What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?
[0]: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.intro.whatis.html#svn...
First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere.
Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift.
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 elements. Sometimes the elements (unnecessarily) surround individual characters, sometimes they surround _parts_ of words. 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? Fourth, it tries to do too many things. I already have email. I don't need Blackboard's email functionality getting in the way. I could go on (for a while), but it's time for those blood pressure meds.
AWS. It’s UI is honestly baffling, it feels and looks like someone made it in a rush with jQuery and Bootstrap years ago. It’s login and identity and resource management is confusing, and apparently you need a chrome extension which adds a bunch of complicated options I don’t really understand just to be able to change roles. It is literally years behind Azure.
Git. It’s purposely archaic commands and syntax leads to too many accidents far too often. I recently started using Gitkraken which allows you to pull changes WITHOUT needing to commit locally first because it uses stashes. It basically does the same option. Why can’t git be smart like that?
Linux. It’s great, but it’s so easy to run into configuration problems or poor documentation.
Docker. Again it’s great but for whatever reason it just works poorly on ARM and the whole ecosystem is geared to x86 and it just goes and pulls the x86 images and then fails to run them. Come on.
I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-window (even with the recent "pop-out" functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern trends. You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc).
Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my computer sleeps/wakes it sits in offline until you open the main window from the system tray. Those are year+ old bugs.
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.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-mic...
I use it and love it every day in both dev and prod, but I also really kind of hate it.
I'll keep my complaints short.
There should not be a system-wide daemon. (Or any daemon).
It should not require root at all (no setuid either).
From outside the container, the container and its processes should be a single process (with threads). (Like glueing a bunch of processes together.)
The containers should be nest-able to arbitrary depth without performance loss (at least to say, hundreds of nestings deep.)
Docker-compose should not exist, instead it should be replaced by nesting of containers.
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.
These changes probably require a bunch of kernel hacking, but I think it would be worth it long-term for a cleaner architecture.
It appears there are some movements into this direction thanks to podman, but it's really not there yet, especially with nesting.
Also, it wouldn't really be a product at all but just a built-in tool on Linux systems.
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.
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 Teams - drains my battery 1% every two minutes
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.
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.
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.
Signal has consistently been a pain to use for my moderately sized (<15) friend group chat and for 1-on-1 threads too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
If your company is considering this, avoid it like the plague.
Their search capability is just bad. To find something requires a lot of tries and tricks. I don't want to waste cognition because they re-invented the flat tire.
Their inbrowser text editors are also just bad. On the level of WordPress three years ago. Markdown? no. Cut and paste from other apps? OK, if you remember to "Paste as Plain Text.
I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where it is impossible to find something.
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
The most complex simple system I used. Simple in theory (Project Management) but complex in implementation.
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.
Anyway I think that's a massive opportunity, if that's what you're looking for.
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.
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: https://support.google.com/docs/thread/9482426?hl=en
- 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.
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)
Technically speaking most of the code that seriously annoys me runs inside 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.
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 only way to access most of the writings on the internet.
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.
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.
Jira, because it's too slow and bloated from features you never use anyway.
IntelliJ, because it freezes on every 6-7 autosuggestions, on projects of 50-80K LOCs.
This should be popular
It seems so aimed at the consumer market, with everything set up to help with integrating with Apple services.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Great home computers, great for individuals, terrible for enterprise use.
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.
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.
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.
After years of working in the JS ecosystem I sort of hate the complexity in general.
* Zoom - worst video conference product __EVER__. Can't say a single good word about it.
* AWS admin console - same as jira, at least it's not slow.
* 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).
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.
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 every single person you open a chat with. I had to just go back to another SMS app and lose the ability to use their protocol.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Windows and macOS have a much sainer desktop for GUI apps to test against.
Threading is completely broken, filtering is broken, compose screen is unusable.
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.
jira would be a distant second, but no comparison.
I happen to know some web development, so here's a few observations from top of my head:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Front-end CSS framework is based on YUI (discontinued since 2014). It supports IE quite well, but breaks on current Edge, Firefox and Chrome.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Printing is a nightmare. Whatever sent to the printer often doesn't show up, but that's a story for another day.
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.
Do we have anyone in the community that can enlighten me on the root case?
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.
Specifically: AEM, AAM, Omniture, among others. My favorite is AAM’s “only Adobe could come up with such a stupid data integration” file format: https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/audience-manager/user...
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 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.
I noticed another comment thread about Microsoft Teams, but for me, Teams is a godsend compared to Skype for Business.
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.
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.
Edit: This product is apparently now called "Google Chat"
* Atlassian JIRA (never really got the hang of it. Overcomplicated.)
* Workday (the web app is sloooooow.)
* MRemoteNG (The best SSH client on Windows. Also the worst. Alt + Tab navigation annoys me to hell!)
* iTunes on Windows (Why is it like the way it is even in 2020!?)
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.
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.
It's cool that so many people aren't satisfied with the status quo, and will continue to push the to make things better.
To throw in my answer, G-Suite (as an IT Administrator).
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.
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.
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.
If I ever get the opportunity to retire I would love to take a crack at fixing all of these.
OSX file explorer
Both are unavoidable and horrible.
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?
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.
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.
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
I paid $300 for capture one but can’t use it because I can’t figure out where it puts my images and why.
As far as I can tell this is a demo EMS from Intersystems, they provide Cache [1] to companies developing real 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- No way to set status (essential in current remote work situation)
- No way to reorder the rooms
- No nested comments.
- Cannot mark conversation unread or have some way to remember to come back to the conversation later.
- If you lose your notification you are lost. Cannot figure out which room you were tagged in.
- Cannot message to self. This is not a big problem but a good to have.
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.
This is especially bad since small mistakes can easily break your security model.
I don't want to rewrite GnuPG, I want a fresh start without all the cruft.
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).
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.).
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?
The worst version control software known to man.
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.
The paradigms are backwards. The project doesn’t branch, the files do. You make your commits before you do any work.
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.
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.
It's appalling how such a powerful company can keep so many things so bad for so long.
bash on *nix - less horrible then cmd.exe but still trurlly horrible anyway.
I want to kill myself any time I enter any of those. PowerShell cross platform made all my cells rejoice.
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.
And it's widespread enough that it won't die.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
It always feels like I'm working against the OS now that the OS philosophy has shifted to being all things to all people.
If it's Windows or macOS, it wants to advertise to me, or prevent me from launching certain apps or features.
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.
- Nautilus. Serious usability/UX problems.
- Audio in linux. Ubuntu often selects the wrong audio devices (microphone, headphones, speakers)
- Linux sleep/hibernation. System hangs are common.
- GRUB. The interface is dated, why is it so ugly?
My current bank just wrapped a mobile website in Android app. Logging-in with a fingerprint, though supported, takes 3 or 4 attempts.
The app is also very slow and fails miserably on slow mobile connection (very common in Germany).
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.
The 2FA app can only be registered using snail mail confirmation.
I'm responding to the prompt in the OP, not the title.
> What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AWS. I don't know where to begin. Nothing make sense. Nothing works.
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.
K8s: same Go: same
Venv. Goddamnit this never worked well and same as git, noone gets it.
The home screen stream is this weird mix of people you follow, suggested streams, things your followed people liked and ads.
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?".
I can totally understand why people just delete the app. It's worse than FB imo - which is setting the bar really high already
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.
- It hangs at least every other day -- the pinwheel of death.
- It sorts files in some sort of weird non-alphanumeric order.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Finder has long overstayed its welcome.
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.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.
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.
It is so bad, my next laptop will not be another XPS, even though nearly everything else is great about it.
I'm still using it because the alternatives come with their own drawbacks (usually high price but still having enough quirks).
If anyone reading this is considering trying or moving to HubSpot, I urge you to take our experience as a warning and seriously reconsider.
We moved to their sales CRM 2 years ago and have been filled with remorse ever since.
It’s hands down the most poorly thought out software package I’ve ever had the misfortune of using.
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.
Such was the frequency of our frustration with nearly all aspects of HubSpot, the phrase “fucking HubSpot” even became a meme in our office.
Run. Don’t look back.
Core of the product hasn't seen any noticeable features in a while.
1PasswordX was launched without the feature set of the desktop version. Dumb stuff that hasn't been fixed in forever like not being able to delete a single item from the trash, password formulae are rigid - words with no digits or symbols or random mess of all characters, no TouchID/FaceID, Apple Watch unlock support, can't selectively sync a single vault to say my work laptop.
There should be some open standard data-attribute on password fields so the app can read in the required formula to create the perfect password without me fiddling the settings.
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.
Word still doesn't do some very basic things it should, and it probably never will now.
[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 all of them are far more streamlined and professional.
[2] The number does seem to be decreasing. But it's still higher than it should be.
And if it fails for reasons such as storage getting full, it gets corrupted and then it's half an hour until it restores an old backup, losing the day's messages. And it also stores a week of backups, so that's 7x of the size which on many phones is untenable.
And this can't be turned off! I hate it with a passion but literally everyone I know is on it. There's even no way to hide a conversation from view without blocking it forever.
Awful.
[0] I once had a page-long note file on literally how to search for a document by title 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.
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.
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.
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.
God I hate Slack so fucking much.
I want my IRC client back.
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.
It's productivity software that I need to touch every half-hour or so. Productivity software has to be snappy. Toggl is the opposite of snappy now.
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.
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.
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.
Just curious:
Were you inspired to ask this question by the recent CoRecursive Podcast interview with Jim Blandy (https://corecursive.com/054-software-that-doesnt-suck/) 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?"
HUNDREDS of different systems on the market. Some with maybe a handful of doctor's offices using a particular system.
Worst UIs you could ever imagine. Limited interoperability.
In even well-established systems with large numbers of installs you'll see multiple bugs in production code that don't get fixed.
Switching costs are essentially infinity so doctors get locked into a system no matter how bad it is.
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.
Client portal could display information using the above rules, and more rules
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)
This applications is absolutely usability nightmare, created in 90s, and it hadn't undergone any change since then. It's database design is also absolutely horrible.. yet it is faster, and more comfortable to just use plain SQL to work with it than bother with UI.
Then there is that piece of shit known as firebird. It has all downsides of file based databases, while also having all downsides of service based databases.
It also has its own way of doing things, and it doesn't even have services/systemctl service by default. Prior to version 2.5 you couldn't drop connections, and guess what - that PoS application set it to a week.
File itself wont update if there is any live connection.
That piece of shit app uses legacy client dll for firebird, so you can either connect to firebird 3, or to firebird 1/2. but not both.
And then there is firebird documentation, which is horrible, and fragmented.
I could rewrite that piece of shit, and design a better database but we won't ever compete with that company for political reasons.
2. Freecad (difficult, weird UI)
3. WordPress+WooCommerce (they charge you for as basic as simple shipment tracking plugin)
- Loading up the client list takes forever ~15 seconds
- Loading up the asset list for a given client takes even longer.
- Remote access is hidden behind a 2 layer context menu
- 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.
- Terminal experience is way worse than putty. Output formatting is always jacked up and a command takes ~5 seconds to return output.
- RDP all goes through a relay and your connections will just die occasionally.
- 90% of my work interacts with it in some way.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm recently lookeing at SciDavis and hope this solves my nightmares.
No new user, and rarely an experienced one, starts a new thread. Every reply just builds on the original.
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.
(On a separate note, I see no Apple products in main threads. I see a few google ones, Microsoft, Amazon (AWS) and Facebook (workplace))
Don’t get me wrong, I still love it and it makes my life easier but it just breaks all the time, especially when I update it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Alexa - only listens to me; doesn't cutoff quickly enough when someone tries to issue a new/improved command or dismiss a response
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
That said, I still find the UI much less fiddly than gmail, which is why I use both.
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.
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).
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.