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

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 Iwank, 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 were 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.

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.
User error. People have all sorts of issues with iptables – all can be solved by spending a little time reading the manual – it’s not actually that complicated (and a lot easier to configure than anything similar on Windows). Or do you expect a firewall to let you in to fix it when you accidentally lock it down too hard?

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.

Fair enough – I used to just turn it off, until I found out how easy it was to configure. Bears no comparison with Word, let alone SAP.

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 …

Therefore I re-tag everything with 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

That’s the “test” icon.

Create should be (same as windows basically)

Execute should be

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.

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.[/quote]

Works for me? 😕

No it doesn’t! Look at my video – I wanted the SPACE BEFORE “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: WRONG.

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?

Holding the left button down and moving the mouse over the word I want to select works just fine for me in Word 2007 (however many spaces there are before or after the word). User error.

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.