Your most hated piece of software

[toestrap]

Any software that comes on a disk with a phone or that arrives with any bit of hardware, come to that. They seem to be programmed by the reception class. Useful to a point but never integrate with anything, have a complete disregard for normal layout conventions and fall over when most needed e.g. restoring backups, Sony.

Also software preinstalled on memory sticks. I have a SanCruzer (sp?) drive which has some cr*p office suite on it. The computer thinks that bit of the memory stick is a CD and for the life of me I can't get rid of it either using Windows or Linux.

Thank you for letting me get all that off my chest 

[essexian]

Windows 8. 


I say bring back Windows 3.1. I knew what I was doing with that.



(We have a new Customer Database which I was part of the design team for.... its completely crap as the techs ignored me and the other end users questioned and produced something while being great for producing reports, is totally rubbish for doing what it was supposed to do: recording client contacts. Sigh.)

[TimC]

General grumble:

Computer screens are trending towards widescreen.

Trending?Trending?

I'm typing on a 2005 Sony Vaio VGN-S5. It has a 13.3" 16:9 screen. Widescreen wasn't new even then!

How long before a fashion becomes a trend becomes the default?

[L CC]

I quite like excel.


Every single piece of software for dealing with GPS devices has flaws so big I end up shouting at something.

[Euan Uzami]

My current work's code surpasses most of my previous thresholds of offensiveness.
it's (from what I've seen) actually not too bad to use as a user but completely unmaintainable from a developer point of view.
Massive nested if/switch/cases half way across the screen, 8000-line classes, stupidly-vague named methods like 'doStuff' and 'getItems' - basically it's just been done without much thought given to those that may have to come along and maintain it in the future. Annoying 'cos it's more about laziness and selfishness than not knowing about best practice. You don't need to have had formal training to know how to do it properly you just need to be able to spare a thought for other people.
Basically every task involves cleaning up somebody else's mess. I shouldn't have to come to work to see that any more than I should have to come to dirty cups in the sink, or clean up muck off the floor.
But, it IS 10 miles away from home so I can cycle in without getting up ridiculously early AND go to the gym in the evening, so I play their game.

In terms of commercial products, Office 2013, for being completely unintuitive compared to previous versions, every thing I need to know how to do I have to lookup on the internet how to do it. But at least you can do it somehow. They've tried to make it fancy without giving much thought to users who are used to previous versions.

Adobe reader for having to update itself more often than you actually use it.

Any software that keeps bothering and nagging without giving you anything back for it.
"[So-and-so] needs your attention"
"[So-and-so] requires to update. Click here to download the update now."
"Do you accept the license agreement? UNtick here if you DON'T want to opt out of NOT being sent NO emails." *
"Sorry - the update failed! Could not connect to the download server! Your attempt to update [so-and-so] failed! [So-and-so] could not update!"
 - well, don't then! I didn't want to frigging update it in the first place. iTunes is a bugger for this.

Any software that constantly manages to find something more important to do than what I, the user, want it to do.

* reminds me - the most comical incidence of the stupid double-negative mailing list optout was at a previous job: the tick box said "please UNtick if you do NOT wish to be sent emails".
The code behind said
"if ( ! checkbox.Checked ) { sendEmail(); } "
 
I've no idea whether it was deliberate or not - the depressing thing is I suspect not.

[Oaky]

excluding Microsoft Windows on account of being too obvious:

I on the other hand am not going to exclude Windows, on account of Windows 7 stealing half of last weekend from me when it decided to crap out completely forcing a reinstall.  At least I had the majority of my important stuff in DropBox, and was able to retrieve VMs and a bunch of other local files from the disk using system rescue CD.

Festering pile of turd.

[mrcharly-YHT]

iTunes
I've spent quite some time recovering stuff for my son when iTunes has removed all of his music after a failed content.

Framemaker.
Seriously, anyone who thinks Word is bad should try to use this piece of shite. It has such wonderous 'features' as a search dialog that is in a fixed position on the screen - even when that is obscuring a found item. I know someone who resigned when they were told they would have to use it.
Word, well, I can make it sit up and beg. Most of the problems are caused by people failing to use styles and trying to bodge things. 

[CAMRAMan]

Windows print manager. It is a shit pacakge that defies all logic. It ignores cancel requests and bulds up queues that shouldn't exist. Awful.

[Pingu]

Whatever you do, do *not* use word's automatic section-numbering system.

It seems to work fine on the first release of a document.
But if you try to edit it, the numbering just goes haywire.
It takes *hours* to fix the fucked-up section-numbering for what was a 1-minute edit.

BTDTGTTS 

[simonp]

Windows Update.

[mcshroom]

This morning - MS Project.

[CommuteTooFar]

XCode, fortunately I do not need to use it much because SlickEdit rescues me.

[pcolbeck]

Microsoft Word.

[T42]

The Olympus Pen E-P3 user interface.

[Ham]

Whatever you do, do *not* use word's automatic section-numbering system.

It seems to work fine on the first release of a document.
But if you try to edit it, the numbering just goes haywire.
It takes *hours* to fix the fucked-up section-numbering for what was a 1-minute edit.

BTDTGTTS 

A couple of small tips for everyone that nominates Word as a result of suffering from issues such as this and other similar where stuff "just sticks".

To sort out mega mess, or when any given section doesn't behave as you think it ought to - select the area (whole doc if needed) -> Styles (Alt-Ctrl-Shft-S) -> Clear all. Then you will need to reformat. Use the format painter as much as you can, and you knew that double click on the paintbrush lets you paint multiple instances?

Really not how you want it still? or just annoying stuff like the wrong language dictionary

Styles (Alt-Ctrl-Shft-S) -> select normal, modify -> format. Change here for things like language, paragraph spacing, you name it.

Those two tips will cut hours from most people's hair pulling sessions.

Can't find a friendly old command in Word or Excel 2010? Don't want to install something like classic menu to give you your old menus back? Then download and install Microsoft's Search Commands from here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=28559

[Biggsy]

Microsoft Word for me too - but not necessarily because there's anything wrong with it, but because it's what everyone expects me to use.  I wish everyone used Lotus Ami Pro! 

[Kim]

Can't understand people's dislike for iTunes, it's one of my favourite pieces of software. Each to their own.

Windows media player on the other hand! Can't stand it!

The fundamental difference between iTunes and WMP is that it's entirely possible to go through life and have nothing to do with WMP.  iTunes, on the other hand, is highly integrated into the One True Way of using certain fruity gadgets, which means you end up having to fight with it to make your mum's iPod work, for example.

It's all been downhill since Winamp 2.0, I reckon.

[Afasoas]

Windows Update - without fail. I've got it setup so updates are installed on my say so, but so many people still lose work when Windows update forces a reboot during the ten minutes they've taken a tea break. It's abysmal.

Further more, even in Windows 8, Windows Update seems incabable of handling dependencies and installing things in the right order so updates don't fail.
And then, once updates have been downloaded and the PC is pending reboot, that PC's practically unusable.


Any application that once installed, unecessarily runs a background service to:
- handle updates
- listen for connected devices
- "speed launch" - I'm looking at you Adobe!
- provide "helper" classes

Also, operating systems that run background processes to support features only a small segment of the user base will be interested in. Surely if there are no connected printers, a print spooler service isn't needed. If there's no media installed on the PC, then the Windows Media Player sharing service isn't needed.

Adobe/Apple/Google/MS Office/Team Viewer/Dropbox/Spotify - you all suck because of the amount of memory your background processes use.
If you use a PC that runs these apps, you are really going to feel the effect of all that memory sucked away unless you have >6 GB


Bloated Software
I've switched back to Firefox and also now using Thunderbird because the alternatives are $hit - but both are quite bloaty. Thunderbird uses more ram then Outlook, but it does manage to background sync mail boxes instead of locking up for endless hours when synchronising mail. Firefox is very bloaty compared to Chrome, but Chrome takes an age to render a page now - presumably because of the data it's sending to the mothership which each request.


Then, singularly, Perfect Photo Suite.
The results are great but seriously - I've invested in a behemoth of a PC just for you.


And finally, any software which when installed trys to surreptitiously install anything else - e.g. browser toolbars, virus scanners, system checkers etc. If I wanted those things, I would look for them myself.


Oh, one more. Seagate GoFlex drives which require users to sign up and pay monthly to benefit from the backup software - especially when rooting the device permits the same benefits via RSync. How easy is it to ship a nice front end with that? Don't think it should cost a fiver a month.

I think I'm done. Meh.

My answer to most of this is using two PCs. The laptop is general purpose and has piles of crap on it. The desktop is only used for photo editing and doesn't have anything I don't need for that purpose installed. It runs dropbox and teamviewer, but only when I ask it too.

[mike]

There should be a special place in hell reserved for Salesforce.com..

came here to say exactly the same, it's absolutely awful to use.

I'm the admin on our setup and had a call with our salesforce rep last week.  She told me our useage was 'impressively high', i bought her down to earth with a bit of a bump with 'but that's because sales people Have to use it. They all absolutely hate it because it's so badly designed and I'm desperate to get to the end of our contract year and change to something else'.

Microsoft Dynamics is apparently the one that's easiest to use (which surprises me). It's also about 1/2 the price of salesforce, which doesnt surprise me at all.  We have to pay 500 quid / year / user for salesforce.  Zoho is much cheaper but I've heard a lot of tales of woe about it.

[Palinurus]

Many bits of equipment at work have terrible software- but these are specialized bits of test equipment or other machines so there's not much point in posting those here. In any case I may very much dislike some of these but SAP I actually hate.

[andyoxon]

Adobe Shockwave - when it crashes, again, and again, and...

[caerau]

General grumble:

Computer screens are trending towards widescreen.
Why is that?

I'd hazard a guess at games playing.

I hear that the PC games market is dying off -  consoles have cornered the market, along with tablets and smartphones.


People really really *do* watch lots of movies on computers now.  I work with lots of students and they're well into it I can assure you.

[mcshroom]

A secretary at one of my previous employers had turned her screen round 90^o so she had it look like an A4 sheet of paper.

[caerau]

My University is about to abandon Lotus Notes...


TFFT 

[caerau]

A secretary at one of my previous employers had turned her screen round 90^o so she had it look like an A4 sheet of paper.

Yes I've seen that before.  I actually like the widescreen though as I can have two documents open side by side which is really really useful sometimes.