Subversion was created because the authors were frustrated with problems in CVS[0].<p>What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?<p>[0]: <a href="http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.intro.whatis.html#svn.intro.history" rel="nofollow">http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.intro.whatis.html#svn...</a>
Sorry, but everything listed here is rank amateur stuff when compared to Blackboard Learn (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn</a>).<p>First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere.<p>Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift.<p>Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture. When I want to delete text that I am writing, half of the time, the delete key won't work (I'm exaggerating, but not joking). Formatting of text is quasi-random. Want red-colored text? That works about 90% of the time for me. The other 10% will give me gray text (This time, not exaggerating). If you are brave, you can edit your text as raw HTML, but, my God, you'd better bring the anti-hypertension pills, because the HTML will blast you with a tsunami of <span> elements. Sometimes the <span> elements (unnecessarily) surround individual characters, sometimes they surround _parts_ of words.<p>Third, it is nigh impossible to set useful defaults. Why can't the due dates for assignments be defaulted to the end of the day instead of the current hour and minute? Do you honestly think that I would ever want my assignment to be due at 4:33 PM?<p>Fourth, it tries to do too many things. I already have email. I don't need Blackboard's email functionality getting in the way.<p>I could go on (for a while), but it's time for those blood pressure meds.
Anything Atlasssian. Jira, Bitbucket, confluence. Just frustrating to use, poor UX, and slow. Business types love them however.<p>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.<p>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?<p>Linux. It’s great, but it’s so easy to run into configuration problems or poor documentation.<p>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.
Microsoft Teams.<p>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).<p>Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my computer sleeps/wakes it sits in offline until you open the main window from the system tray. Those are year+ old bugs.<p>While it is often updated[0], the Team's priorities leave a lot to be desired. Adding new gimmicks and tie-ins while ignoring the dilapidated state of the core software itself for two+ years now.<p>[0] <a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-microsoft-teams-d7092a6d-c896-424c-b362-a472d5f105de" rel="nofollow">https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-mic...</a>
Docker.<p>I use it and love it every day in both dev and prod, but I also really kind of hate it.<p>I'll keep my complaints short.<p>There should not be a system-wide daemon. (Or any daemon).<p>It should not require root at all (no setuid either).<p>From outside the container, the container and its processes should be a single process (with threads). (Like glueing a bunch of processes together.)<p>The containers should be nest-able to arbitrary depth without performance loss (at least to say, hundreds of nestings deep.)<p>Docker-compose should not exist, instead it should be replaced by nesting of containers.<p>Basically, I think it needs to follow the UNIX philosophy better by providing simple abstractions that can be combined easily. The containers would visually look a bit more like an old virtual machine (single process) than our current containers.<p>These changes probably require a bunch of kernel hacking, but I think it would be worth it long-term for a cleaner architecture.<p>It appears there are some movements into this direction thanks to podman, but it's really not there yet, especially with nesting.<p>Also, it wouldn't really be a product at all but just a built-in tool on Linux systems.
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.<p>And all this "Google phone wants to have an access to calendar" after each call. I do not know why it needs an access to calendar, I'm not going to give it one, so just stop pecking me. But it will never stop, it seems.<p>And a lots of useless stuff I cannot delete. I stopped it from popping up with stupid messages, but I cannot delete them. It seems that I will be forced to replace Android with PostmarketOS.
Microsoft Outlook - decade after decade the icons change but the suckage does not, its 1987 every day when you use Outlook.<p>Microsoft Teams - drains my battery 1% every two minutes<p>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 it as a knowledge archiving tool but unless you know exactly where, when, and who said something good luck finding it.<p>G-Suite has been awesome for almost five years now, though it can be problematic when you need to communicate with people outside your org that don’t use g-suite for work. Hangouts drains my battery fairly aggressively also but not as much as Teams, so I’ve switched to Zoom for video - plus it works seamlessly reguardless of which email program people use.
The Apache big data suite (Hadoop/Spark/Yarn/Hive/HDFS/etc).<p>In several years of big data engineering work, I've believe I've seen only one application that couldn't be refactored into a simple multi-instance framework-free program. People use the big data frameworks as glorified distributed-job management tools, and the resulting systems are more fragile, more complex, more vulnerable to weird version compatibility errors, and less efficient.
I hate to say it, but Signal.<p>Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately sized (<15) friend group chat and for 1-on-1 threads too.<p>Messages sometimes don't arrive or arrive out of ordered and appear in the wrong order, scrolling up has random jumping behavior, opening the chat in iOS causes my audio to stop playing, there is explicitly no way to back up any of the chat, copying multiple messages is broken on desktop, search is super slow and search result previews have been corrupted for as long as I can remember, sharing links through the iOS share menu causes the app to behave super weird or just crash (my mom can't share links with me through Signal), you can't mute conversations on desktop (IIRC there have been two PRs implementing this feature in the last 2 years; both not pulled), mutual verification is so frustrating that I literally got yelled at when trying to explain it to my parents, I sometimes can't take pictures from within the app, when I can take pictures the viewfinder is half the resolution of the actual camera and everything looks blurry, the most recent app update causes a several second lag whenever I open the group chat, and I am throughly convinced that every issue I've mentioned is so low priority for the people running the show that they won't get fixed for a very long time. At least we have stickers now.<p>Seriously though I believe in what Signal is doing and will probably continue to use and suggest the app. But it will hurt every time I do it.
Scrolling through the top few dozen posts here, I see a bunch of commonly used development software. IMO, all of those do have some issues, but none are remotely comparable to the horror show that is internal software at medium-large corporations. I've used a bunch of these, actually worked on improving a few, witnessed the development process for others. There's no point in naming them, because people outside the company will never use them.<p>These types of programs are uniquely terrible for reasons described in other posts - the people doing the development, and setting the priorities for development, have no connection to the people who need to use it day to day. Different offices, rare personnel crossover, systems specifically designed to discourage direct communication. They're usually big and complex enough that a ground-up redesign is either impossible, or will inevitably gather enough poor management decisions to be about as bad as before by the time it becomes remotely practical to use.<p>I recall one place where a critical application required to record data and deliver it to clients in a realtime application was based on an X-Windows application running in Windows XP using the one X-Windows manager that sort of worked there. Yes, really. I know it's a super weird combo, but it's what we had. I ended up moving into a related software department, and got some behind the scenes info. Turned out that there was just one guy left who was still actively coding for it, already past retirement age, but kept on anyways out of desperation, because nobody else was willing to touch that codebase. There was a project to build a more modern replacement application, with all of the usual corporate bloat and ever-slipping deadlines. It wasn't great, but at least it ran natively on Windows 7 and had a better UI. I think they moved over to it entirely after a while, but I left that place before that move was finished.
Anything which requires me to use a Google captcha or hcaptcha. I generally don't get annoyed very easily but spotting fire hydrants and traffic lights just to login into a site to which you are a paying customer is plain nonsense.<p>I've actually decided to move my entire infrastructure from Digital ocean to AWS because of this captcha before login nonsense (thankfully DO reverted it just in time)
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).
Dropbox. I've used it for a decade, but now it's slow, bloated, and takes over CPU and memory like there isn't a single other program I need to run... and I was paying $20 for the privilege.<p>But a few weeks ago I switched to Syncthing[0], and it's the best software transition I've ever made. Opposite of everything Dropbox is now: fast, simple, and I don't even notice it running in the background. Seamless setup, and FREE. (So good, you're gonna want to donate anyway.)<p>[0]: <a href="https://syncthing.net/" rel="nofollow">https://syncthing.net/</a>
Workplace from Facebook.<p>The company I work for uses this for internal communication. Workplace is basically the same Facebook and Messenger, but tweaked for a private group of people.<p>The problem is that, because this is basically the same Facebook, it is designed to keep you "engaged". It uses all kinds of patterns to keep you addicted to your timeline and search for attention. Rather keeping you informed with the important topics, it distracts you with a lot of irrelevant stuff. The algorithm will always show you something that keeps you scrolling. Huge time waste.<p>The motto of this software is "Bring your company together". And it works exactly as Facebook's motto, "Bring the world closer together", in the sense that it does exactly the opposite. The software has all sorts of mechanisms to generate controversy. Because controversy is what ultimately drives more engagement. Reactions, memes, notifications. It makes you fight with your colleagues about silly things, and it makes it really easy to derail any sort of constructive conversation.<p>Imagine having to try a technical conversation in this platform and then people are allowed to "react" with an angry face or a silly animated GIF. No argumentation required. And those reactions will bring more reactions. And in those rare cases when some meaningful discussion actually happens, then the thread is quickly buried by the constant stream of new things.<p>If your company is considering this, avoid it like the plague.
Windows. Not windows applications, but windows itself. Completly incoherent user interface. Impossible to find anything. The wifi dialog in the systray, the new windows 10 wifi control and the old style network interfaces dialog often show conflicting information. Neither of them works. Have trouble with bluetooth (of course you have, it never works)? Windows is kind enough to hide anything bluetooth related so you have not chance to do anything about it. The Start menu. Not only full of ads, but also completely insane. Type word X. add a character. Press backspace. Get a completely different result. Entering notepad.exe works. entering notpad does not. Enter "visual", find no results. Enter "visual studio" et voilat. Ads in the explorer. And the list goes on and on. It's full of nuisances and inconsistencies.
Atlassian's Jira and Confluence. Why?<p>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.<p>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.
WhatsApp. The desktop version has very few features, requires constant connection to a mobile phone and gets out of sync very often. It's practically irremediable if you're in a crowded wi-fi area and ethernet is the only way to get a good connection. It's also designed so no conversation is ever private despite advertising it's E2E encryption. Everyone you talk to has automatic backups enabled and they're stored unencrypted in Google Drive. And the "two step verification" password is the one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. It must be a 6-digit number that requires you to type it constantly in order to remember it. It basically assumes people are too incompetent to use password managers or simply writing a password down. Passwords you can remember are never safe.
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 <i>own</i> 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.<p>I don't know what's the status now, but Spotify India had too small a library when it was first launched. Otherwise I would have made the switch
There's this software that one of my customers use called SAP Fieldglass. Fieldglass was a separate company and sold for $1B and it might be - and I'm not exaggerating - the worst software I've ever used, pretty much ever. But the reason is interesting. It's designed as enterprise compliance software and nobody enjoys using it. The enterprise managers hate it. The vendors hate it. The contractors hate it. The finance team hates it. I can't imagine anyone enjoyed <i>writing</i> it. The UI is unintuitive and self-discovery is practically impossible. It's so bad that companies have resorted to making Youtube videos on HOW to take repetitive actions inside the tool. The system is so anti-success that part of me wonders if this is done on purpose; to delay any kind of payments to vendors / etc.<p>The best part is it doesn't _do_ anything itself. It's just a workflow system for dispatching operations to different systems and teams. It will create an invoice in an existing finance tool. It will issue a ticket to create a physical badge, etc.<p>Anyway I think that's a massive opportunity, if that's what you're looking for.
Android on my TV: (keeps crashing, internet sometimes not working, sound volume usually is wrong, etc.)<p>Nvidia GeForce Experience: I don't actually use it daily, because it doesn't work. I have not been able to start it for the last 6 months without getting a startup error. I contacted Nvidia support, reinstalled, downgraded, updated, problem is still there. The tray icon always shows when there's a new update, but I have to manually download it.<p>Google Chrome: Whenever I ALT+TAB back to Chrome it freezes for 1 second. It could be one of the extensions I use, but never found the cause. Google's own note-taking app, Google Keep, was crashing the browser on Google Chrome: <a href="https://support.google.com/docs/thread/9482426?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/docs/thread/9482426?hl=en</a>
- GitHub
+ why do we centralize issues, documents for a <i>distributed</i> version control?
+ why do we use a a closed source, walled garden to develop free software?<p>- Git
+ it's a leaky abstraction.
+ why do we need to know about the stash?
+ why is it that changing to a different branch doesn't give any visual clue, even worst it keeps the files I'm working on that are not part of the repository yet.<p>for an academic treatment of the defects in Git read: What's Wrong with Git? A Conceptual Design Analysis
S. Perez De Rosso and D. Jackson. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming & Software (Onward! 2013)
Google Chrome. (I use Chrome because all of the other browsers are even more annoying to me.)<p>Technically speaking most of the code that seriously annoys me runs <i>inside</i> my browser, but IMO it was never realistic to hope that the myriad creators of individual web pages or web sites would collectively create a good experience for me: my only hope was for the makers of browsers to make choices different from the choices they actually made.<p>Clarification: the web browser makes a pretty good framework for creating user interfaces, IMO, but it is a bad way for an end user with preferences sufficiently similar to mine to access writing on the internet. Sadly it is the <i>only</i> way to access most of the writings on the internet.<p>Written documents can be extremely simple: just a sequence of characters in some well-known encoding, but most of the actual documents of interest to me on the internet are essentially programs that require execution in what is essentially a "virtual machine" as complex as any general-purpose operating system.
ServiceNow.<p>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.
Maven, since the dependency hell and that __every__ single project requires the same ugly boilerplate and yak shaving tasks, worsened if the infamous release plugin is used.<p>Jira, because it's too slow and bloated from features you never use anyway.<p>IntelliJ, because it freezes on every 6-7 autosuggestions, on projects of 50-80K LOCs.
OSX/MacOS<p>This should be popular<p>It seems so aimed at the consumer market, with everything set up to help with integrating with Apple services.<p>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 policies? Authentication via Azure AD would be really helpful too. But the real killer is forwards/ backwards compatibility. Enterprises have long software life cycles which are respected by Windows. You can run VB6 applications from 1999 on Windows 10.<p>I get so many service desk issues for macs that are resolved by a reboot, and why don't they reboot?.. because they worry that the updates will take 20 minutes.<p>I hate MacOS. It causes me so much more aggravation than my main Windows user base. I'm currently having to work on printer deployments and MDM's (solved problems on Windows) just so marketing people can look cool in meetings.<p>I just gave one of them a Windows laptop to try and they noted how nice the PC Office apps are, and how fast their computer was (processor being 2 gen ahead of the current macbook pro)<p>We have one coder who still uses mac (he supports some old desktop apps that incidentally are all broken by Catalina), and since he mainly targets Linux nowadays he is currently looking at moving to Windows and WSL.<p>Great home computers, great for individuals, terrible for enterprise use.
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.
Slack: their web UI is ridiculously slow, and I hate how it creates this expectation that I’m online 24/7.<p>GitHub: we mainly use phabricator now at my day job (which I love love love), but I don’t really derive any joy from using this product anymore. I think great tools are also fun to use, perhaps controversially. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I find GitHub sort of a drag for some reason.<p>NodeJS: I absolutely hate dealing with node_modules. My node-based docker images are huge, and that’s after a lot of hand-held optimizations.<p>Additionally, we definitely avoid a lot of defects from using TypeScript, but its compile time is awful for large projects. I also don’t particularly like the edges: often I’ll hit odd typing inconsistencies from undocumented limitations of TS.<p>After years of working in the JS ecosystem I sort of hate the complexity in general.
* Jira - over-engineered, unnecessarily complex and utterly slow.<p>* Zoom - worst video conference product __EVER__. Can't say a single good word about it.<p>* AWS admin console - same as jira, at least it's not slow.<p>* VPNs in general annoy me beyond reason too. At this point I use a raspberry pi to connect to the vpn and I use it as an SSH access server (and tunnel respectively).
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 Mac again.
CUDA.<p>The GPU is the new Floating Point Coprocessor. (I think they are likely to be integrated on CPUs even for high performance use-cases, eventually. Although this is only happening very slowly...) It should be be programmed with vendor-neutral CPU instructions and if need be, trapped by the kernel and emulated or delegated appropriately. But all of this should be totally transparent to the user application.
I agree with the person that says "everything Atlassian", overall it's probably not the worst, but the Confluence WYSIWYG editor has to be one of the most irritating pieces of junk I've ever used. Literally nothing it does is predictable.<p>Similarly, whomever said Signal has a good point… it never manages to download MMSs for me (which isn't its fault, signal is bad in my house), but it alerts me anyways so I get a stupid "this couldn't be downloaded message" that I have to be distracted by instead of only notifying me when I move into a place where I have good enough signal to download it. It also then says "tap here to retry" but does nothing when I do so (not even an indication that it's working or that I tapped it). Aside from the annoying notifications about messages I can't even read, it tries to make you spread it to your friends and you have to manually close the stupid "Tell this person about signal" thing for <i>every</i> <i>single</i> <i>person</i> you open a chat with. I had to just go back to another SMS app and lose the ability to use their protocol.<p>The worst though for me is probably pulseaudio (still, after all these years, even though it's gotten a ton better). People knowledgeable about it love to tell me that it's obviously a configuration problem on my part, but every time I start my computer something else is wrong. Every time I plug in my midi controller and start up a synth I have no idea if it will work or not, but it also fails in a different way almost every time. If I turn on a bluetooth device, the device itself mostly connects fine, but then how the audio is routed just seems random. That one works most of the time, but not always, and if I turn the device off my audio settings sometimes go back to whatever they were before, but sometimes I randomly find I no longer have a microphone, etc. everything about it just feels bad.
Gradle. I appreciate that it is a fast build system, and a lot of it does just work. When it doesn't just work it's a nightmare. The config language is completely opaque and undiscoverable (Kotlin might fix this, but I ran out of patience to understand how Gradle works a while ago) though.<p>In many respects I think the fact there's a commercial version of it is a sign that it's lacking in the UX area.
Microsoft office. Unavoidable in a business context. Slow. Hangs. Crashes. Menu options hard to find in the constantly shape-shifting ribbon.<p>I actually have fond memories of office circa 1995 when it was a single platform app. Now it’s some cross-platform monstrosity with horrible performance.<p>So many features have been piled on top of each other that I suspect it’s impossible to debug now. Image inserted in a shape in a table and commented on? Good luck figuring out why that pauses scrolling for 5 seconds when it’s encountered. Or explaining to someone non-technical why they shouldn’t do it.
I don't use it anymore luckily, but from a couple years ago: Xcode!! Unstable, baffling interface decisions, very poor on features and the features that are there are unreliable. By far the worst IDE I've ever used.
Desktop GNU/Linux.<p>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."<p>Windows and macOS have a much sainer desktop for GUI apps to test against.
gmail, by so many orders of magnitude.. Email interface designed by people who seemingly have never tried to read email.<p>Threading is completely broken, filtering is broken, compose screen is unusable.<p>At previous companies I've had to use gmail but was able to use a sane email client via IMAP so it was almost ok (although still somewhat broken as gmail doesn't handle IMAP correctly). At current work they disable all access except via the unusable gmail web interface. So definitely gmail is the worst I have to put up with everyday.<p>jira would be a distant second, but no comparison.
I feel the other comments are really first-world problems.
As a doctor from a developed country, the worst piece of software would be my hospital's clinical portal. Not only it is painful to use, I believe the inefficiency it causes actually is detrimental to patient's care and the health economy in general.<p>I happen to know some web development, so here's a few observations from top of my head:<p>- Slow speed. Simple page changes takes at least 1 seconds, others such as viewing lab results or clinical letter takes around 3-5 seconds, but often needing repeated clicks to actually work.<p>- No form autosave & inconsistent saving behaviour. I have had to re-write discharge summaries several times because of save failure. This taught me to write on notepad/Word first and then transfer onto the portal.<p>- Many buttons are deeply nested in a navbar. Sometimes the nested buttons fail to show up at all on very small or large monitors. We have to resize the window size to find the dropdown button.<p>- Front-end CSS framework is based on YUI (discontinued since 2014). It supports IE quite well, but breaks on current Edge, Firefox and Chrome.<p>- The app tries to stop clinicians from opening more than one instance of it, but this often results in us unable to open any instance of the web app at all. Fixed with incognito mode.<p>- From the occasional server crashes, I can tell from the debug callbacks the backend is written in Java. The point here is that the debug trails are shown rather than a 500 error, which is unsettling for a sensitive data platform.<p>- Fragmented ecosystem, every part of the portal is an iframe from a different provider. Lots of inconsistencies and crashes. Even the sidebar is an iframe.<p>- Printing is a nightmare. Whatever sent to the printer often doesn't show up, but that's a story for another day.<p>I'm sure there are bigger ones I've missed. Unfortunately, the system we have is not the worst in comparison (in one rural hospital I worked at shut the web server for 3 days for a database upgrade). This makes using Outlook, Teams and other stuff a breeze in comparison - they are actually snappy and stable.<p>Do we have anyone in the community that can enlighten me on the root case?
Windows 10 Home: Ignoring all of the typical complaints about windows like bloat wear and Cortana... I would be happy is just basic things worked. For example, I often have to switch between wireless networks for my job and the wifi icon in the bottom tray just randomly disappears about 80% of the time so I have to go through the full settings menu to get to it. Also, searching for applications or documents from the search bar will also search the internet?? I could go on forever.
Slack. Hands down.<p>No issues with the actual product per se, which is quite nice. But the experience while using Slack goes bad exponentially as the team scales if certain usage guidelines are not put in place.
Surprised not to see this here, but doing data engineering against any Adobe product in creative cloud.<p>Specifically: AEM, AAM, Omniture, among others. My favorite is AAM’s “only Adobe could come up with such a stupid data integration” file format: <a href="https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/audience-manager/user-guide/implementation-integration-guides/sending-audience-data/batch-data-transfer-process/inbound-file-contents.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/audience-manager/user...</a><p>The omniture S3 feed comes as a 1004 column TSV. And for fields that capture user inputs, they don’t escape backslashes. But the escape backslashes everywhere else. I filed a ticket on this over a year ago but still no fix.
The Intel Management Engine (IME).<p>The most oppressive piece of software ever written makes suckers out
of all of us. No amount of campaigning to Intel cuts any ice. Nobody
is big enough or powerful enough to get rid of it.
Skype for Business. Everyone I've spoken to in my company has had connection, audio, or screen-sharing issues. Personally, I consistantly have issues with what I've listed plus instances where Skype just flat out refuses to launch, or it crashes, or messages are randomly dropped or fail to send, or file/image transfers that just <i></i>do not work<i></i>. It is truly baffling.<p>I noticed another comment thread about Microsoft Teams, but for me, Teams is a godsend compared to Skype for Business.
The answer is certainly Microsoft Teams but since there's already a large section on that, I'll say Visual Studio.<p>VS is largely a wonderful piece of software but sometimes just stops working in inexplicable ways. Sometimes I have to build 5 times without changing anything to get it to succeed. Sometimes my build fails but the only error in the error list is about projects that couldn't be loaded (because they failed to compile for some mystery reason). Sometimes it just randomly freezes doing basic tasks. My recent favorite is this endless string of banner errors at the top of the screen saying that there's an error with my projects that I can't dismiss or hide. VS is great, but also sometimes the worst.
At a previous company, I used Google Hangouts Chat daily. This is a business-focussed chat app that takes seconds to load any change to the UI (e.g. changing the channel you are viewing). If you are atmentioned in a channel, there's no way to find out what message thread you were atmentioned in except by scrolling up until you see the highlighted text. Every message sent to a channel other than a reply to a thread creates a new thread, and threads are displayed sorted by most recently bumped, except that your messages do not bump threads on your UI. If you wanted to avoid all these things, you could use the API to make your own client, except that you can't, because there's no API. (Technically there is an API, but because it is designed only for making bots it is not allowed to do things like read messages from a channel you are in that do not atmention you)<p>If I recall correctly, one of the company's public incident reports explicitly mentioned Google Hangouts Chat as a reason that the incident was not fixed much more quickly. I could not find this incident report when searching just now though.<p>Edit: This product is apparently now called "Google Chat"
* BMC Remedy (Oh my god. Utterly disgusting experience.)<p>* Atlassian JIRA (never really got the hang of it. Overcomplicated.)<p>* Workday (the web app is sloooooow.)<p>* MRemoteNG (The best SSH client on Windows. Also the worst. Alt + Tab navigation annoys me to hell!)<p>* iTunes on Windows (Why is it like the way it is even in 2020!?)
Microsoft Teams, hands down. It is utterly atrocious.<p>I've never seen an app that uses 40-80% CPU on a modern laptop non-stop to do not much more than ICQ/AIM/mIRC used to do in 1999 on a thing that's probably less powerful that my alarm clock.
I guess the beauty of being old is that I have experienced how software has gotten so much better.<p>It's interesting seeing negative comments about things like AWS, Git, JIRA, etc, and compare to what my career was like BEFORE those were mainstays.<p>It's cool that so many people aren't satisfied with the status quo, and will continue to push the to make things better.<p>To throw in my answer, G-Suite (as an IT Administrator).
From worst to slightly less worst: Helm, Istio, and everything Atlassian (Jira & confluence).<p>Helm: go templates aren't a robust, or even remotely sensible, way to define the configuration changes someone will need on a day to day basis for deploying applications to multiple environments. Some metaconfig language as used in kubecfg and tanka is the way to go but every single time I work with a team on kube they say something like "Helm is fine. Everyone uses helm." It's at times like this that I remember there was a period in human history where bloodletting was an established medical practice and that's the point the software engineering industry is currently at.<p>Istio: someone had a great idea, implemented it poorly, and just kept hacking at it. Obvious features are missing (setting QPS & bandwidth limits per service-to-service). Configuration is disgusting. Documentation is somehow worse than k8s' docs but, unlike k8s, the code is a mess. There's absolutely no reason why it has to be implemented as a side car, it's just a hack that baloons the resource usage of the entire system and reduces effectiveness of things like edge redis caching. There's so many obvious ways to implement similar functionality to istio except do so in a transparent way. Maesh is one example but it'd also be far simpler to implement it as a combination CNI and DNS system.<p>Atlassian: nothing further needs to be said. The problem space is so simple and somehow it was implemented so poorly but juuuuuuuuuust enough management features look pretty and it fools people into buying the software.<p>If I ever get the opportunity to retire I would love to take a crack at fixing all of these.
Mail.app on macOS. Some macOS apps are really great (Notes or Safari for example), but the average quality is poor. Mail, for example, is slow, search almost never works, etc.
Windows file explorer<p>OSX file explorer<p>Both are unavoidable and horrible.<p>Where did I save that file? What was it named? Where did that piece of software save its file without asking me? Do I have to click 10 levels deep to find a file?<p>Yes, it is a human problem, too, but maybe make things a bit easier for humans? I know johnny.decimal exists but good luck getting people to use it.<p>Pretty much any email client And email as a primary mode of business communication. Who said what in which message, then changed their mind as an aside in an unrelated email thread and where’s my source of truth about anything? People use their email like a chat sorted by most recent.<p>My mom uses zoom on android tablet and every time I call her I spend 25 min on the phone trying to guide you through to initiating or receiving a meeting<p>I paid $300 for capture one but can’t use it because I can’t figure out where it puts my images and why.
Atlassian's Confluence (Cloud). A showcase for the decline in web based software forced by the move to make everything a SPA. A terrible new editor experience. Slow JavaScript heavy page loads. No persisted markup editing.
Trakcare [0] electronic medical record system.<p>As far as I can tell this is a demo EMS from Intersystems, they provide Cache [1] to companies developing <i>real</i> EMS with modern user interfaces. They don't sell this product in the USA (so not to upset their customers), but have dumped it on the rest of the English speaking world.<p>I suspect here is some sort of NDA with those unfortunate Hospitals taking this pile of stinking £%^£" as I have never found a user group or trustworthy review.<p>I get to use it at ground level (talk about poor UI), at management level (no coherent db integrity, very poor reporting) and have seen a complete inability to reconfigure the system to cope with COVID.<p>When ever we see demos for new clinical system I always ask "Would those coding this system accept this level of quality/usability in their daily software tools?". The marketing guys look at me like I'm from another planet.<p>I know "you get what you pay for", but for something hundreds of thousands of Hospital staff will be using for patient care (we don't bill in the UK), there should be a floor below which no company should offer half-baked dangerous products. Trakcare is in the sub-basement.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.intersystems.com/au/products/trakcare/" rel="nofollow">https://www.intersystems.com/au/products/trakcare/</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://www.intersystems.com/products/cache/" rel="nofollow">https://www.intersystems.com/products/cache/</a>
Google Chat (enterprise G Suite offering):<p>- No way to set status (essential in current remote work situation)<p>- No way to reorder the rooms<p>- No nested comments.<p>- Cannot mark conversation unread or have some way to remember to come back to the conversation later.<p>- If you lose your notification you are lost. Cannot figure out which room you were tagged in.<p>- Cannot message to self. This is not a big problem but a good to have.
Confluence by Atlassian.
It is very slow, it gets stuck with bigger documents, or has no useful editor tools (eg marker) and it constantly had issues and bugs. Sincerely Jira is another piece of crap.
GnuPG<p>I'm surprised that it hasn't come up, yet.
But it's CLI interface as well as it's data model are truly archaic. It's near impossible to properly invoke from other programs or scripts and most users don't even understand half of it's "web of trust" concepts.<p>This is especially bad since small mistakes can easily break your security model.<p>I don't want to rewrite GnuPG, I want a fresh start without all the cruft.
Jenkins.<p>Has a UI that was cool when the Internet was first switched on. They made Jenkins Blue, to be fair, but for all that it eats an ungodly amount of memory (at least when I was using it, dunno if that's changed).<p>Needing to configure Jenkins to work with other services means I won't be productive for a while; this yak has a hell lot of fur. I have to write extremely detailed notes for myself on what and where to click just so I can do something again (i.e., if something breaks and I need to reconfigure/migrate/etc.).<p>There was this scene in HBO's Silicon Valley S1, in that episode where they hired this leet hacker kid who turned out to be no more than a skiddie. The kid broke their work and Richard Hendricks had to fix everything and the scene where everything got fixed featured Richard watching his Jenkins build go green. I find it very amusing that to achieve verisimilitude, they had to eschew years of Hollywood "hacker" portrayal, and have Richard stare at the iconically ugly UI of Jenkins. Real life can be cooler than Jenkins but other tools just won't feel legitimate, no?
OneDrive for Business. You can't move folders with more than 5000 files in it (including subfolders). This is by design. The Windows 10 app is atrocious. It fails more often that not. It's built on top of SharePoint, which brings a lot of confusing features and configurations that makes no sense to someone just looking for a way to store the company's files.
Cmsynergy<p>The worst version control software known to man.<p>It is a bloated IBM tool from the 90s, takes 10 minutes copy a repo that would take git 5 seconds. It has a lock modify unlock paradigm, so if your coworker forgets about a file they were working on and they get promoted, you can forget about working on your project ever again.<p>The paradigms are backwards. The project doesn’t branch, the files do. You make your commits before you do any work.<p>It’s slowly being phased out at my company, but it can’t seem to die fast enough. A lot of people have built their careers on this tool so it’s hard to kill.
MS Office and it’s UI inconsistencies (where’s the button I need?). While Word and PowerPoint technically have good tools for managing styles, the interfaces steer users to use manual tweaking to the point where I don’t think I’ve ever seen a clean document. And after a few copies and pastes between documents, you now have 100 styles that will never be managed again.<p>Shared folders are a nightmare for version control, share point is inconvenient and slow. One Drive works OK and finally allows collaboration. Azure is good for some other use case (probably, never used it). So for a typical company, MS should guide companies to transition to use OneDrive and keep things in one system? No, single sign on, IT gets sold on how easy it is to manage all tools, everyone gets every tool. And for good measure everyone gets teams, surprise you’re using share point even if you don’t know it and now all your confusing v2_final files are spread out in 5 places.
cmd.exe on Windows - trully horrible shell.<p>bash on *nix - less horrible then cmd.exe but still trurlly horrible anyway.<p>I want to kill myself any time I enter any of those. PowerShell cross platform made all my cells rejoice.
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.
Windows, usability is worse than MacOS, installing software is more complex than Android and iOS, code is worse than any flavor of Linux but still somehow it is default for most people with a 9x5 job.
Skype. Ever since Microsoft made it that it no longer saves your chats locally, search has become so unusable it's really quite amazing how awful it is. Whenever I need to search text in a thread it does so in the cloud??? And it never finds anything. There are times when I literally have had to manually scroll back several months back in a thread to find what I was looking for. I absolutely hate it.
Bash/POSIX shell. It's necessary because it's the standard, and you can't expect computers to have a better shell by default. It's good enough for simple things that scripts for it grow complex enough to warrant something better. It's only bearable because it's familiar after years of experience.<p>It's terrible because it does everything to make it hard to write scripts. Three syntaxes for using variables, and only one will not cause breakage. Stringly typed. Killer spaces when looping. Arcane syntax for conditionals, where despite 10 years of coding I can't write a simple if/else without looking at references.<p>And it's widespread enough that it won't die.
Outlook for Mac.<p>The menu options are a mix of redundant 'possibilities' from where you find things, 'icons' that don't seem to be obvious in what they represent, the GAL is broken (w/ Office 360 cloud), the Outlook connectivity becomes disabled when I disconnect from VPN and I have to click on "Send/Receive" under I think "Tools" once to re-enable it, the list goes on.<p>Over 15 years ago a senior dev I worked with walked up to our (Sys Admin) communal bookshelf, and noticed a book called Outlook Annoyances. He remarked, "Hm. That looks like it's way too short of a book", something I've found hilarious to think about ever since.
Slack. It has become the ultimate annoying piece of software that I feel I always need to check and keep an eye on. There is an untold expectation to always be online. It's using the same mechanism as Facebook to keep you hooked with dopamine.
Either Adobe Target or VWO. Both have their upsides sure, but both are also an absolute quagmire of terrible design decisions that aren't consistent in the slightest, and that are prone to break an A/B test if you even look at them wrong.<p>In Target's case, this means stuff like 'install a browser extension when our software doesn't work, so it can load the code that browser security settings will often block', and 'log in via an Incognito window if the editor doesn't work properly, since some setting is now incompatible with your current API version and the interface to disable said setting breaks along with the entire editor'.
Sas hands down. And it isn’t just that The software is bad. It’s terrible, and seems to train users into bad programming habits. But what makes it the worst is the ecosystem around it.<p>For example the help and forum posts are just agonizing. They are verbose to the extreme, Often including paragraphs on what the author was thinking the first time they encounter the problem, and manage to sound patronizing and naive at the same time.<p>The official docs and forums being naive and patronizing makes it annoying to find the right syntax, as it’s not my primary language. But Every simple thing requiring a 13 page white paper full of irrelevant digressions makes sas agonizing to use.
Epic EMR (electronic charting/medical software)...
-Ubiquitous defiance of UI conventions.
-Inconsistent behavior of buttons, forms, etc
-Irrationally composed deeply nested menus.
-Very slow log in via Citrix, and you have to log in many times per day.
-Terrible distraction from providing care.
-Was really painful during COVID.
Whatever the OS I am using is, be it macOS, Windows, or Linux.<p>It always feels like I'm working against the OS now that the OS philosophy has shifted to being all things to all people.<p>If it's Windows or macOS, it wants to advertise to me, or prevent me from launching certain apps or features.<p>If it's Linux, it's trying to shift me into some ill-thought out use pattern. This is fixable, but at a significant time cost customizing things. Actually, I'm being unfair to Linux, environments like XFCE pretty much stay out of your way. But I don't like where the mainstream DEs are going.
There's a lot of essential software that I would improve, but I wouldn't replace or rewrite:<p>- Nautilus. Serious usability/UX problems.<p>- Audio in linux. Ubuntu often selects the wrong audio devices (microphone, headphones, speakers)<p>- Linux sleep/hibernation. System hangs are common.<p>- GRUB. The interface is dated, why is it so ugly?
That would be German mobile banking apps (websites are just slightly better).<p>My current bank just wrapped a mobile website in Android app. Logging-in with a fingerprint, though supported, takes 3 or 4 attempts.<p>The app is also very slow and fails miserably on slow mobile connection (very common in Germany).<p>Finally the app doesn't do the 2FA feature, it's offered by another, even worse app from the same bank. They're too cheap to offer SMS option.<p>The 2FA app can only be registered using snail mail confirmation.
Emacs.<p>I'm responding to the prompt in the OP, not the title.<p>> What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?<p>Emacs is the most essential piece of software in my workflow. It's probably not the worst, but it's the one where I see the most room for improvement. I lean heavily on org-mode for tracking what I'm working on, it's like my command center. I keep two emacs frames open at all times, one dedicated to org-mode.<p>Supported by an assortment of magical packages like helm, projectile and magit, I write code and anything else more efficiently than any other editor I've used. I was a vim user for ~5 years, and now use evil mode for modal editing in emacs.<p>So yeah, my opinion is that emacs is the best editor out there. But honestly it takes too much time to configure and maintain. I spend that time, because I don't feel like taking the productivity hit that I would by switching to another editor, but I wish I didn't have to.<p>I have a vision for a SaaS app that hosts my emacs config and provides me a nice graphical, discoverable interface for managing my configuration. It would have simple, intuitive flows for setting up the essential packages. Like maybe I could scroll through a list of the most popular packages (helm, projectile, hydra, magit, etc), and click to install.<p>The current state of the art in managing emacs config is googling the name of the package you are trying to configure, and trying to find someone's blog or github from which to copy/paste code from. There has to be a better way.
Bank apps (eg. HSBC's consumer app). For the most part they are buggy, crashy, slow, lacking in features, and fail to do useful things (like support copy paste, export transactions to CSV, email transaction, etc)
Git. The UX and design is broken af, nothing work, noone get it.<p>AWS. I don't know where to begin. Nothing make sense. Nothing works.<p>Docker. This thing is basically backward at every step. We should have never packaged different things on linux as a single "container". It does not work that way and that has created more pain than solve anything.<p>K8s: same
Go: same<p>Venv. Goddamnit this never worked well and same as git, noone gets it.
Twitter iphone app.<p>The home screen stream is this weird mix of people you follow, suggested streams, things your followed people liked and ads.<p>Each swipe down involves "OK I'm looking at something here it's a surprise...what is it..an ad? someone I follow? Some other gibberish?".<p>I can totally understand why people just delete the app. It's worse than FB imo - which is setting the bar really high already
Peoplesoft Financials.<p>I travel once a quarter on average for work. I probably spend about 6 hours on vouchers afterward, between account resets, etc. My employers rules are pretty brutal, but the system is impossible.
IOS Podcast App. Its absolutely terrible. Stops playing in the middle of episodes, forgets what episode it is playing, episodes disappear, and it throws up a spinning wheel again and again...
Mac Finder<p>- It hangs at least every other day -- the pinwheel of death.<p>- It sorts files in some sort of weird non-alphanumeric order.<p>- There's no way to cut and paste a set of files. You have to copy them TWICE, once to an intermediate destination, then again to your endpoint.<p>- Right mousing on a file takes WAY too long to pop up a list of appropriate apps. This lookup should take a second at most. Adding a new app or removing an old one should update of the hash for affected files IMMEDIATELY when added and never again. This idiot check should NEVER occur on user time every time you right mouse.<p>- Finder should be rejiggered to publish a simple API so anyone can readily access all its constituent services. That way it'd be trivial for any power user to easily clone, reorganize, revise, and extend any/all of this obsolete malfunction-riddled 35 year old app, bringing the integration and performance of those services into the current century.<p>Finder has long overstayed its welcome.
Probably Linux. I don't understand how people put up with things like PulseAudio. If I use Windows, the audio sinks behave like I expect them to. They use the device I expect them to. They don't mysteriously set the volume to some bizarre level that has nothing to do with anything when I start a new program, or change the video I'm watching on YouTube, or open a new video in VLC. Whenever I use any audio-capable application, it's like I'm rolling dice as to which device it'll choose to use and what volume it thinks I want it to be at, and none of it has anything to do with previous usage or what I want it to do. What is this crap? Also, if you want to configure <i>anything</i>, have fun trying to figure out what magical command-line incantations will do what you want it to do. Because the GUI tools are all utter crap and don't do anything useful.
Most frustrating first:<p><pre><code> 01) Atlassian entirely.
nearly broekn, far from elegant and far too many times broken.
02) Slack. using it since communication is a must.
Yet, noisy, using search too many times (left menu poor performace)
03) npm. oh lord. miss the old plain vanilla Javascript days.</code></pre>
Waves MaxAudio Pro, a thousand times over. It comes preinstalled on Dell XPS laptops. It is used to control the combo audio jack, and it is used to control the speakers. Without it the speakers on windows are quiet and sounds like tin cans.<p>When you plug in a headset, after a 4 second pause, it pops up a dialog asking what type of device you connected. After the dialog you have another 4 seconds pause while it mounts the device. An 8 second wait while an incoming call is waiting is an eternity.<p>And god forbid you accidentally unplug your audio device in a call, it goes to the internal mic, and after restoring the device, MaxXAudio wont pop up the dialog until you leave the call.<p>It is so bad, my next laptop will not be another XPS, even though nearly everything else is great about it.
Kodi on Raspberry Pi: slow loading menu, random hangs & crashes, getting bluetooth LE working was a adventure, BLE remote key presses are only recognized after pressing them several times when waking up, SMB file access not reliable (mounting a smb drive and then accessing it works much better), plugins are flaky at best (youtube needs api keys, youtube cast with extra plugin works mostly (when it does not crash), amazon video stutters on SD video, satellite TV is much less reliable than VLC on Windows)<p>I'm still using it because the alternatives come with their own drawbacks (usually high price but still having enough quirks).
I feel like I should post here as a sort of public service announcement.<p>If anyone reading this is considering trying or moving to HubSpot, I urge you to take our experience as a warning and seriously reconsider.<p>We moved to their sales CRM 2 years ago and have been filled with remorse ever since.<p>It’s hands down the most poorly thought out software package I’ve ever had the misfortune of using.<p>Aside from our sales performance taking a nosedive, it’s painful to use in a multitude of ways, and everywhere you turn is frustration, inefficiencies and dead ends.<p>Such was the frequency of our frustration with nearly all aspects of HubSpot, the phrase “fucking HubSpot” even became a meme in our office.<p>Run. Don’t look back.
1Password.<p>Core of the product hasn't seen any noticeable features in a while.<p>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.<p>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.
Office 365.<p>Word processors and spreadsheets shouldn't be rocket science, but the updater seems to have been designed by Satan's "I wrote some Python in school once" nephew [1], and many versions [2] seem to have rather obvious UI bugs.<p>Word still doesn't do some very basic things it should, and it probably never will now.<p>[1] Updated recently. Still bad, but not quite as bad. The really hilarious part is that I also have updaters for various music packages from Arturia, NI, and so on, and <i>all</i> of them are far more streamlined and professional.<p>[2] The number does seem to be decreasing. But it's still higher than it should be.
Whatsapp, absolutely. Every single night it does a forced backup of everything that I do not want and hangs for about 10 minutes.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Awful.
Anything with the word "Enterprise" in its name or description. Any "Enterprise" search system will be useless or unusable [0]. Any "Enterprise" file/document management system will be a nightmare in any possible way.<p>[0] I once had a page-long note file on literally <i>how to search for a document by title</i> in $HUGECO's search application. Because it took me 3 hours to figure it out the first time. Not exaggerating. It would probably be easier to operate a DNA editing machine than this thing.
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 that much "different" pieces of software).
Slack. I've got two or three people DM'ing me, threads going in more than one channel, and four other channel's @here'ing me. So I mute all the channels except for when I'm directly @'d, but why isn't that the damn default. I can't view more than one conversation at a time because the stupid client is a single window that doesn't even have tabs.<p>When I paste a link, I don't want it to attach what's at the link because that takes up like half the window.<p>Lately the client has tried to auto-format things. Bulleted lists. Code. When I type ''' to start a code block, sometimes Slack automatically terminates the code block for me and sends my message before I'm done and sometimes not. I think you continue bulleted lists with the return key but code blocks with ctrl-return, I can't remember, it seems inconsistent though.<p>Somehow the Slack client doesn't register for links to my company's slack domain so links to channels end up opening in my default browser then bouncing back to the client.<p>God I hate Slack so fucking much.<p>I want my IRC client back.<p>Jira's not great either but I've never used a bug tracker that didn't suck in one way or another and it doesn't suck any better or worse than others. At least I can open issues in more than one browser window/tab.
Toggl the time tracker somehow went to complete shit in terms of performance. Its workflow is great, the Mac app worked splendidly until the redesign of a couple years ago. The redesign changed nothing drastically, pretty much only polished things, but somehow everything became much slower and gets slower still. Doing <i>any single change</i> requires you to wait. It feels like they do synchronous network requests on every action (which they quite possibly do, judging by the interaction with the mobile client). Sometimes CPU usage spins up too, for good measure. Even completion in text-dropdowns is hella laggy. Just switching to the app is often ‘app is not responding’ territory.<p>It's productivity software that I need to touch every half-hour or so. Productivity software has to be <i>snappy</i>. Toggl is the opposite of snappy now.<p>On top of that, the app forcibly updates itself and has no option to disable that—while I'm using Homebrew for all other updates. The Android app is also half-baked compared to the Mac one, which is no surprise by this point.<p>Toggl's workflow fit me almost like a glove: no automagic guesswork, just manual entry and tracking of me being AFK. No alternative app has that same model, from what I've seen, and/or the interfaces are meh.<p>Somewhat ironically, Toggl's client apps are open-source and I've cloned the desktop one right after seeing the redesign. But fiddling with them would likely require coming up with my own storage method. I might as well redo the app in Lua with Qt or whatnot, as Lua is hella fast—but the state of GUI libs for non-native languages fills me with endless dread.
`git`. I mean, its so popular that <i>you get used to it eventually</i> but the commands never make sense or map well to the mental model of what you're doing. And "getting used to it" is a seriously low bar for software IMHO.
(Question for OP)<p>Just curious:<p>Were you inspired to ask this question by the recent CoRecursive Podcast interview with Jim Blandy (<a href="https://corecursive.com/054-software-that-doesnt-suck/" rel="nofollow">https://corecursive.com/054-software-that-doesnt-suck/</a>) in which he talks about how the motivation to design a CVS replacement come from the question "What's the worst software that you use every day?"
Webflow. The menus go 10 levels deep to interact with an element. As a dev, even I can't understand it. Raw HTML is better than their menu-driven WYSIWYG
iTunes because it adds indirection I don't want and yet somehow is required for a variety of tasks I'd rather do from my file system or browser.
Literally any electronic medical record system ever built.<p>HUNDREDS of different systems on the market. Some with maybe a handful of doctor's offices using a particular system.<p>Worst UIs you could ever imagine. Limited interoperability.<p>In even well-established systems with large numbers of installs you'll see multiple bugs in production code that don't get fixed.<p>Switching costs are essentially infinity so doctors get locked into a system no matter how bad it is.
I accidentally bought a gaming laptop that can't run Linux, so I'm stuck with Windows 10 exclusively. Although it really isn't that bad now.<p>My workplace uses SmartCAM, an ancient CAM package for manufacturing. It's probably not that bad, but I couldn't wrap my head around it compared to other CAM software. It turns solid geometry into low-poly mesh, and nothing is intuitive like Autodesk HSM.
for me it's phpmyadmin. I guess I should just find another tool that does the same, but I don't use it that much, just for quickly changing things around when building prototypes or just looking at things. I've been using it for over a decade and 10 years ago, I loved it. now I hate it. it's inexplicably slow when doing nothing at all, it uses frames for the sidebar so your list of tables goes out of sync constantly (presumably so it doesn't have to reload all dbs/tables on every request, but then why is it still so slow? it takes like 10 seconds to load sometimes when I'm not even doing anything with any data involved). every change they make to the interface makes it worse and more cumbersome to use. the default settings paginate your sidebar after like 40 tables or something ridiculously low. so you have to wait for the slow-ass frame based sidebar to load 3 times before the table you wanted to look at is even in your list. you can change it by modifying some php file somewhere, but it didn't use to have this problem.
I worked at a company that made financial planning software called Xplan. What a user could see on screen for their client was a combination of
<i>over 1k user capability controls
</i>users group membership, which was hierarchical so you used your parent group settings of your primary group unless they were overridden (primary group.. yes you could be in any and all groups, all with their own settings throughout)
<i>clients group membership
</i>page settings, with every page AND field showing controlled by conditional rules that could be based on any of the thousands of fields of the current user or client
<i>country set for user
</i>module allowed product lists that could be applied at user, group or global level, and group hierarchy applied<p>Client portal could display information using the above rules, and more rules<p>Thousands of site settings were in an admin area which was grouped by major module, or just placed on which page the developer picked at the time (some pages dedicated to a couple of settings, other general ones full of unrelated random settings)
Apple Xcode. Not because it is bad-bad or worst. Just because all other software I use is better. Firefox, Things, Emacs, etc.
Perhaps, this is what is happen when there are no alternatives. I know about AppCode from JetBrains, but in many cases (like, build system, dependency management, etc.) it behaves just like a wrapper on top of the Xcode or requires to launch Xcode itself.
Firebird, and by extension the industry specific application which utilizes it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>File itself wont update if there is any live connection.<p>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.<p>And then there is firebird documentation, which is horrible, and fragmented.<p>I could rewrite that piece of shit, and design a better database but we won't ever compete with that company for political reasons.
1. Gimp (not natural to use it, so UX/UI sucks)<p>2. Freecad (difficult, weird UI)<p>3. WordPress+WooCommerce (they charge you for as basic as simple shipment tracking plugin)
Managed Workplace. It is an RMM tool so it does monitoring, automation, and facilitates remote access to client environments.<p>- Loading up the client list takes forever ~15 seconds<p>- Loading up the asset list for a given client takes even longer.<p>- Remote access is hidden behind a 2 layer context menu<p>- All URLs are dynamic so you cannot bookmark your favorite assets / jump boxes. I use a selenium script to automate the page navigation because it can take ~5 minutes to get to an asset by name due to a combination of needing too many page loads and not being able to just start from the search page.<p>- Terminal experience is way worse than putty. Output formatting is always jacked up and a command takes ~5 seconds to return output.<p>- RDP all goes through a relay and your connections will just die occasionally.<p>- 90% of my work interacts with it in some way.<p>BUT it makes pretty reports for management so we are stuck with it. I demo'd some alternatives like apache guacamole or remote desktop services but the consensus was that we didn't want to take on the risk + we are already paying for a product that "works".
MS Excel.<p>It can give you nice plot results, but to get there you need to struggle with the UI. The UI for adding data series is a pain as while there is a editable text indicator indicating cell ranges for the data, typing on that indicator activates cell selection on the background that also modifies the text as you type.<p>It is a nightmare if you have many Y-data sharing the same X-axis. The methods for bringing out dialogs also rely on being able to click parts of the chart, which is largely hit or miss, especially if you have dense superposed data.<p>Scroll position changes when I select data (using several methods) so new charts are often created at the bottom of the long spreadsheet and I have to manually bring it to a more sensible higher position.<p>Well, I might be wrong for using Excel in the first place. But I use it for the same reason I use MS Paint instead of Gimp. Sometimes you just need something quick and familiar. And for plotting, the alternatives seem to require some learning.<p>I'm recently lookeing at SciDavis and hope this solves my nightmares.
The new google chat<p>No new user, and rarely an experienced one, starts a new thread. Every reply just builds on the original.<p>All this even when the new thread button is _right in front of you_. But the design is so terrible I don’t blame people for missing it.<p>(On a separate note, I see no Apple products in main threads. I see a few google ones, Microsoft, Amazon (AWS) and Facebook (workplace))
Modelsim<p>I would hate to rewrite it but I wish someone would. It has the worst and buggiest UI of anything I've ever used. Everything looks incredibly dated, and while the backend (the useful bit) does what it's supposed to (though very slowly unless you're paying for the big boy license) it's just a horrific place to be.<p>Coming home from work and working on my own stuff with the tools I like rather than have to use is like a breath of fresh air.<p>Vivado is also notoriously a bit of a bloated and buggy pig. For hardware simulation, Active HDL is probably the least worst thing that I've used that has all the features. But for just doing simple simulations without all the bells and whistles, GHDL is by far and away the best experience, and it's the free one.<p><a href="https://github.com/ghdl/ghdl" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ghdl/ghdl</a>
... and why is it Lotus Notes?
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3ilzey/were_a_bunch_of_developers_from_ibm_ask_us/cuhp4ej/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3ilzey/were_a_bunch_o...</a>
All of my "worst" softwares that I use daily have alternatives that are equally as bad if not worse IMO or will be a huge pain to switch to, so I still "love" them by comparison.<p>Lastpass + Authy - main frustration is helping wife use them - her usage is less frequent so she needs help each time. Also they don't sync reliably so adding new accounts can be painful.<p>Anything that starts automatically on boot by default, slow to launch, or has a separate "installer/updater" that is constantly annoying me (looking at you Adobe everything)<p>Alexa - only listens to me; doesn't cutoff quickly enough when someone tries to issue a new/improved command or dismiss a response<p>So many posts on here about X not working on Y system where Y is not a money maker for X. Yes, you are an afterthought.
I work as a control systems engineer and ClearSCADA is my biggest pain point.<p>Crashes all the time on both the front and back end. Bloated mess of user displays that you have to drag and drop elements on by hand. Oh and let's not forget that I'm usually interacting over a slow RDP connection.
The software I run every day on my laptop is ok (Firefox, thunderbird, emacs, terminal, Ubuntu in general) so it must be something on my phone. Probably the OS because the phone is as good as my previous laptop but Google limits what it can do, more and more with each release. And yet any alternative I can think about is worse. Example: iOS is even more locked up and a Linux phone won't run some apps I must have so I'll end up with two phones.<p>Aha! I was about to submit the comment and it came to me that my laptop's nvidia proprietary device + linux kernel combo is (let's be kind) under optimal (still better than the open source driver.) The main point: 40 Hz refresh rate with Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04. It was 60 Hz with 16.04 and earlier.
KMail. It hangs so frequently that I have a shortcut-key combination to kill -9 akonadi (ctrl+alt+k), which then respawns and fetches mail again.<p>At the end of every startup it used to present a dialog 'Mail has encountered a fatal error and will now close'. If you clicked 'OK' the programme would terminate.<p>Fortunately the dialog wasn't modal, so you could carefully tuck it into an unused corner of the screen and continue as normal. Eventually I did some googling and deleted ~/.local/share/local-mail/templates which got rid of it (but I lost the templates)<p>That said, I still find the UI much less fiddly than gmail, which is why I use both.<p>In fact I'm writing this comment while I wait for Kmail to re-load it's mailbox, so I can reply to an email.
Pocket ( <a href="https://getpocket.com/" rel="nofollow">https://getpocket.com/</a> ). It’s really bad. Been using it for years and it’s always been broken. Crashes often, narration sometimes works most of the time it doesn’t, other times it works if you force stop the app and restart it. It’s very slow too. I depend on for my long daily commutes and I only stick to it because InstaPaper is also very broken and there is no reasonable way to move the stories from pocket to instapaper. I am convinced the people who build it never really use it for those issues are otherwise trivial to encounter and I would think trivia to fix as well. I hope someone will build a better such app and make them irrelevant.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Adobe Acrobat here; maybe techies view/edit their pdfs in ed.<p>I have to admit that I don't use it every day--I have PDF-XChange Editor on my home computer (and a couple other PDF viewers), but when I do have to use it, I hate it. The UI has gone through lots of changes in the past few years, and each time it's worse. Most everything is icon-based--tsort of like Microsoft's Ribbon, except these icons are randomly displayed above, or to one side of, the doc you're working with, leaving little room for that doc to be displayed. You can get a menu, but its primary use seems to be to bring up rows or columns of icons. And the icons are both large and ugly (and often indecipherable).
Web browser. It is hands down the most insidious. Complexity by default, no alternative. No debate.<p>What is that website "browse happy" or some such? All due respect, I simply cannot agree. I am not happy with those recommendations. Web should be friendly to all user agents.
Apple's XCode. In particular its configuration (project and environment) features. Yet, making distributions and the whole signature magic is, ummm, something. Seems like it is in principle impossible to generate and build native UI project outside of XCode...
On every workday: Microsoft Teams. When trying to make a link, it overwrites the clipboard. When formatting text in the text box, it sometimes randomly moves the cursor into the previous block.<p>Unfortunately the company has decided to use it and my colleages have as well.
It used to be Jira. Thankfully my current company doesn't use it. Now it's probably DBeaver, which is hard to complain about because it's free and full-featured, but it has one of the worst user experiences I've ever encountered.
Dragon Pro, voice recognition software. Awful UI, known bugs that never get fixed, incompatible with critical applications like web browsers. Why? It's my understanding that they have no real competition. If you need to "drive" your computer with your voice, Dragon is all there is. In fact, it is pretty limited without the addition of Voice Computer, which allows you to command Windows to do certain things, like switch programs, etc.<p>Dragon is so important to my workflow, while so shitty a program, that I would pay three or four times its cost for a competing product that actually worked well.
Outlook for the search and threads. The search is attrocious, the well known Ctrl-F means "forward" (why, but why?) and the search does not highlight the result in the mail, good luck finding it in a 1000 lines email thread.<p>Email threads are not there; "Find related" works, but it does not help organize emails, while long emails with embedded history of other 20-30 messages and no capability to identify, expand/colapse messages are a nightmare.<p>And the calendar is useful, but a black box. My calendar has about 0.5 GB and I have no idea what is taking up all that space and how to reduce it.
This was back around 2005, so I imagine the software has improved since then, but... Sonic Scenarist for DVD authoring.<p>The thing we hated most about it apart from the slowness (computers were slower back then too, but anyway) was that it auto-saved after every action and had <i>no undo</i>. If there was an option to turn this off, we couldn't find it.<p>It was all too easy to select a bunch of items and accidentally drag them to the wrong place, and so we ended up just making a backup copy of the project file from time to time, and before attempting any type of operation that might mess up.
Cisco Contact Center Express. This is a pure disaster, this damn thing is full of hilarious bugs that exist there for many years through many major versions.<p>One of examples: if you click 2 (or more) links in its web interface and open the links in new tabs, the content of these tabs will be a mix of content from the links you just clicked. It’s not very obvious and it’s very easy to change something in the tab A, thinking that you’re changing the call center configuration for application A, but in fact you’re changing a random piece from site B or C.<p>Cisco doesn’t care much about it.
The new MacOS. When WiFi is active it needs seconds (!) until apps like VLC open. Normally this just takes miliseconds.<p>It slowly (haha) steels time from me every day and I was never so frustrated using a computer.
Between Confluence, Salesforce, Azure portal, and Addepar, I am starting to wonder if I am the one that is insane in expecting web pages to load in under seven to ten seconds.<p>Typing in Asana is painful as well.
tmux. I mean, I know it's better than screen, but I'm a user of emacs for 25 years, and I still can't get used to the tmux keymapping. I'm reluctant to customize them because I want my fingers to do the right thing on an unfamiliar system. And so many of the defaults are just bad, like constantly renaming windows when you run commands (without making a config file change). Even the command line arguments are different for the same parameter depending on which sub-command you're using.
MySQL workbench. It's slow, buggy and hangs again and again. I have to force close it multiple times everyday because it freezes so often. Same experience on MacOS and Ubuntu.
Not many marketers perhaps in this thread, so here's mine.<p>Dynamics 365: millions of unwanted features that bloats the system. Very complex where it shouldn't be, poor search features... Could go on and on. On par with Salesforce in my opinion.<p>Marketo: entreprise software that was probably good 10 years ago. Nothing has changed since then. UX/UI is shameful. Landing page builder is just a joke. Not being able to write custom objects from a form defeats the purpose of using an advanced tool like this.<p>Also... Concur?
Messages app on iOS is the most frustrating app I have to use often and Apple doesn't allow any alternative as well. There is no way to star/pin certain messages in it. It doesn't allow copy-pasting partial text in a message. Results of searched query are often not what I am looking for. Finding historical messages in some date range takes minutes.<p>Many other Apple-built apps and products (especially those that cannot have any 3rd-party alternatives) are horrible to use.
This really applies to every CAD software I've used, but Solidworks is an overly heavy, unstable piece of crap that drives me absolutely nuts every day I have to use it.
I’m not sure it’s the worst but I continually find myself frustrated by how sluggish slack feels.<p>Even with the new UI it still seems strange that the site is so slow vs others I have to use.
I recall reading the Subversion architectural chapter in Beautiful Code. In fact it's probably the only chapter that stuck with me (there's another IIRC but I can't recall which. My brain didn't make an association to the book).<p>One of my design mental exercises is to try to figure out if you could tweak the svn architecture into a DVCS, preserving the superior subtree support. I think it could have been, it's just that theory and execution diverged.
ConsoleZ on Windows that I use with Cygwin, being on one hand the best terminal app for Windows, on the other there were things that were driving me insane. The main project seems to be sort of abandoned, so I eventually fixed them myself[1].<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/youurayy/console/releases/tag/1.19.0-personal" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/youurayy/console/releases/tag/1.19.0-pers...</a>
I'd say basically half the software I use on a fairly regular basis is usually pretty much garbage. Corsair Link is a clunky, laggy mess. It takes like 10 seconds to open it, every single time, even if it's running in the background. I have yet to use good software for "peripherals". Google home devices are cool when they work, but I've gotten frustrated with them too many times that I barely use them. I could go on.
Jira. How can so simple a concept be implemented with so many unnecessary lines of code and run so slowly? Despite (because of?) several major redesigns, that is.
Outlook's webapp email client. Mandatory(1) at work. No IMAP access.<p>I truly can't think of a single positive aspect of this absolute garbage piece of software. It's so mindnumbingly bad that most of us just avoid email whenever possible, even if it means going to physically seek out a person who may not even be available.<p>(1) The actual Outlook client is an option if you're willing to forego root on your computer. To me that's far worse.
In summary:<p>Docker: crash o plenty
Service now (bloated forms system on .net or slower)
Teams - UI, no sizing of window, spyware (look it up)
One Drive/ SharePoint (ugh - group of us said we would take pay cut to not use)
Finder - anything but. (How is a file in past 30 days and not recent that I made 5 seconds ago?)
Photoshop? Nobody mentioned here. Adobe anything...
OSX Mail - particularly Big Sure flavor
Itunes Connect
SAP Concur
There are no words to describe how much I hate JIRA. Terrible UX & slow as hell. The mere thought of browsing for my next ticket in JIRA gives me seizure.
Airflow. Hard coupling to their own ecosystem, buggy as hell, and fully tied into Python's terrible dependency management, ensuring you will fail but only after you build an entire ecosystem onto it and will face a massive challenge moving away from it.<p>Running it in a kubernetes cluster is basically like holding a marathon in a minefield. You know someone's gonna die, you just don't know when.
AWS console set of web pages ... granted any big shop most certainly automates all their commands so rarely if ever needs to use that site ... evidently AWS console is a victim of its own success in continuing to have a 1990's look and feel ... yet being such a cash cow AWS should launch an entire re-write ... the underlying SDK and cli are great and they deserve a better UI
Bad software usually gets out of my workflow quickly as a software engineer. Postman's workflow is really confusing to me however.<p>Also why bad software exists: <a href="https://twitter.com/jaukia/status/1114044716616753152/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jaukia/status/1114044716616753152/photo/...</a>
I like FreeCAD but it keeps crashing, slow operations freeze the UI and by slow I mean for up to a minute, it's a bit ugly, failing operations usually just give you a cryptic error message when you apply an operation. If you can get used to the quirks it's a pretty nice tool. I've used worse software but I don't use truly bad software every day.
The software that powers almost every appliance or device on the "Internet of Things" that I've ever used.<p>The manufacturers of those appliances and devices really do NOT know how to develop usable, secure software.<p>See <a href="https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en</a> for egregious examples.
Slack - for being unstable (crashes frequently). We have very little noise, so it is only an interruption when somebody actively needs to interrupt me.<p>Skype - an absolute trainwreck of instability and messages not syncing between devices. Always needs to update - and never improves. I only use it because it is still the de-factor standard for a lot of poeple.
PTC (formerly MKS) Integrity<p>It's a "product lifecycle management" that is basically version control plus issues list tracker. It has horrendous 80-90s-era interface and require clicking for every possible steps. Formatting always involves MS Word style rich-text button with sans-serif font.<p>Worst: it has to stay Online just to do version control.
Kijiji. Ebay owned Canadian classifieds site that is absolutely horrid experience with hundreds of http request and a bazillion ads loading on 1995 web servers. Its still one of the most popular classifieds in Canada. I'm annoyed to the point of rewriting their UI and entire app and thinking of open sourcing it.
Jira: slow, confusing, ugly, but then again most of its competitors suck too. All ticketing and PM systems suck.<p>Xcode: don't use it every day but damn it is unnecessarily weird and unintuitive. It's clearly something designed for the people who know it and nobody else.<p>Mac Mail, but unfortunately the alternatives suck too and I hate web mail.
Jira. I freaking hate everything about it. Its task is so simple and yet it sucks so monumentally at it. If I'm done with a task, it's freaking hard to find it. I can never get to the overview of tasks for a project, and it's cumbersome to log my hours for a task I haven't worked on before.
What's more interesting about a lot of these products is that they are widely used and still highly embedded in workflows. Even though they're shite. Re-enforces the point that your product can't just be the "best user experience". You have to have a strategy to dominate as well.
Confluence/Jira... slow, chaotic, broken search engine... Basic stuff hidden or not fully functional... I never understood the raison d'etre of confluence expecially, it's a broken wiki basically... I'd rather pay an intern for an in-house solution.
I’ll say web browsers .
They’ve taken 30 years to provide desktop GUI functionality and APIs from
The 90s . And they require gbs of ram.<p>We really should have live reloadable Cocoa apps and the desktop experience would be 1000 x better , with 10x battery life and better responsiveness
Azure. From blob storage to DevOps. Almost every interface attached to it, UI or API, is an overcomplicated wedge of grief.<p>I can navigate it, sure. But I'd also use an elevator caked in dried urine, to get to the top of a 14 story building, like most people would. So go figure.
Hey I'm working on an alternative to Jira. If anyone would be willing to try my website I would appreciate it. I'm looking for product market fit and I would love to hear feature requests. Check it out at kanception.io. Or just down vote me if you want :)
I have to use it once a week, but since it requires filling daily slots, I think it qualifies too: NetSuite time tracking.
It's just database internal structures exposed to end user with no business logic layer whatsoever.<p>ADP is even worse, but I don't use it daily.
Microsoft Teams. I can't decide which feature is the worst: lack of native widgets, including pop-ups (macOS); random crashes it induces (including kernel panics); or using my machine's CPU and GPU cycles to heat up enough to cook an omelette.
Tuya. They make Wifi chips for everything in the world, and their interface systems are 1/2 Chinese 1/2 English so that basically nobody can understand. It's like Monty Python software, I can hardly believe it works.
Android Auto on my Passat b8... I made it work 2 times. Any other tries it just restarts again and again... I tried to reset csctory settings on a car. Uninstalled android auto app... I will be forced to use sygic with mirror link.
Amazon Alexa and the FireTV. Been around for some time now, several iterations except that the UX hasn’t changed, quality isn’t any better than couple years ago and painful/buggy 3rd party app integrations.
I really dislike git. After years of using it almost daily, it still trips me up when I'm doing something that I don't do every day. Want to do X? Here, remember this random command with some flags!
Fiserv's Signature UI (their Desktop Teller is also trash but not near as bad). I don't even know where to start with how bad it is, but I'd need a BAC of at least .1 to get through it all.
JIRA - easily the most clunky, slow, confusing app I have to use every day for work (with my current client), coming from GitLab issues it’s a nightmare along with just about all other Atlassian software.
I remember this question being asked in the Fog Creek forums about a decade ago and the winner by far was Adobe Acrobat. It's interesting that it doesn't appear anywhere in todays responses.
SAS. I do data analysis everyday and it is just so antiquated to modern data needs. The organization I'm with is on a path to sunset and move to Python. Can't happen soon enough for me.
SharePoint.<p>The site is trying to do absolutely everything and the performance shows.<p>I already have Outlook and Teams open. There's no need for SharePoint to be running extra code to notify me of an e-mail or Teams message.
Spotify on Mac.<p>It’s Chromium-based, so, of course, it’s slow. Specifically, search is excruciatingly slow, removing an album from your library redraws the whole page, and—most frustratingly— as soon as you lose internet connection, your perfectly nice and readable page get replaced with “Artist pages are not available offline”. It’s a list of tracks and albums which is updated (at most, on average) several times a year, why require connection to continue showing it?<p>Not Mac-specific, but extremely weird: sometimes Release Radar playlist has tracks by wrong artists with the same name. I don’t think a recommendation model would use names instead of IDs, so it probably means that track was first ascribed to a wrong artist, and that’s... even worse?
Previous employer transitioned time tracking (and all other hr things) to this giant all in one SAP thing. It took so many clicks to do anything. Took 3 clicks to just save your hours.
Mac OS X. Apple keeps going out of its way to make life harder for power users, even though the non-power-users are increasingly moving to iOS/Android/ChromeOS anyway.
Jira is bad, but Google Doc and Google Drive are so, so much worse.<p>Knowing it is not Jira is what makes Pivot tolerable. Knowing both are coded in server-side Java, though, is oddly satisfying.
Checkpoint VPN. It does not run on Linux so I need to run a Windows VM just for this piece of cr4p software. And it's slow.<p>Besides that: Jira. (A distant second to Checkpoint though)
Oh yeh!! Also, Trac.<p>There is literally nothing good about that issue management program except that it is free. It is impossible to understand what you are looking at. It is just awful.
QGIS but sadly I don't think I could come close to creating something that huge and still free. Doesn't make it less frustrating that it's buggy as shit
Google Maps on android. It has such a hostile UI: zoom out too far and the thing you're looking for disappears. Zoom <i>in</i> too far and it disappears again.
The AWS management console (Not the AWS services themselves which are great). Just navigating the console and getting things done is a major source of frustration.
I use a free desktop edition of Quickbooks from 2007 or so to keep my businesses' books. It's clunky but it works and there's no subscription fee.
> What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?<p>Every (space) day? Definitely the spelling/grammar check and autocorrect software on my phone. ;-)
Wickr (Encrypted chatting).<p>Bloaded, Slow, Buggy, Unreliable. Unfortunately some customers are too stupid and/or lazy to use a Jabber/OTR client.
I’m the only one on the planet, but I hate Notion.<p>It’s a mediocre spreadsheet, half assed database, and infuriating WYSIWYG ... but all-in-one!!1<p>And it’s search sucks.
Any modern OS: MacOS, Windows or Linux. All have major problems. _Works out of the box_ vs _is actually fast_ vs _is good UX_ and so on.<p>All of them lack some kind of functionality: mail calendar apps are buggy (win and mac), GPU suspend problems (linux for me), can't replace hardware parts(macos), weird finder problems, weird "explorer.exe" problems, weird nautilus problems.<p>Why can't OS'es just work? Why is UX getting worse? Frustrating to say the least.
macOS has an extremely weird UI to me.<p>* Why does the maximize button fullscreen by default?<p>* Why can’t I simply drag windows to the side to split half and half? No, I don’t want to switch to fullscreen mode to do this.<p>* What is the point of the minimize button and why do things minimize to a special area on the right side of the dock?
npm will be the official reason I stop writing Node code at some point. It does not know what it wants to be and it disagrees violently with concepts from the tools it pretends to emulate. This whole lock file debacle makes me angry and I'm not close to the only one.
webcam control panel. it’s meant to adjust and control logitech cameras but it resets the camera back to defaults (no gain, no exposure) every time a piece of software restarts the driver.<p>it’s wretched and ruins every zoom call.
iCloud sync. It's broken and it has been broken since a long time. Considering it's run by a company as wealthy as Apple (on their closed ecosystem) it's an utter disgrace.
homebrew. I can probably replace it with nix, but in two months I'll just hit my hardware refresh cycle and ask for a Linux laptop from my employer and be done with Mac for good.
music.youtube.com<p>slowest interface ever.
songs are impossible to find when playing from a playlist.
focus never switched to the music player.
no native cast
plenty other problems
Not me, but my wife - an EMR.<p>God they're fucking terrible. The actual EMR's are often fine. Then some hospital administrator gets involved and completely destroys usability.
The internet. I mean, I love the concept of what the internet could have been, but it's currently the most hostile thing I have to deal with on a daily basis. Bad actors are too prevalent, and the amount of BS stuff we've tried to come with GDPR/Cookie banners, Do Not Track, AdBlockers, etc.
Android<p>I have a computer in my pocket but I am not allowed to do even the most basic stuff I would like to do with it. Like using a shell to work on my files, use git for version control and to sync to other machines, use vim to edit text ... the list goes on forever. Heck, I cannot even easily backup all of my data. Like the contacts for example. No way to read the files in which they are stored.
macOS Finder. It is hard to fathom how bad a file explorer could be if you have used only windows and linux file explorers. Finder is astonishingly bad. Default search is global, it means searching while you are in a folder will search across all documents. This can be changed, but search is even then far worse compared to windows or linux.<p>Sometimes Finder simply won't show certain files, and you need to do a mv from terminal to another folder, where you can see them in finder.
macOS<p>I have a very bad UX. It's small annoying issues, like minimizing a window. If you don't explicitly minimize the window and open another program, the other window is hidden. Where is it? How can I open it? Yes by minimizing every window until I have found mine. For applications, this is not that bad, since you have the dock and just click on the icon to reopen your window, but what happens if you have several windows open of that app? It's a nightmare.<p>I could write a whole list of toxic UX in macOS.
iOS:<p>I almost never use it myself, but I get called upon to deal with it for some of my relatives. The fact that you can't just mount the file system on a non-crippled computer and transfer files to and from the device just drives me mad. Getting someone's music into the right place if they don't have access to a machine with iTunes is miserable. When the "files" app appeared a few years ago, I thought "finally, they'll let you manipulate files directly", but no - it's just another silo too restricted to be of any use.
- Google products.<p>- - Gmail intentionally doesn't filter spam or phishing emails.<p>- - Google Voice used to be useful but today is being blocked by more and more services.<p>- - Google Contacts is pervasive and uselessly so.<p>- - Google Calendar also supports tons of spam and phishing.<p>- - I stopped using Chrome because it stopped being a <i>user agent</i>.<p>- Atlassian products. Slow bloated pieces of privacy violating garbage.<p>- - JIRA is more and more confusing every day. Frequently changing UI incurs cognitive costs. Its workflows are confusing af.<p>- - Confluence is functionally inferior to Media Wiki. That's not even the worst part; the worst part is that it doesn't use markup like the rest of the world.<p>- Microsoft products.<p>- - Skype. Once upon a day Skype was nice and usable. Today Skype is functionally, measurable, objectively less useful and less stable than it was just half a decade ago.<p>- - Github. It was great until a few weeks ago. That new UI is still worse.
G-Suite<p>Google Slides makes me want to cry every time I have to use it. Google Docs isn't much better. They're poor web versions of office software from the 90s.<p>Google drive is a disaster of product. Uploading and finding files are both incredibly painful.<p>Google sheets is fine for simple stuff, and I get why people use it, but there's far better alternatives. For anything moderately complex it's a dog.<p>I can't stand the gmail interface, but I can at least see why some people prefer it. It's the one part of the suite that isn't far inferior to its competitors.