[Closed] Way OT: The most hateful piece of software you've used?

I'll remind you of that next time you start a "windoze" thread.

If it pleases you. 😐

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re. GIS software, why can't Adobe get involved and make a UI that is more user friendly. Too many dialogue boxes, tabs, drop down menu, sub menu, another dialogue tab, another drop down menu, and then you can change the font... but wait, it isn't even wysiwyg!!!

Rivendell. Such a horrible radio playout "solution".

Ah yes, good point Elfin. Office Assistant. File under "what [i]were[/i] they thinking."

Sage, why can't you just let me do a search by customer name?!!

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Why iTunes? Because every time I have to open the hateful thing up just fills me with dread.

It's not that figuring out how to do what I want is hard. The UI gets better (and less prescriptive) with every new version. It's the actual function of the thing.

It may or may not choose to recognise my iPhone or iPod according to its whim. If for whatever reason I have to disconnect my device while iTunes is open (even if I "eject" it properly) it is a certainty that I will have to restart iTunes to get it to recognise it again. Often I will have to restart the computer.

It is a colossal resource-hog and hence runs incredibly slowly.

It crashes regularly (only software that crashes my PC). If it does this in the middle of synching to my device, it f*cks the device, requiring a hugely long and frustrating process (see above 2 points) to re-instate it.

It made an utter ar$e of importing the pre-iTunes music in my collection. Even though it was all already organised in one collection (flawlessly, by Windows Media Player). I'm still not sure I've got all my old tunes in there.

It will not allow me to access content from any location other than France (no, I do not want to download sh*te French TV, thanks). Even with a card from a UK bank!

I could go on and on but I'm getting frustrated just thinking about it. The worst thing is that all the other aspects of using my iPhone and iPod are so slick.

Minitab

Lotus Notes is one piece of software that makes Microsoft look especially good at writing software. It's just awful, and has hardly changed in more than a decade. Yet it's still so widely used!

iTunes? What's the issue? It's just the front end to a database. I know it gets updated more regularly than night follows day, but quite frankly for what it's designed to do, it's great. And in 4 years of iPhone use, not once have I had a sync issue, or lost all my music, contacts or whatever.

SAP is clunky, and not the easiest to use compared to most home consumer software, but for commercial software it's actually pretty good. As someone with quite a bit of experience of implementing Warehouse Management Software Systems, you need look no further than many commercially available WMS software. Most of it is bloody awful, designed by geeks for use by geeks. Oh, and they ALWAYS have quickly anomalies that have to be worked round. My first serious role post uni, I had to investigate where £250k worth of mobile phones were disappearing each year inside the Vodafone distribution centre. Short answer... They weren't disappearing, the shite software was creating ghost stock when certain stock movements were performed. Took me a while to find that one, but when I did it was totally obvious and regular as clockwork... Shite software "costing" them £250k a year and I managed to find it and fix it inside a few months!

As someone above has said, I can't get on with Propellheads Reason either. But that's probably cos it tries to be too clever, emulating a real hardware studio, including all the old school cable patching and midi sync etc. Not for me ta, makes Logic seem like child's play. That said, I'm no Ableton fan either.

has to be the Oracle timesheet system I have to use!

Real Player - gone (I hope) but not forgotten, has screwed up more PCs than any virus I've come across.

SAP - a facade of integration across a bag of acquisitions.

I really can't see why people have such a problem with iTunes - my first mp3 player came with a thing called Musicmatch Jukebox, now that really was an unusable waste of disk space.

Never had itunes crash, never had a problem with it recognizing ipods (I've had several) or iphones, never had a syncing problem.

Also agree with elfin about deleting all your music then syncing your ipod again. Duuuuhhhhhhhhhhh.

Minitab

Why?

Can be a touch confusing to start if you don't have a bit of guidance to start, but for doing what it does, it's awesome! There is literally nothing that comes close...

Anybody who isn't saying Lotus notes hasn't yet used it.

It needs destroying. There is no other *anything* that makes me feel such sorrow for people when they say they have to use it. If one person said they had to use an iron lung and another said they had to use Lotus notes, Well... you can see where I'm going.

itunes is ok I guess, but it is very apple. Everything looks ok but there's something a bit dirty about it. Nothing you can put your finger on, it's quite gentle, like a really competant paedo, it feels wrong but you can't say why. Taking control of your music collection, knowing where you are, controlling how many computers you can play music on.

If microsoft had invented it there would have been an uproar but apple are great at lubricating stuff.

itunes is ok I guess, but it is very apple. Everything looks ok but there's something a bit dirty about it. Nothing you can put your finger on, it's quite gentle, like a really competant paedo,

As gentle as a really competent pedo? Best metaphor ever.

HP Service Manager. I used to think Remedy was bad. Not compared to this.

ITunes has no place on a PC.

[i]Best metaphor ever[/i]

Especially because iTunes leaves you feeling ****ed over, however gently.

iTunes is fine, though it didn't work that well on my old PC

MS Word gets my vote, it drives me mental. Why can't you just put stuff where you want it to go?

MS Word gets my vote, it drives me mental. Why can't you just put stuff where you want it to go?

I had to use Word in my last job. Luckily, I can get away with using Notepad in this job! Life is so much easier when you have only have a choice of one font and one font size 😀

Supercalc

I typed a weeks of MIS from every post office letter sorting machine into it once sat next to a boss with minging armpits.

itunes is ok I guess, but it is very apple. Everything looks ok but there's something a bit dirty about it. Nothing you can put your finger on, it's quite gentle, like a really competant paedo, it feels wrong but you can't say why. Taking control of your music collection, knowing where you are, controlling how many computers you can play music on.

You don't have to buy music through iTunes! In fact I'd positively discourage it myself, but then I like to have it on CD too and when I rip to MP3 (not AAC of course) I want to choose a much higher bit rate and be able to play it on any device. iTunes software doesn't stop this unless you bought it from the iTunes store. Simple answer, don't buy from iTunes!

Lotus Notes. Still have to suffer that for most things other than email.

SAP netweaver. The most laptop slowing, vile bit of SW I have ever had forced on my laptop by Corporate it. I reckon it has added 10 mins to the bootup time.

SAP in general. At least the implementation the multinational I work for have in place.

Many, many in-house things that some "well meaning amateur" has spent months "writing".

Arcot VPN SW.

Power point. Not because it is hard to use or clunky. Just because every middle manager or wannabe thinks it is absolutely the only way to deliver any information at all. ##must take deep breath and count to ten##

SAP gets my vote. squander all profits as it was named in my previous company. Maybe it was poorly integrated but it felt like going back to MsDos. The company paid millions for it too. They messed up SalesForce.com which was a major achievement in itself

I have no problems ever with iTunes and I run loads of devices and music. Strange how polarised the opinions are here for iTunes.

I have never got to grips with gimp or photoshop... just can't seem to find the way in

Lotus notes is rubbish

anyone ever used MEGA? that's terrible

I reckon everybody suggesting something generic like MS Word rather than SAP hasn't ever [s]used[/s] been forced to use SAP. In comparison MS Word is really user friendly (actually I don't really hate Word that much at all now I've spent long enough learning how to use it).

I should also mention that I have no problem at all with any software I've written 😉

I'm very happy. A swift reading of this thread - apologies if I've missed anything salient - shows no open source software moaned about. This makes me happy, and confirms my own prejudices. Not that I think free/open source is perfect........

I reckon everybody suggesting something generic like MS Word rather than SAP hasn't ever used been forced to use SAP.

Yes strangely people are citing the worst software they've used rather than suggesting software they've never used. 🙂

Anyone who thinks Word is bad has lead a very charmed life in software terms, that's all I can say.

Waderider - there is plenty of open source toss out there, but people tend not to be forced to use it by large inflexible organisations who've spent millions and have to justify it.

Just to throw something else into the mix - PVCS, a source control system. Sort of.

PS for all those Word haters - you know you can turn off auto correct with a couple of clicks, don't you? And it does let you format the document how you want it. I suspect user error here.

Eziwine. Might have been ok on windows 95, not so good now.
OSX 10.7 & iOS5 have both been disappointing in their instability so far.

waderider - OK, just for that I'll pitch in and say that Open Office is so laughably bad it's barely worth calling it software. Will that do?

PS for all those Word haters - you know you can turn off auto correct with a couple of clicks, don't you? And it does let you format the document how you want it. I suspect user error here.

I think you miss the point. Maybe 5%* of users of Word actually know how to use it. The other 95% are forced to use it and don't care for the myriad of features it has. Nothing is more painful than having to work with a template some 'expert' user has created with multiple formatting options and 'styles'. In a past life I must have spent something like 20% of my time on any particular document on actual content and then the other 80% getting the format right for corporate 'style'

*This figure is obviously a complete guess so don't take my word (pun) for it! 😆

Why iTunes?
It's mostly the disappointment. My iPod Touch is great, so I was expecting the same from iTunes, plus Apple stuff just works, right?
But it's so hard to do anything, normally I just give up. Why are some menu items greyed out, why can't I delete stuff, how do you sync videos? I know I could read the manual, but all the other Apple stuff is so much better.

I've always thought Mapinfo is fairly intuitive, more so than ArcGIS in any case. Neither makes me want to throw my computer across the room.

Lotus Notes ... without a doubt, the most infuriating piece of software I've used on a regular basis.

I used to work for IBM, and even talked to the developer group about making it follow the conventional rules of working in windows UI, and they would point blank return with ' no, this is the way we do it '

Windows. Without a doubt. Closely followed by MS Word then Internet Exploder.

ANSYS workbench. Soul destroying when it corrupts your files mid project. I have many many Gb of backups as a result of this, completely wasteful and hogs my time.

Gambit - incredibly poor data entry system. Archaic.

There are more but I'm just so angry with Workbench right now!

I'd agree with Windows, particularly the earlier versions, but I could never get annoyed with it because it's a miracle it works at all.

iTunes is the most disappointing Apple product because it has so many functions added to it that don't really belong in a music organisation application.

[i]I used to work for IBM, and even talked to the developer group about making it follow the conventional rules of working in windows UI, and they would point blank return with ' no, this is the way we do it ' [/i]

Yeah, 2 years for me there. Any software associated with IBM is going to be awful. Lotus Notes, that horrible AT&T VPN software, what was that crazy web server they wrote, jeeZ, talk about useless! They're like Apple in that they do things differently to be different, not because it's a better way of doing it but at least Apple stuff usually looks nice, IBM stuff all looks gash and behaves like a gibbon on acid.

if I were looking to nominate something more purposefully toss than notes, it'd be IBM's version of Java. There's a perfectly good version of Java made by Sun out there. But no, IBM have to make their own version which is compatible with nothing (thus spoiling the ethos of Java), works really badly when you do get it going and just causes everyone so much pain. You can hear the anxiety in the IBM staff's voice when you highlight yet another thing that doesn't work with it.

But they don't care, 'We're IBM, suck it'.

We have a citrix portal which is running an 8 year old version of Java because the IBM laptops don't work with anything else. So all our users who use that same portal have great difficulty using it.

if it was up to me I'd ditch SAP, screw up the IBM contract and kick 'em all out the door, arrogant cocks.

EMC ControlCenter, bloated, overly complex, GUI designed by engineers and agent-based so there's always at least some parts of it broken.

Itunes is bloody awefull. Importing music from an old collection is just soul destroying.

wtf is the problem with compilation albums? Why cant it just leave them together as an album and not split every track into seperate, unrelated singles. It completely relies on ID tagging and regardless of following several different guides on tagging to resolve this, it still doesnt work. Ive even had the biggest apple fanboy in the world known at work as IBob, fail miserably at resolving the issue. I even went to the itunes store and their solution was to create a playlist for each album? your having a laugh arnt you!

Every other mp3 player Ive used just works. Leaves my file system in order and just plays the bloody music as it apears in the folders. But I****, Noooo.

And dont even get me started on what the software does to my pc.

wtf is the problem with compilation albums? Why cant it just leave them together as an album and not split every track into seperate, unrelated singles. It completely relies on ID tagging and regardless of following several different guides on tagging to resolve this, it still doesnt work. Ive even had the biggest apple fanboy in the world known at work as IBob, fail miserably at resolving the issue. I even went to the itunes store and their solution was to create a playlist for each album? your having a laugh arnt you!

http://www.apple.com/itunes/how-to/index.html#makecd-compilations

Every other mp3 player Ive used just works. Leaves my file system in order and just plays the bloody music as it apears in the folders. But I****, Noooo.

You can set itunes to leave the files where they are, you don't have to let it manage the files.

wtf is the problem with compilation albums? Why cant it just leave them together as an album and not split every track into seperate, unrelated singles.

IIRC if you select all the files, then go to 'info', there is a tick-box for 'mark as compilation' or something.

iptables.

Managed to firewall myself out of the server - 2hr round trip to get physical access to unlock it.

I think Windows NT is on my list too.

Windows XP, on my work machine. A mighty beast, hamstrung by an OS old enough to be learning algebra school.

Lotus Notes - I just used it for 5 month and thankfully yesterday I was migrated to Outlook. The IT bod tried to tell be that Notes / Domino was better which it may be for him but not to any client users who waste hours every week because of it.

I made this to show why I hate Word (one of the reasons!)

+1 Lotus Notes.
Incredible that people are still using it (or trying to) after all these years.
I once went to IBM in Austin TX to try and integrate our software with Notes/Domino. After two days of fruitless fumbling in which it became clear that none of us knew what we were doing I suggested that we needed to call in high-end technical support. The IBM'ers looked sheepish and then admitted that they [i]were [/i]high-end tech support.

Motion 4, do one action, save, repeat until crash, cold reboot and repeat for days.

My work is about to bring in SAP.

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I've never come across anything quite so unintuitive. Icon design that bears no relation to any other system I've ever used. You want more info? You'll want the 'top hat' icon (headers?)

Completely inconsistent. I can learn to do something on it and if i do it regularly i can repeat. Don't use that function for a few months and you'll never find it again.

iTunes? I've never understood the haterz. I've been using it since the first Windows iPod so, er, 8 years? First on windows, then on Mac. I've never had any problems. Happily let it organise my music (it sorts it by Artist/Album) and since there's never really any need to go into the music folders it doesn't really matter how it does it. It used to be a bit of a resource hog on the PC but it still runs fine on a 4 year, bottom of the range, iMac. No-one I've seen use it seems to have any trouble finding or playing music.

I had a few non-apple MP3 players and the sync with Win Media Player NEVER worked properly. Nor did syncing music with Nokia or Sony phones. Yes you could drag and drop but one of them sorted the tracks into the order you dragged them across in and ignored the tags!

Compilations - tick the 'compilation' box in the tags. If you don't want it split by artist when you search set something in the 'album artist' field (sometimes you want that with DJ albums). It does rely on the tagging BUT Apple bought and maintain and good database - it's very rare i have to alter anything i rip.

I think most peoples problems come from badly tagged music they've ripped of the net.

Itunes. resource heavy clunky and completely user unfriendly.
it turns my pc into a crash zone. If i try to run anything else at the same time, it all crashes.
album covers!!! what a faff. New CD and it can't find and album cover for it! as for compilations or greatest hits it just can't work out what is going on.

i only use it once a week to update my podcasts. the rest of the time it sits there noisily trying to update itself every couple of hours. PITA!

iptables.

Managed to firewall myself out of the server - 2hr round trip to get physical access to unlock it.

LittleTones - Member
+1 SAP - who put together this dross?

SAP's potentially great - it's all in the implementation. A bit like saying that a bike porn wonderbike is crap because it was put together by a monkey at Halfords...

My work is about to bring in SAP.

I've never come across anything quite so unintuitive. Icon design that bears no relation to any other system I've ever used. You want more info? You'll want the 'top hat' icon (headers?)

Completely inconsistent. I can learn to do something on it and if i do it regularly i can repeat. Don't use that function for a few months and you'll never find it again.

Top hat = header - I always thought that was fairly sensible. Often though developers will use whatever icon they like the look of so it's not SAP who make it inconsistent.

Can't say that the problems mentioned are an issue here - our users seem very positive about SAP - in fact, they always boast about it to visiting companies...

User error, yes. It's still on my list though.

New CD and it can't find and album cover for it! as for compilations or greatest hits it just can't work out what is going on.

Pretty sure it gets it's album art from iTunes store. If it's not in the store it won't find it. Easy enough to remedy and you can drag an image directly from a web browser to the 'artwork' space in properties.

As above for compilations/greatest hits. They do seem to be the most inconsistently tagged albums - I think because there's not a consistent view on whether a greatest hits album is a compilation or not. It's a different selection of tracks from the original albums so *is* but is all one artist so *isn't*. Depends on your point of view.

Still, when I reripped all my music with iTunes (originally done with LAME) there was massively less clean up work to do.

User error, yes. It's still on my list though.

[i]wtf is the problem with compilation albums? Why cant it just leave them together as an album and not split every track into seperate, unrelated singles. It completely relies on ID tagging ...[/i]

Therefore I re-tag everything with [url= http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ ]MP3Tag[/url] before adding to iTunes library.
Compilations I tag Artist as Various - [album name] , then the track names as [Artist]-[Title].
Simple to do with mp3tag.

Can't say that the problems mentioned are an issue here - our users seem very positive about SAP - in fact, they always boast about it to visiting companies...

really? Universally hated where I came across it.

Auto formatting in word can be a PITA, but you can turn it off really easily -

Word 2002 or Word 2003
1.Start Word.
2.On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect (Or Autoformat) Options.
3.Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.
4.Under Replace as you type, Apply as you type, and Automatically as you type, select or clear the check boxes for the options that you want to enable or disable. After you do this, you can format these items manually.
5.Click OK.

Word 2007 or Word 2010
1.Start Word.
2.In Word 2007, click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Word Options.

In Word 2010, select Options from the File tab.
3.Click Proofing, and then click AutoCorrect(or Autoformat) Options.
4.On the AutoCorrect tab, click to select or to clear the check boxes for the options that you want to enable or disable. After you do this, you can format these items manually.
5.Click OK two times.(

really? Universally hated where I came across it.

Yeah, it's very polarised - people seem to either be positive or negative about it - rarely in the middle IME. That said, most of the bad implementations I've seen, the story behind it is of management people who don't understand what they're doing making decisions about it that make no sense at all...

Therefore I re-tag everything with MP3Tag before adding to iTunes library.
Compilations I tag Artist as Various - [album name] , then the track names as [Artist]-[Title].
Simple to do with mp3tag.

Not only is re-taging years worth of music a royal PITA that no other mp3 player needs, it dosent always work! I thought Id made that clear, despite very very carefully checking the album and artist tags, and checking the stupid compilation box, it still chooses to split up the albums. It just dosent work.

Its not intuative, and everything is a work around. Its rubbish.

I think you miss the point. Maybe 5%* of users of Word actually know how to use it.

+1. That's another drum I've been banging for years.

Often though developers will use whatever icon they like the look of so it's not SAP who make it inconsistent.

This is true, however, it should be normalised before it goes into a production environment.

In a previous job, we were implementing a new back office system. I didn't have a lot of dealings with it personally (I'm not wholly sure what it was even, a glorified CRM I think). My lasting memory of it (other than the constant whining from the users) was that one of the primary toolbar buttons (for 'new call' or 'save' or some such) was an icon of Odie.

Yes, -that- Odie. No, me neither.

mboy - Member

Minitab

Why?

Can be a touch confusing to start if you don't have a bit of guidance to start, but for doing what it does, it's awesome! There is literally nothing that comes close...

granted it's about 9 years since I used it, but at the time I was using SPSS which was light years ahead and trying to use minitab as part of a postgrad course I was doing through work was hair pulling stuff. Clunky, old-fashioned and far too basic (in comparison to SPSS at the time)

I generally find its more a case of the longer you spend with any piece of software the more you hate it.

I work with Oracle, SAP, stuff I've written and most M$ products (office, sql, exchange etc). I hate them all.

The only thing I hate more is bloody printers. I hate them with a passion, can we please just stick to one interpretation of postscript, it'll make my life so much easier.

iTunes hits the top of the list for me. It's also nearly impossible to uninstall from a Mac without delving into the Terminal, which is somewhat ironic given Apple's criticism for IE in Windows. 🙂

At work I have to use something called LPC-NG, which is a nice concept (saves hours) but poorly executed and tempts me to see how tough a ToughBook actually is.

Oh yeah... DezB. Just double click on the word you want.

Yes, -that- Odie. No, me neither.

LOL. I'm trying to work out which one that would be 🙂

SAP's actually very good at standard (within SAP) icons - you rarely see anything random so it's usually when someone's developped something that it's odd(ie)

I'll bet this is Odie

[img] [/img]

That's the "test" icon.

Create should be [img] [/img] (same as windows basically)

Execute should be [img] [/img]

Maya made me want to gauge someone's eyes out with a rusty spoon. The animators loved it, but anyone who was just doing modelling longed for 3D Studio Max again.

maya is 3dsmax in boxing gloves 🙂

no problems with itunes here, does exactly what it says on the tin. XP is crap to use but boy it can be stable. Weird, hateful awful to use but at the same time wonderful Zbrush.

Flaperon - Member
Oh yeah... DezB. Just double click on the word you want.

Er, WRONG.

The only thing I hate more is bloody printers.

Oh, wise words. For as long as I've been around computers, getting a paragraph of text onto a piece of paper has been a pain in the ass.

I'll bet this is Odie

Nope. Odie.

[img] [/img]

The person who wrote Lotus Notes should be hanged by his testicles.

Obviously the issues with it are as glaring as all the memory it hogs and the constant crashing but...

..who in their right mind would choose to highlight unread emails in...

...red.

Cretin

As gentle as a really competent pedo? Best metaphor ever.

It's a similie.

Which is why you're wrong about itunes. For a consumer only piece of software, why does it need so much impenetrable stuff found deep inside menus.

I could make the UI so much easier to use for so many people.

It is the reason why I assume that Apple actually hates its customers, and the reason I don't intend to own more than the ipod I have.

DezB - Member

Flaperon - Member
Oh yeah... DezB. Just double click on the word you want.

Er, WRONG.

Works for me? 😕

No it doesn't! Look at my video - I wanted the SPACE [i]BEFORE[/i] "couple" and "couple" - double clicking selects "Couple" and the space AFTER it. It couldn't be any bloody clearer than in a VIDEO FFS.
WORD annoys me (hence the tone!)
Why can't I just select the bits my mouse moves over eh?
SO: [u]WRONG[/u].

Slight highjack. If iTunes is so universally hated, how do you get round it? For installing updates, syncing music what other option is there. Yes of course you can sync music using Spotify etc, but as soon as the iPod is connected to iTunes to do an update it will revert to the original iTunes library. Or am I missing something

Another Vote for Lotus Notes being one of the most dire piece of software in the world. I used to work for IBM. It's crap and IBM should do the world a favour and stop selling it.

They developed Same Time just so you didn't have to use the email function...yet call it a social work tool.

I left IBM to join another firm this year. To then find they had Notes. In my induction course I was telling the trainer how it worked (or more importantly it doesn't)

Why can't I just select the bits my mouse moves over eh?

I concur with lotus notes being awful

secondly ive not used SAP as a user but as a source for my systems its an absolute PITA anyone else found their KUNNR table yet 🙂

Someone mentioned MS Analysis services, as a specialist in it i would disagree its not hard to use its hard to learn!

KUNNR isn't a table, it's a field 🙂

The main customer master table is KNA1 with KNB1 and KNVV holding Company Code and Sales Org data (there are other tables too but those three are the main ones, linked by KUNNR - customer number)

And I'd say that SAP is very logical when it comes to table structures, certainly compared to other systems.

Oh and there are much funnier names, anyway 🙂

Lotus Notes, thank god I haven't had to use it for a couple of years. iTunes, ditto - got rid of my iPod, no longer have to suffer it. MS Project is fine at the start of a project, but as soon as you start having to insert tasks and divide others and move your resources... another nightmare.

I quite like Word, though - especially the ribbon. I hate having to go back to the 2003 interface.