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Cortana is really bad

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Re: Cortana is really bad

#91

Post by notatoad »

fhrow4484 wrote: post #86
notatoad wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but the package id won't get you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is necessary. Google can figure it out. I order something, i get cards in Google Now telling me exactly what i ordered and its shipping status, without any interaction on my part. It just happens. If microsoft can't figure out how to do this, fine. But if they're going to pop up notifications saying "hey, i can track pack…

But you get the order's confirmation/shipping email on your Gmail account, do you? Now what tells you this doesn't work with emails received in your outlook.com mailbox? Or do you expect Windows to read all your Gmail's email somehow?

the article's author says he has given windows permission to access his inbox.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#92

Post by nsxwolf »

GolDDranks wrote: post #41
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…

Just to be fair: I installed a copy of IntelliJ IDEA on my macOS. It was the trial version. I use Spotlight (and a year back, Alfred) to launch my all applications. However, Spotlight couldn't find the app for it's life, even if it found all the other apps in the same directory. After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.

Spotlight can't find the IntelliJ app on my macOS either, but mine is registered.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#93

Post by CydeWeys »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #82
CydeWeys wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "everything search"? Is that third party or does it ship with Windows? That sounds like something I need.

https://www.voidtools.com You might also like http://www.getwox.com (basically Alfred for Windows) which can also search the Everything DB. There’s also stuff like https://mobile.jam-software.de/ultrasearch/?language=EN and https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/ Yeah, Cortana is awful and if you totally remove it, you break the start menu (just like removing IE back in the day...sigh). Blackbird can stop the C…

Thanks so much. I will definitely try these out. It's a shame to have to resort to third party tools to have an acceptable experience for such a basic OS use case as finding and launching applications. I don't know what the hell they're doing over there at MSFT anymore, but they're missing several basic building blocks of a good OS.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#94

Post by castis »

toss1 wrote: post #67
castis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then the entire world should rejoice that people like yourself and OP are not in control of other peoples livelihood.

Really? This is not only a worse-than-useless, waste-of-user-time feature on its own, but it actively interrupts the user to get their attention! So, this PM decided to put into a production environment a feature that interrupts a customer's workflow for no good benefit. It doesn't even benefit Microsoft, so he's not even being a bandit. This is the very definition of stupid. Hurt the other guy, hurt yourself, for no…

The question was not whether or not an employer should continue to pay a person.

The question was whether or not some angry internet person should be responsible for the livelihood of a developer of a product they are having difficulty with.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#95

Post by seanp2k2 »

gmueckl wrote: post #68
wslh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure about Cortana but I am sure that other project product managers (e.g. Skype) should be fired. They have historic popular issues. Basic negligence, not bugs.

Skype... I am actively trying to get rid of it these days. That ridiculous bloated and slow HTML user interface that many native clients have transitioned to (especially Linux and Android) is beyond description. Why does it need to take up 50% of one core when it is idling in the background? On an i7-6800k no less! On my note 8 it drains the battery in no time while managing to be extremely sluggish and unresponsive.…

In Atom (one of the first public releases), I had this plugin that used CSS animations to fade the cursor in and out. It took ~100% of one core to do this. That’s right, in order to fade a color between white and clear, in 2017...

I don’t use that plugin anymore. Electron is dope because it actually delivers on the “one UI across all OSes” but the number of abstractions and the performance hit for this is staggering. It’s not that it needs to be this bad — I don’t think that there’s some specific problem in the technologies, it’s that it /is/ bad in practice. But whatever, my home desktop has 8 cores, 32GB RAM, ~2GB/sec disk reads, and 100mbit internet, so it works with about the same responsiveness as a normal app under Win95 on the hardware of the day.

https://www.forbes.com/2005/04/19/cz_rk_0419karlgaard.html Still as relevant as ever.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#96

Post by QuercusMax »

Theodores wrote: post #13

The Google approach is much better. Tracking numbers go out in email to the customer and you can put little xml snippets in there so that gmail can put 'track order' in the subject with a little button to click. This goes to the URL provided in the email, not to some magical service that magically determines if that tracking number came from UPS, USPS, Royal Mail, China Post, or whatever. Due to how couriers merge an…

Looks like this isn't even a proprietary Google thing, they just have better support than lots of providers. The docs you point to mention that the schema is from schema.org.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#97

Post by gggvvff »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #82
CydeWeys wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "everything search"? Is that third party or does it ship with Windows? That sounds like something I need.

https://www.voidtools.com You might also like http://www.getwox.com (basically Alfred for Windows) which can also search the Everything DB. There’s also stuff like https://mobile.jam-software.de/ultrasearch/?language=EN and https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/ Yeah, Cortana is awful and if you totally remove it, you break the start menu (just like removing IE back in the day...sigh). Blackbird can stop the C…

Alfred is Spotlight. Conclusion: switch to a Mac if you want a working computer.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#98

Post by AgentME »

mwambua wrote: post #63
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".

What DE do you use? Back when I used Unity in Ubuntu I found their search widget really hard to use. It was laggy and mixed in results from the web, their 'appstore', and my files. Now I use dmenu in i3wm and I couldn't be happier. All I need is something that searches my path for applications... and that's what it does.

The Unity search menu was really frustrating. It had confusing category buttons, and if you did a search that only had results in a specific category, it would inexplicably turn on that category filter and use it for future searches too until you cleared the textbox. I loved pretty much everything about Unity except for that baffling bit. I'm almost glad they're killing Unity just so it means people aren't subjected to that wacky design decision or bug.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#99

Post by ska »

CydeWeys wrote: post #70
kop316 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have similar issues with Edge on Windows. When it auto completes a webpage, it will do a bing search instead and have that as it's top result. Personally, I think it's done on purpose, as every time it searches, it counts as a search in Bing, and that way they can use that to show how many people use Bing to charge more for advertisers.

I believe you might be right about the why. Windows used to be optimized around user experience. The deal was, I pay my $200, and I get a good operating system. Now, I still pay my $200, but what I'm getting is an operating system optimized to generate further revenue from me, at the expense of basic usability. This might be acceptable in a F2P model, but not when I've paid good money for it! Meanwhile, all this stuf…

   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.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#100

Post by eitland »

ska wrote: post #99
CydeWeys wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you might be right about the why. Windows used to be optimized around user experience. The deal was, I pay my $200, and I get a good operating system. Now, I still pay my $200, but what I'm getting is an operating system optimized to generate further revenue from me, at the expense of basic usability. This might be acceptable in a F2P model, but not when I've paid good money for it! Meanwhile, all this stuf…

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:-)

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