Mine is iPhone as hotspot/'net sharing feature, for other mac products (macbook pro, macbook air, etc.), be it bluetooth or wifi, let alone non-mac clients == ongoing failures/stoppages, regardless of iPhone or macbook models.
Latency.<p>Back in the day, you flicked your computer's on switch, and it turned on. (And then it took ten minutes or so to load software from the tape drive – <i>much</i> faster from floppy, but still far from instant.) Now, our processors and storage devices are millions of times faster, and computers can take minutes <i>just to start</i>. Software needs to load itself into memory, then initialise the initialisation routines, then <i>actually</i> initialise, then you have to wait for the data to populate, then it's <i>still</i> slow until the cache has warmed up.<p>It's 2022 and if I want to play a rhythm game, I have to calibrate my input device because, since the days of PS/2, keyboard latency has gone up so much that I can <i>hear</i> the delay between the button click and the computer's reaction.<p>It's 2022, and when I draw something on one device, it takes several seconds for the drawing to make its way to the other, even if they're in the same room, because the data's being sent through four layers of format conversion <i>in JavaScript</i>, and the traffic's being sent half-way 'round the world.<p>It's 2022, and "blazing fast" means "slower, and probably more buggy, than Windows 95".
Transferring files between two computers/phones/devices right next to each other, regardless of operating system.<p>Most solutions rely on sending a file to some server in probably a different country, and then downloading said file on the other computer. Or, using a USB stick to pass the file from one to the other.
Dunno, I'm mostly missing the day when we had the technology to create responsive user interfaces. Like imagine we used to have progress bars that actually reported progress, not just some bogus animation.<p>Good times.
I should be able to programmatically check my bank/brokerage balances, check when bills are due, and in general automate my finances. My judgment on when to pay what bills is entirely automatable and yet every payday I spend 45 boring minutes doing it myself anyway. Basically, I want to pay all bills that are due before the next payday. If I have money left over, I want to reserve $X in my checking account for spending, put some in my savings account if it is below $Y, and transfer the rest to my brokerage account to invest.
For me, it's what's getting worse over time.<p>It's accepted to wait 6 seconds for your TV to start. Washing machine to light up, dishwasher to be responsive, or even apps to take seconds to boot up....<p>It makes me go crazy.
- Why is bluetooth so consistently buggy? Unless you're using the exact bluetooth headphones made for that device, I find myself needing to connect/reconnect or debug so often.<p>- Why don't TVs still have physical buttons? Sometimes the remote batteries die or I can't find it. Just let me turn things off or adjust volume.<p>- Why isn't there a sliding toggle "checkbox" in HTML? Why do I have to abuse a checkbox to get one?
Humans. It doesn't matter what country or culture. We're mostly busy arguing over the colour of a political party, as opposed to working on the root cause of important issues.
Wifi hotspot works fine for me.<p>What doesn't work is just sharing stuff between different people and devices. I want to send a web page to my son on his desktop. I want to play a video on the TV. I want to play some music on the main speakers. I want to collaborate on annotating an image with my wife. The whole family wants access to the e-book collection, movies, music, etc.<p>All these things are possible now to an extent, but each and every one is some degree of difficult to set up, and it's own little thing. And not even mentioning the fractured wasteland that is messaging.<p>All of this should be baked into the very fabric of computing by now IMHO, a seamless landscape of shared data.
Mine is automated message handling in iOS.<p>Specifically I volunteer for a group that uses SMS with embedded links for the volunteers to tap to check in and out of a job. Frequently these links are truncated or divided in a way that makes their URL structure invalid. This happens all the time due to the difference in message length and how iOS handles longer messages.<p>I know this boils down to an SMS character limit kludge, but our Android users do not experience this. The message comes as one block or "bubble" but the iOS users see multiple bubbles that are frequently out of order.
MS Office issues. The whole project back in the 90s as I understand it was that all of these productivity tools would work together. You write something up in Word, move that over into a PowerPoint slide and add in a cool data visual from Excel. I don't know what happened but they do NOT play nice together anymore. Tables don't copy right, I use a totally external program to <i>screenshot</i> the table or pie chart, and maintaining formatting between programs?<p>Fahgettabouttit.<p>Word is also remarkably bad with long (100+ page) documents and lots of different content sources. If you're not pasting as <i>pure text</i> into Microsoft Word, you're playing with fire.<p>Also, I suspect it's cruft inside the program that has made this problem actually worse over time, not just "still a problem". Thank god Markdown is now more widely supported, including on Microsoft-owned Github.
Home routers doing a good job at Quality of Service - at allowing both big downloads and a responsive video call at the same time. This is a common enough usecase these days that it's crazy how a software update on one computer will obliterate a video call on another, even with "QOS" turned on.
I've not experienced it but I still find it quite scary: automated account termination with no tangible recourse.<p>Get your account flagged by a black box and you could loose decades of emails, contacts, bookmarks and favorites,... Then it's a Don Quixote fight to get anything back.
Tried for hours this weekend trying to share files from my Mac Laptop to a Windows 11 PC over the network. Both had latest versions of operating systems.<p>Could not for the life of me get it working. Had to dig up a usb thumbdrive.<p>I used to have this working fine in 2002.
Perceived sluggishness in the desktop response.
Perhaps it's my memory or imagination but I remember that dos/win3.11 had an almost immediate desktop and application response on a pentium.
I'm sure with a lightweight linux I can approach the speedyness and MacOS on an M1/M2 has a good enough desktop response.
<i>I can play quake in my browser using webgl compiled from c++ code running as WASM</i><p><i>but I still can not scroll though a table of 5,000 items.</i><p>via <a href="https://twitter.com/samccone/status/902542169524772864" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/samccone/status/902542169524772864</a>
Database versioning. Why can't I have version control on a database record just like we do for documents? Why do we have to implement audit trails over and over again?
Education in Western countries.<p>Budget cuts every year, ministers more preoccupied by putting their name on a law or reform than to actually improve things.
Bluetooth. It sucks in every kind of way possible. It never connects when you want it to. It autoconnects when you DONT want it to. Pairing is a crapshoot and praying.<p>It's basically printers all over again. It sucks!
Charging cell phones is more of a pain than charging my cordless home phone.<p>Even 30+ years ago, it was simple. The phone has a docking station, and you simply place your phone into it.<p>Why do I have to fiddle with a cable to charge my smartphone? Some phones support wireless charging, but they're rare, and some manufacturers have dropped support for it.
Control desktop monitor settings still requires using the display's built in controls. This should be directly accessible to the OS so one can quickly lower or raise the screen's brightness like on a laptop.<p>Manually turn off bluetooth once disconnect from paired device, such as a car or headphones. Save battery and reduced in-store tracking.<p>Interactions with smart phones still requires multiple attempts to properly format text, fix corrects on unknown words or industry jargon, and copy and paste text.<p>Android 12+, Google camera no longer follows the standard of allowing to select the photo gallery application and requires open it manually. Older versions allowed for it. Now Google forces you to use their application and break standard. Another Do as I say, not as I do.
Even worse than printing I find scanning. It's like we're stuck with some ancient technology that works maybe 20% of the time. When it works, the scanned page of text is 8MB. Open in Acrobat Reader, export with "reduce file size", 6MB. What the hell?!?
Bluetooth. I’m fairly vested in the Apple ecosystem with a MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad, and a few AirPods, and never have I seen a feature that creates so much instability across such a wide range of gadgets. I have gotten kernel panics on my MacBook, hard crashes (straight to the Apple logo) on my iPhone and iPad, and had several AirPods refusing to switch devices without a hard reset, all from the Bluetooth dameon. And, don’t get me started on default audio inputs with Zoom calls and whatnot. Rolling dice seems to have better odds than getting the right input to connect from the start.
This is my personal opinion. No offense to any developer or project, but:<p>The linux touchpad experience... After shifting around responsibilities for a decade between libinput, compositor, desktop environment, applications and back, not many people seem to really see the importance of the touchpad as input device. Especially precisition, interial/kinetic scrolling + rubberbanding and palm detection do not feel optimal.<p>After digging around with libinput and libinput-config on fedora 36, I have achieved at least an acceptable level of touchpad usability and I'm looking forward to 2023 :-)
Search in Windows.<p>I have a term I know I used in some set of documents. I can't remember where I put those documents in some file structure. I use the search function. Friggin' 10 minutes later it finally stops searching, returning a gazillion files which have nothing to do with the term I was searching for.<p>Yeah, yeah, search is hard on local systems. Turn indexing on. Blah blah blah.<p>Like, I have endless <i>Halo</i> and ads in the home menu, but I don't have the ability to actually use the computer in any productive way.
Gotta add another vote for printers in general. All of our computers "lose" the printer at least once a month, even though it has a static IP address etc. Only solution is to remove and reinstall. Then it never remembers quality settings, which is important because normal quality is utter crap that nobody would ever want. (TBF that last part is more of an OS problem.) Then there's the "can't print black because you're out of yellow" thing, and so many more. How can everything about printers still be so awful even after decades of that awfulness being so well known that it's the subject of memes and jokes?<p>Special bonus: suspend/resume on even the most vanilla of laptops. The one I'm on now keeps hanging on wakeup because (I'm 90% sure) the fingerprint-reader driver is total trash. I've been hearing lots of reports of suspend/resume problems with 12th gen Intel processors, on multiple platforms. Windows or Linux, same. Again: how is this something that vendors can't even test properly, after all this time?
Programming language design as a discipline improves more slowly than anyone admits, and truth be told, we're trading off more than improving.<p>1. Your new language will die, but not because of the language, but because it's so hard to build out a standard library for it.<p>2. We still don't agree on the basics and fundamentals.<p>3. We are arguing from elitism (and its sibling, anti-elitism) more often than "make it easier".
While not the most "mission critical" application, making basic Siri requests via a HomePod has never improved since the HomePods came out in 2018. Asking to do simple things like turning on a specific light via HomeKit, or asking for the weather, and having the request fail for some strange, unreported issue makes for a frustrating experience.<p>HomeKit accessories in general have been extremely hit or miss, I had two Logitech Circle View cameras that constantly lost their network connection and had to be power cycled to get back online. I tried many things over the almost 2 years I had them set up in my house and nothing seemed to improve their connectivity. I replaced the indoor one with an Ecobee camera, and the outdoor one with an Eve camera, and haven't had any network issues since. I've seen similar behavior with "cheaper" HomeKit enabled light bulbs too. Certain brands seem to have major issues with connectivity, while others are 100% reliable. Maybe Thread will address this?
The display of sender emails on various email clients and services. It is discouraging to see how blindly clients trust the name provided by a message's sender and display it as-is (and without the actual email address) to the user. The client will naively display<p>"Amazon Customer Service"<p>as a message's sender when the full name and email that come in the message are something like<p>"Amazon Customer Service" <contact@amazonfakedomain.com><p>So many technically-sophisticated verification processes are currently run on incoming email to throw out spam and scam messages, yet this particular, rather clumsy form of attack remains unaddressed. Email clients will warn you about everything else but this! I can think of a few simple ways in which clients could detect suspicious sender emails and/or names and help users know that there's something seemingly fishy about a particular sender. Yet I'm surprised that so little attention is paid to this attack vector.
Why the hell is it so hard to just send a file to someone? Why must I go through a central service to host my content before I let someone else view it? Why do I have to tell someone else that they must download third party software in order to just... send files? Without having some corporation store it on their servers.
1. I still can't seamlessly stream from Spotify/android phone to Google/Nest Home speakers. Takes up to 30 seconds to sync, randomly breaks down. I switched to iPhone two weeks ago. Spotify/iOS connects to Google Home immediately and works well.<p>2. I keep giving different variants of the same command to my Google Home, which often gets answered with "I have no idea how to do that", or sometimes minute grammatical details change the command for the computer, or sometimes it refuses to remember a task that it did the day before with that exact phrase, or sometimes it randomly does something completely different. Why does "Turn living room off" do something different from "Turn off living room"?<p>I am slowly moving away from Google's ecosystem because nothing ever works seamlessly.
Where to even start with this... Ok, how about with Microsoft Outlook? The "undo" after deleting or moving an email works about 10% of the time. Sometimes it recovers the message, but most of the time it either does nothing or even better, brings back a totally different message!! smh
Selecting and pasting text on Android. It works completely differently in different apps, or different text boxes in the same app, despite being a service provided by the OS and not the app. And even at it's best it's a nightmare.<p>Sometimes double tap will select a word. Sometimes double tap will show the clipboard menu. Sometimes double tap will show the clipboard menu, then quickly dismiss it again. Sometimes to show the menu I have to single tap, but sometimes I have to long press.<p>If it's a single-line text box, I can't tap anywhere within it to get the clipboard menu, I have to tap (or hold, whatever it is today) on the tiny part at the beginning where the cursor is.<p>Then there's the whole nightmare of actually selecting the text you want correctly.<p>Pasted the wrong thing? There's no undo. Just suffer.<p>Horrible.
We've flown a helicopter on Mars. We've crashed a vehicle into an asteroid.<p>I have to type 25 character random passwords into AppleTV with no mistakes 5-10 times from a remote.<p>On that note, it's 2022 and I cannot set up an AppleTV in the Home app on a Mac. It's apparently impossible.
There's so much software written these days that is duplicated. We focus on the large framework style pieces (and in JavaScript land rewrite them every year ;)), but ignore the long-tail pieces that are common but domain specific.
This would mean standardized software development building blocks for domain models. E.g. a standard model of money/bank account/user/address/company/shopping cart/food product/ingredients/calendar/... for every programming language.<p>I've seen a a database-centric version of this (I don't recall the name of the site though), but not a domain model version.
Speech to text is still really bad, Cloud costs are real bad too, checkout <a href="https://text-generation.io" rel="nofollow">https://text-generation.io</a> or OpenAI whisper which will fix that fairly soon I think. Over 8x cheaper than Google.<p>There's lots of other cloud cost stories like CloudFlare R2 egress saving people millions on large file storage.<p>I'm surprised decentralization hasn't hit cloud providers as hard yet either.<p>With that hotspot example my Telco in NZ (spark) blocks me from using a Wi-Fi hotspot on one of my android mobiles, which is ridiculous that they can turn off an Android feature on my phone for profit.
Two brand new Bosch ovens side by side, both showing different times on their digital clocks. Why don't they auto-adjust with daylight saving or at least synchronise with each other. I'd rather have no clock than two wrong ones.
Automatic faucet/dryers/soap dispensers in public toilets. Always delays before they start. Or don’t start at all. Or start/stop before you’re done. They seem to work as (un)reliably as they did 20 years ago.
PulseAudio<p>I still have to fight with it all the time, and cannot get it to work as expected.
And that's with the most standard use cases:<p>- System always getting muted after unlock/reboot (for some reason)<p>- Playing sounds on the speaker despite jack headphones being connected (I have to manually switch the output)<p>- If I unmute the sound (that wrongly got automatically muted) with my earphones connected, it starts loudly playing my music on speakers at maximum volume.<p>- UI not reflecting the actual situation (it shows muted speakers despite playing stuff on it for example)
Shit, I'd be happy if the Mobil stations near me would correctly implement chip cards on their gas pumps. Every friggin' time, they ask for a PIN and refuse to take "no" for an answer. Every. Time.<p>It's a credit card. It doesn't have a damn PIN in the US, and I have to go inside to pay for gas every time. I've quit buying gas at the area Mobil stations because of the hassle. Most of the other chains seem to get it right.<p>How is it that Europe has been doing chip cards (with PIN) for decades, and we can't get this right?
Companies still ignoring business. I tried to get a company account at getsby, nothing happens. I email them, silence. I'm pretty sure I'm not blacklisted by MC/Visa because I have both from my bank and my company has way more money than it knows how to spend.<p>Oh, and Paypal's payments not working 50% of the time. Probably something with using firefox or being on linux, or having an adblocker. I have a secure password. I use 2fa. It still fails so often, I now avoid it.
Connecting external screens or projectors to a PC. It never made sense to me that the devices on either end take many seconds to realize that something was plugged in.
"Instant edit" on most website. Similar to a wiki but it should go to the user/admin that made the content and he can publish or discard it.
Ofc it would have to be without login/captcha etc.<p>Every blog post would have every reader be able to correct small mistakes, fix broken links etc. etc. Basically a distributed maintenance system for the web where stuff that is actually used by people is keep up-to-date.
We have trouble keeping Jira and Bitbucket synced. Both cloud products. How can they struggle with integrating themselves?! (Our GitHub repos sync just fine.)
Outlook shows national holidays in the calendar, yet its "Scheduling Assistant" is unable to figure out that people don't work on that day.
Encrypted email and search.<p>It's no easier to send a confidential message using the most
widespread communications protocol than in 1980.<p>Searching for anything serious/interesting I pause and think: Do I
have it locally? Else, which specialist databases or sources I might
try. Else use a bash script that hits a bunch of "alternative" search
engines. Finally, use Google/Bing as last resorts. What happened to
search?
Recently installed Linux Mint, what baffled me in 2022 is that regularely upon log-on it nags me to install security updates and when I acknowledge the request, it asks me for my password again. I agree that general package manager operations should be a privileged operation... but approving the installation of security updates should not have the user being greeted by just another password prompt.
I recently installed Debian Unstable on a new PC and it came with Pulseaudio installed by default. Just like it did when I first tried Pulseaudio on a different computer many years ago, the audio intermittently desynced from video playback on Firefox. Thankfully, Debian compiles Firefox with the optional ALSA support enabled, so I uninstalled Pulseaudio and everything worked perfectly again.
Multipath mesh networking in ubiquitous devices. We all walk around with a super computer more powerful than the original devices hooked up to ARPANET. Assuming that we believe that E2E encryption is secure, making these talk to each other shouldn't be forefront rather rather than them having to communicate only to centralized hardware (cellular base stations etc.)
Buy once, use everywhere media - we regressed from owning the vhs/dvd/bluray to finding which service will allow you to rent / license the media.<p>While I'm there, the path from media rental to "ownership". If I watch a movie for $4.99 and it's good, why not take the $4.99 off the price to own it rather than making me pay full price?
Home automation and security.<p>Why isn't there a single model for sharing video and alerts to a local PVR? Why do so many crappy cameras <i>require</i> internet access and 1st party apps?<p>I want cameras, I want alarms, I want heating and lighting automation, and I don't want to share access with some kid in China, or have nine different apps.<p>HomeKit? Sure, but on my terms, not Apple's.
Buying a dozen eggs and not having one of them be cracked when you use them. The clear plastic cartons might help you see a fully smashed egg, but it doesn't let you see the small cracks. Especially for brown eggs. The cashier double checks the eggs anyway, but there's always a cracked one once I have paid.
My MacBook Pro 128 GB has "Pro" in its name but it takes a whole night to upgrade Xcode to a newer version on this model if I just pick Upgrade in the App Store (I no longer do it and download it manually instead, and then delete the old version manually before installing the new one).
Sharing WiFi connection details via a QR code in iOS. On Android it's intuitive; but last I checked a few months ago on my spouse's iPhone, it was a weirdly complex process that didn't leverage the information the phone already had to connect to WiFi.
Digital signatures for the wider public are still very cumbersome. The number of times I have had to print a filled PDF form just to sign it manually, scan it, then upload it back to the issuer's website is too damn high.<p>I am in Germany.
AirDrop – how is a 50% success rate remotely acceptable?
And my personal favourite – macOS carries over the input language from an app to another, which makes no sense at all and is frustrating me for 17 years now
A goole calendar view with 2,3,4 month or even custom view showing events in the day. Its not like there isnt enough screen real estate to fit it all in with modern displays.<p>or maybe im the only one who wants this.
Cross-platform user interface libraries, including desktop<->mobile. GTK and QT work for desktop-only apps, but once you include mobile there's no good, solid solution for this except a web view.
Clicking 2 devices together does not pair them, or at least initiate pairing. Have to scroll through a list of 100 cryptically named devices without any indication which I should connect to.
Trying to find a setting in Windows' 3 or 4 generations of control panels. Honestly, it's amazing to me that Windows is such an unpolished turd after 30 years of development.
Printing something from my computer. I can connect to servers all around the world and for whatever reason, I cannot predictably and reliably connect to printers in my home or office.
Phone / TV / Computer integration that is not just handoff, but treats the 3 things as part of a whole UX. Why am I streaming from a website to my phone to the TV?
The ability to change default Google accounts without signing out of every account.<p>At this point, I'm absolutely convinced I'm doing something wrong. Maybe this is painless in Chrome?
RT @reverentgeek: We should have flying cars by now. Instead we're fighting to convince the automatic faucets that our hands are really in the sink.
Video game controllers. Even in the world of steam and unity, controller behavior and configuration is a huge crapshoot and often just doesn't work.
Windows search.<p>It is so incredibly slow and inept at finding anything, whereas the app Everything by voidtools has no problem and works instantaneously.
we have only 3 browser vendors left, and they mostly cooperate with each other, and still the default styles are so all over the place that even simple pages often end up with broken features between browsers on the same platform
I think you have the arrow of time backwards. Technology seems to be getting less reliable, not more so. Every time my laptop manages to connect to a hotspot it's a small miracle.
iPhone hotspot over wifi has always worked flawlessly for me, with all types of clients from macbooks to imacs to chromebooks and chromecasts and even my car.