrote: 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.

Just use Fedora and GNOME. Linux is good but suffers from the Android problem where third parties modify it with their own branding and ruin it.

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

#730

Post by crest »

GordonS wrote: post #67
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…

+1 for Teams. Video calling actually works great, but gods the UX is appalling! It's just so confusing and inconsistent. As you said too, the whole thing is buggy. Sometimes screen sharing doesn't work unless you reopen the app, for example. The wiki feature is crap (at least the web version, I haven't tried the desktop version of the wiki) - formatting is a mess, markdown support is practically non-existent, it's bu…

And at least on macOS screen sharing doesn't work with a German keyboard layout. Neither the German nor the US keyboard layout modifiers work correctly. At least it is enough to bootstrap a better remote desktop connection.
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