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. 😐

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 were they thinking.”

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

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.

Best metaphor ever

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 used 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 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 ‘

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 Iwank, Noooo.

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