- It's slow on every platform I use (iOS, macOS).
- I often don't get notifications at all, on either platform.
- The Mac client crashes too often.
- The Mac client uses more resources than it should.
- Threads are useless.
- Settings are split into too many different views.
- I dislike the design. It's too spaced out (even with the "compact" setting). There's no dark mode. I don't like the icon. Everything is too cutesy.
- I hate the emoji. I don't want more emoji in my life.
Most of all, I hate the hivemind that says it's the only viable chat system, so much so that even open source projects use it over IRC. Hipchat wasn't too much better, but I've not gotten the chance to use it in the past few years because everyone defaults to Slack. I'd love to try Facebook's new work thing, but there's the same problem.
Remove the small amount of technical know how to "properly" use IRC and make chats (and permissions) persistent, and I imagine you'd end up with something that looks eerily like Slack.
That said, I think the Slack load-time in-browser is silly-long and I get spammed with notifications. As for threads, Zulip (https://github.com/zulip/zulip) does things "right" and I wish Slack would rip off their approach (central topic is the "room" and threads are independent, visually-separate-when-highlighted chats within a central topic).
- Can't edit previous message aside from an exceptionally limited s/// for your very last message
- Can't mix text formatting; you're either quoting, coding, or regular typing
- Animated GIFs for Avatars. I mean, seriously?
- Many of the same problems from Slack's use of Electron (and similar)
Their new electron app is better in perf and memory and generally the experience is the best I've had (and I've used professionally pretty much every chat app there is).
Compared to alternatives like HipChat or Skype it's eons ahead.
But threads are useless indeed, I'll give you that.
They're a big enough company to work on developing platform-specific apps which would totally improve the user experience (from a performance standpoint at least).
Past work, it would have been Identity Finder by a landslide. Awful UI, awful support, super intrusive, a total pain to administer, just bleh. Glad I was able to wash my hands of that.
Personal stuff, iTunes. I genuinely like the interface (at least on macOS) but it's huge and bloated and doesn't do some of the things I want it to. If they ripped out everything that wasn't related to listening to your personal (local) music library, I'd probably like it quite a bit. I wish it would write metadata to file tags rather than its own database, but I forgo that if it got rid of all the other crap.
If your company is large and you're looking at JIRA, pay a consultant to come in, set it up for your different teams and train people. It's worth the money, otherwise you won't see the benefit JIRA brings.
It also regularly refuses to play music which has been downloaded to my iPhone because my cell signal isn't strong enough. I have to put it in airplane mode when I'm on the subway.
The procedure for entering vacation time is "Put in the hours and the code for PTO. Now hit enter. Yes, it'll all turn red and it'll display an error. Hit enter again. Everything else just autofilled."
The procedure for changing an SAP password is to click New Password on the login screen[1]. No, not after logging in, if you accidentally did that you need to log out and try again. (Bonus: you can only tell it's a button after you hover over the innocuously placed text)
I'm not familiar with SAP at all so maybe this is just a failure of a specific implementation and the curse of customization, but it bothers me immensely.
Second place goes to the Jazz web interface for having page content reloads be distinct from page reloads. Oh you opened the work item again? It's still got the old version cached with the banner "The content of this page has changed, click here to refresh."
[1]: Something like this https://technews.blog.olemiss.edu/files/2012/12/SAP-Logon.pn...
Having said that, it's a gigantic beast so it's not surprising that there's a lot of broken implementations out there. Good SAP 'guys' aren't very common unfortunately.
Edit: Geeze, it has its own wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_implementation
But there is a huge amount of customising you can do, the biggest part I've found is normally the integration with existing systems/data sets/data sources. As far as I'm aware, it will integrate with just about anything - I've seen it pull data from Access 2002 databases, proprietary analytics tools, in-house software that was completely undocumented etc etc. It costs many many $$'s though, good example of how throwing money at a problem can eventually fix it.
It's designed for an 14" CRT, showing only like 10 days of 31 days months - happy scrolling in both axes with non standard scrollbars.
You have to enter the hours per day in decimal minutes (1.00 = 60min, 0.25 = 15min) instead of the more human natural 60minutes.
The table UI control is completely non-standard. The Save button doesn't work like expected, it automatically closes the page, or a popup comes up there is nothing to be save - how dare you that you even thought about clicking on the button. If you open the page, all your data is locked, and no one else can access your data.
It's an 1980s nightmare program, that got reskinned in 1998 with "fancy" UI over ASCII char based UI elements.
Projects list is a pain in the arse and the layout is weird. Emailing a client involves witchcraft and switching to some whole new client interface. Doesn't have time tracking, have to use yet another garbage app to do that. People keep using Campfire instead of Slack. Everyone gets a notification for everything by default. So much goddamn white space on this thing. MY BROWSER IS MASSIVE, USE IT. The timeline thing under projects feels like someone thought it was clever so they included it, in reality it's all squashed up and has no real purpose.
Can I just mention this separately. "Like this? Clap for <Name>" - is that supposed to be a sarcasm clap? Like seriously has anyone ever used that legitimately? The only time I'd use it if there was a message "oops I deleted the server" or similar.
I am going to throw a damn parade the day we find an alternative.
Edit: Oh also 3.basecamp.com is stupid. Use your domain.
Also when I log in why am I suddenly on 37signals.com. I get there's a switcher to go back to the (slightly more tolerable) Basecamp Classic but what's this domain about. Branding all over the damn place.
I say this as someone who hasn't used Basecamp, so I don't really have an opinion there.
Noticing a few trends. Poorly written software often:
- Is written for the enterprise, making it vulnerable to buyer vs. user issues.
- Is old and sprawling, yet so successful and so complex to make the much-needed rewrite very daunting.
- Is highly connected to our personal workflows, and therefore always out of sync with the way some significant population wants to work.
Confluence is slow, curation/management is ponderous and the design ignores hundreds of years of research / practice in visual processing of information.
The frequent plain text display of code, freezes and outright crashes really makes me feel like Apple has a completely different internal tool for iOS/macOS development.
These applications do seem to be particularly problematic - the combination of being customizable, multi-user, with complicated permissioning models, and allowing users to store content in the application without a storage quota or garbage collection mechanism model leads to the same obvious problems time and time again.
First, it's slow and bloated. According to Firefox's dev tools, the main project's page takes 15 seconds to load, transferring 3.6MB of data in 62 HTTP requests. This is with a 2015 MacBook on a 150Mbit connection.
Second, it's a UI nightmare. The most common action for a story (expand details) is a 6x9px light-gray triangle with a 17x24px hitbox—not exactly the easiest target to click on. And Pivotal Labs must offer free LASIK to employees, because the default text size is absurdly small. On a non-retina screen, one is forced to use the "Projector" view. The UI offers few affordances, and many are misleading. eg: Each story's "Close" button doesn't modify the story in any way. It simply navigates back to the project overview page. The whole product is fraught with these sorts of issues.
It's telling that Pivotal Tracker is usually imposed upon dev teams. Few devs freely decide to use it; they're fine with a simple issue tracker. It's management and product teams that want the categorization, time estimates, and hierarchical organization of the borderline-chaos that is software development.
-slow (other than playing content everything is just so slow)
-the GUI (inner window) just disappears if I maximize the application (or go over a specific height/width)
-terrible for searching/exploring [0]
[0] I generally search for a specific song then browse the artist's other songs but I would really like to also browse for covers or related content in a way that didn't lose track of the original search/artist.
Example: I search for a Korn song, then I view all Korn songs then I see that other people like System of a Down but I haven't finished viewing all the Korn catalog and if I go to S.O.A.D then I lose track of the Korn. Having a huge delay (compared to other computer functionality) between screens doesn't help either. Then I remember I wanted a cover of the Korn song but I had searched for Korn to compare with the original.
Honestly most of the time I feel like I am misusing it when it is such a chore to find more music. If there is a web interface I will gladly switch.
Previous contenders include http://source.sierrawireless.com/resources/airprime/software... (Eclipse derivative, although really it was the SW firmware that was the pain on that project)
And Altera's Quartus (slow, huge, and I once hit a code generation bug)
What do these have in common? They're the only supported development environment for particular platforms with no good OS alternative.
At least we managed to transition from FogBugz.
They've been more worried about acquiring competitors and patent portfolios than they have about improving the software for about 10 years now.
So, yeah. People hated using it for email. More than once, I built a better email client for it, and people were suddenly a lot happier with it. There wasn't as much that I could do for the calendar app, which had serious core deficiencies.
To be honest, I never understood all the hate, though. Don't get me wrong - no one knew where it was lacking better than I. And, it's been a "dead" product for many years; it would be silly to ever recommend it now. But, executives who never had to even touch the thing would enter a company, and declare that, "We MUST move from this to Microsoft products!" And, the alternatives would always be far worse. (Think Sharepoint, for example.) I'm not even sure that google's productivity products are that big of a step better.
Notes solved a lot of hard problems for large organizations, all at once. It wasn't pretty, not was it ever really that fast. But, it enabled business - particularly non-tech business - the ability to automate things in the blink of an eye, for instant improvement.
I think that we could all learn a thing or two from looking at why it was so popular in its day, and maybe keep just the good parts in what we do.
I now understand why the sysadmins in my life are so hardened/grumpy at times.
* AnkiWeb (great that it exists, but worst interface EVER... >:/
* an enterprise Java based CMS (why why why why)
* OpenOffice (great that it exists, but that interface... >:/
* Hacker News comment formatting
Unfortunately, I can't find a good, scriptable alternative. I've heavily been considering writing my own 3D plotting library, because I honestly think it would be faster than installing MayaVi again.
Mid last year we changed to https://www.blesta.com/ and since they are open source with a good security track-record - we hope that the issues will be over. The only drawback is that they don't have as many 3rd party integrations yet, and that customers have to get used to the new interface.
Its author [David Harris] has done a fantastic job of maintaining it but the UI is definitely the product of a bygone era.
I must confess to preferring Outlook 2016 and its ease of cross platform use when used with an Exchange server. I don't find the ribbon interface confusing like some on here.
My only gripe is the complicated method of publishing recipients S/MIME certificates to the Global Address List before they can be used to encrypt mail with.
Additionally, the UI of their iPad app is so odd, with these sliding panels.
Auto-downloaded on my tablet; I accidentally installed it.
Wi-Fi turns off by itself; bookmark icons don't load in the Internet app; swipe and use pattern to unlock instead of just doing the pattern on the lock screen; other annoyances.
Not a single perceptible improvement over Android 5.
Stupid, ugly colors. Dark blue indicates that a feature (screen rotation, Wi-Fi, notifications, etc) is on? WTF? It doesn't look lit up.
I can write far more performant applications in a fraction of the time without the bloat that is expected in web apps these days, but I would be hard-pressed to find a job where I can do that.
I recently switched to macos from linux, and this is one of the frustrating experience I have with mac. Particularly there is no easy way for me to save a file in a custom folder in the builtin save dialog. Everytime I use finder, I wonder which is worst - windows command prompt or macos finder!
Crashes often when stepping into multi-threaded code, frequently 'forgets' whole families of types.
Throws a fit if you switch git branches from underneath it.
In its defence it does compile damn quick!
Imagine how fun it is to type a "stack-trace" into your issue tracker, because it doesn't even support copy-and-paste...
Luckily, unknown to most people, I guess.
Credit Union online banking and mobile app
Siri - also not 'required'
AWS Web Console
It's amazing how bad the UI and user experience is.
I shipping software by UPS.
SAP R3 - an popular ERP (enterprise resource planning) - think of an 1980s terminal application reskinned with 1998-fancy-theme - the application is still designed for 14" CRT, and you can only open one window of the same page (aka transaction). Think of UI elements like tables where the table-borders are rendered as ASCII chars (when you copy&paste you get the border-chars too. ugly (they renamed it to mySAP and what not, it's still the same old application). screenshot: http://www.saptechnical.com/Tutorials/Smartforms/Barcode/Ind...
Windows 10 - designed by color blind designer with brutalism taste, stuffed with worst adware that sends home your keystrokes and microphone audio, etc - hostile to user privacy. I stay with Win7, it's superb, it's used by like 50% of all desktop/notebook users, Win10 is unsuccessful, Win8 is dead,mI don't care that MS does't care.
I also like to use my arm chromebook, which is perfect for tasks, but Asana literally kills it performance wise.
Fuck your all fancy javascript, I can make the same app using jquery and it will fly. Unfortunately people I need to use it with wouldn't use my app.
it can honestly take me upwards of a minute to load asana, locate a project and check a task as completed. It should take 10 seconds.
Best Emacs Osx