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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?

#361

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).

Agreed.

Jira can do many things. Or so I’m told. I just don’t think it helps me as a dev.

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

#362
Whatsapp, absolutely. Every single night it does a forced backup of everything that I do not want and hangs for about 10 minutes.

And if it fails for reasons such as storage getting full, it gets corrupted and then it's half an hour until it restores an old backup, losing the day's messages. And it also stores a week of backups, so that's 7x of the size which on many phones is untenable.

And this can't be turned off! I hate it with a passion but literally everyone I know is on it. There's even no way to hide a conversation from view without blocking it forever.

Awful.

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

#363
post #330

One of the worst apps I use regularly has to be Google Play Music. The UI is horrible enough, but it also randomly deletes tracks from my library - including my own tracks that I recorded under my own name. And sometimes the tracks will show up again randomly. The worst is when tracks don't show up in my Songs list, but if I put it on shuffle, these tracks will start playing. I don't know what's the status now, but S…

Also try Apple Music.

Apple Music on iOS os fine. It’s terrible on macOS. Every action feels like quicksand.

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

#364

I've still havent't figure it out how to open an email in a new tab with just a single click when inside GMail. It. used to be possible, of course, like all HTML links (by clicking the middle button on my mouse, for example), but since 3 or 4 years (at least) that feature disappeared. I'm still upset about it and that is why I consider GMail "the worst" piece of software I use everyday (it's also because I don't use…

What about ctrl+click ?

I use that often, my only complaint is that it you close the main window, for some mystical reason it decides to also close all the other tabs opened that way

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

#365

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.

> I don't want to waste cognition because they re-invented the flat tire.

Fantastic metaphor. It just got fast-tracked into my personal lexicon.

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

#366

ServiceNow. Perfect storm of abysmal design/UX used to represent a bloated and confusing underlying information architecture. It's possible that I'm using an poorly configured version/instance of the product, but good lord, I'll do anything I can to avoid using it at work.

Seems like all tools in this space (IT service management) are terrible. At work I have to use HP Service Manager. Just thinking of it makes me nervous. Made for bureaucreats by bureaucreats!

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

#367
1Password.

Core of the product hasn't seen any noticeable features in a while.

1PasswordX was launched without the feature set of the desktop version. Dumb stuff that hasn't been fixed in forever like not being able to delete a single item from the trash, password formulae are rigid - words with no digits or symbols or random mess of all characters, no TouchID/FaceID, Apple Watch unlock support, can't selectively sync a single vault to say my work laptop.

There should be some open standard data-attribute on password fields so the app can read in the required formula to create the perfect password without me fiddling the settings.

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

#368
Firebird, and by extension the industry specific application which utilizes it.

This applications is absolutely usability nightmare, created in 90s, and it hadn't undergone any change since then. It's database design is also absolutely horrible.. yet it is faster, and more comfortable to just use plain SQL to work with it than bother with UI.

Then there is that piece of shit known as firebird. It has all downsides of file based databases, while also having all downsides of service based databases.

It also has its own way of doing things, and it doesn't even have services/systemctl service by default. Prior to version 2.5 you couldn't drop connections, and guess what - that PoS application set it to a week.

File itself wont update if there is any live connection.

That piece of shit app uses legacy client dll for firebird, so you can either connect to firebird 3, or to firebird 1/2. but not both.

And then there is firebird documentation, which is horrible, and fragmented.

I could rewrite that piece of shit, and design a better database but we won't ever compete with that company for political reasons.

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

#369

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…

The worst thing about Teams is that for no reason they’ve decided to roll their own notifications framework on macOS that doesn’t respect Do Not Disturb settings. That’s the absolute minimum a notifications system should do: stop appearing when told to.

Same on Windows. Doesn't use Windows 10 notification system. This means sometimes I get a proper Windows notification and at the same time a message and instead of the two notifications to be stacked they are overplayed on top of each other.

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

#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 understand just to be able to change roles. It is literally years behind Azure.

Git. It’s purposely archaic commands and syntax leads to too many accidents far too often. I recently started using Gitkraken which allows you to pull changes WITHOUT needing to commit locally first because it uses stashes. It basically does the same option. Why can’t git be smart like that?

Linux. It’s great, but it’s so easy to run into configuration problems or poor documentation.

Docker. Again it’s great but for whatever reason it just works poorly on ARM and the whole ecosystem is geared to x86 and it just goes and pulls the x86 images and then fails to run them. Come on.

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