Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cortana is really bad

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 303 posts

Re: Cortana is really bad

#201

Post by hirsin »

simonh wrote: post #145
8ytecoder wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if you have never used another OS, MacOS seems like the best. But when even the simplest pro things don't work, it gets beyond annoying. Some examples - Cut, Paste files; Shift select files; Minimise and how it works with Cmd+Tab; Maximise the way it works now. I need something like BetterTouchTool to even tolerate MacOS. It's the terminal (Ubuntu on Windows is great but still needs more work) and the quality h…

Some of that behaviour is a bit awkward, but then there are amazing magical jewels like Automator and active folders. But window management on Windows is a pain now with auto-snapping and the stupid charms thing or whatever it is popping up all the time.

Charms? Like the sidebar? That dies with Windows 8. There's a selection of other windows that appears if you snap something, but if you ignore it it goes away.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#202

Post by skygazer »

eitland wrote: post #100
ska wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows used to be optimized around user experience. Are you sure that wasn't MacOS ? I can't think of a time in recent memory I would describe windows as focused around user experience, it has always had dark corners.

Believe it or not: Many of us far prefer Windows to MacOS. And it's not just old habits: I came to the various linux desktop environments after Windows and i still prefer some of them over both Windows and MacOS. (Spent almost 3 years on Mac. Started as an enthusiastic user. Left really disillusioned. Have later come to the conclusion that it is really great and I'm just incompatible:-)

When you've run an obstacle course to fluency, often a Stockholm syndrome sets in, and you think this is the best obstacle course. It changes you; how you reason, predict and judge. It become natural and intuitive. Your neural net overfits. Other obstacle courses seem arbitrary and unreasoned. They inspire disbelief and derision.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#203

Post by charcoal23 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

Using any of the start menu replacements (StartIsBack, Start10, Classic Shell) will give you the old interface and somehow gives you the old search engine too. Has the nice side effects of making Cortana completely disappear and giving you right click uninstall options for all the apps.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#204

Post by pingec »

michielr wrote: post #169
wombatpm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shout out for Wox. https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox its what I went to when Launchy stagnated. Its one of the first things I install on new PC's

Check out keypirinha http://keypirinha.com/ if you like Wox. I prefer it over wox a lot.

Defender flags the installer as virus :/

Re: Cortana is really bad

#205

Post by contextfree »

johndavidback wrote: post #7
nerflad wrote: post #3

> The Product Manager in charge of this feature should be immediately fired. I hate this kind of writing. It undermines the otherwise good point the author has.

Fair point. I use a little hyperbole to emphasize the fact that a product with an incredible global reach should default to well-planned and executed features, particularly if they are sprung upon you with desktop alerts. Hate it or not, someone did a very, very bad job here. Most likely many someones.

(used to work at Microsoft, not on Cortana but have friends that did/do)

Broken UX flows like this are usually distributed among a bunch of different teams (each with their own PMs) so that no "the product manager" actually exists, and it's organizational seams you're running into. In many cases the individual PMs on each team are well aware of the problems with the overall flow and want to fix them, but find it hard to make room in their "day jobs" for coordinating with other teams to actually do so. So if anything I bet many of them are happy your post could give them more ammo to push prioritizing fixes.

I'm only somewhat familiar with Cortana but I think your example broken flow crosses four or five teams’ feature areas, and I know that some of the problems you identified have had solutions proposed/designed/even prototyped by various teams for years now, but I guess so far nobody's managed to get all the teams to commit to any one particular solution.

IMO though the biggest sin in your story wasn't that a broken flow for a feature existed, but that someone decided to push/spam a notification that led to said broken flow (and that someone else set up an incentive structure that drove that decision).

Re: Cortana is really bad

#206

Post by JetSpiegel »

sha666sum wrote: post #90
CydeWeys wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've experienced similar. My most pleasant experience with finding and launching applications is, surprisingly, in Linux. I think it's best in breed now. If you'd told me this 15 years ago I wouldn't have believed you, but it's gotten much better over the years and everything else has somehow gotten worse. I spend more time using Linux as a desktop OS than anything else these days, and it "just works".

I think dmenu is a good example of this. It's a common launcher application that's (at least) known to all i3 users. Here's a succinct explanation from the man page: "dmenu is a dynamic menu for X, which reads a list of newline-separated items from stdin. When the user selects an item and presses Return, their choice is printed to stdout and dmenu terminates. Entering text will narrow the items to those matching the…

If you want the same experience with more eye-candy, look into rofi.

https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi

It has default submodules to replace dmenu_run, a similar mode that lists the XDG applications (akin to the Start Menu you get on Mint, Fedora or other full-fat DE), SSH that parses `~/.ssh/config`, a dmenu-compatible mode for scripts and a Python API to implement custom modes.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#207

Post by JetSpiegel »

Pxtl wrote: post #181
nerflad wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A GUI with a 1-1 mapping to command line arguments sounds like heaven. Of course this exists for something like GVim, but I had no idea commercial software of any kind was doing it. That makes scriptability possible!

Yeah, AutoCAD is old so you have a lot of people with old command-line habits. I first used it in like '94. Loved the command-line and gui hybrid it used. Commands were composable too, like the "line" command would then ask you for where the first point was and you could use locator commands like "midpoint" or "endpoint" which in turn would take an existing line object as a parameter to select the origin of the new l…

AutoCAD script is actually a dialect of LISP, as I recall.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#208

Post by Taniwha »

staz wrote: post #190
_lce0 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh my, I'm not alone! ;) Anybody knows how to get that "calc" thing working as expected?

Have the same problem all the time, one time it was too much and I just uninstalled Libreoffice (of course in the end I just had to reinstall it)

surely that's a reason to turn off the stupid microsoft search, not to get rid of libreoffice

Re: Cortana is really bad

#209

Post by panarky »

fpgaminer wrote: post #124
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comfo…

Type 'upda' to get Windows Update, but instead it shows Java's updater.

Type 'updat' and all search results disappear completely.

Type 'upd' and now it shows Windows Update but not the Java update.

Type fast and get different results than if you type slow.

Type the same thing a third time and get different results than the first two times.

And now Cortana keeps bugging me with lame notifications. How do I turn this off?

Re: Cortana is really bad

#210

Post by wrycoder »

fpgaminer wrote: post #124
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comfo…

One app search engine I deal with: type “remo” and hesitate a heartbeat. System fills “remove”, meanwhile I finish “ve” and the system searches for “removeve”.
Post reply on HN