8 ms·

Ask HN: What is the worst software that you have to use?

42 points by zxcvvcxz 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
misiti3780 10y ago
JIRA and a very close second is Confluence.
- psjoholm 10y ago
  I would rate them the other way around, barely...
  - viraptor 10y ago
    Which is sad because the pre-acquisition confluence wasn't even bad...
    - elbrian 10y ago
      It still isn't. People just like to complain about popular things on HN.
      - viraptor 10y ago
        I do think it's bad now. It crossed the line with the removal of markup editing.
- ndespres 10y ago
  I administer my company's internal Confluence server and author most of the content, and I have a few complaints but overall I love using it. What do you dislike about it?
  - spanktheuser 10y ago
    My 2¢: Confluence's primary job is to share and manage lots of written documentation. If I wanted to make such software I'd make it fast, the curation/management job lightweight and inline, and emphasize readability and promote fast comprehension of information with layout and design. Confluence is slow, curation/management is ponderous and the design ignores hundreds of years of research / practice in visual processing of information.
    - misiti3780 10y ago
      My biggest complaint is that it doesnt support markdown correctly.
- Underqualified 10y ago
  We have Bamboo which I would consider the worst of the Atlassian stack. Access rights, submodules and remote agents don't mix well.
- jensvdh 10y ago
  JIRA is horrendous. The search is a pain.
  - kyriakos 10y ago
    Probably the only end user software you need to look at the documentation to do any search but a simple keyword search
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- clay_to_n 10y ago
  For Confluence: we've found a much better alternative is Quip - we all love it after the switch. Dropbox Paper is another new alternative that people seem to like.
- meerita 10y ago
  I like Confluence, I hate some pre/styled things they do, but in general is not a bad wiki software and it's integrated with Jira. The worst is no one at my company reads these docs :)
benmarks 10y ago
iOS mail app. New threading is just... confusing.
- sawmurai 10y ago
  Yes, this is by far the worst app on my phone.
- mamon 10y ago
  ... and composing email with more than one attachment is next to impossible due to lack of file system. There's (allegedly) workaround with uploading one of the attachment to iCloud first, but I'm refusing to use cloud storage for any piece of my private data.
- altern8tif 10y ago
  Airmail is awesome. Just putting it out here.
greencore 10y ago
MS Team Foundation Server (SVC)
swanson 10y ago
Sharepoint
paragraft 10y ago
Kiln from Fogcreek. Slow on a good day, it just mysteriously stopped noticing my commits in my activity stream some four years ago, you can't have reviews spanning multiple repos, they've blown off pull-requests as a feature for years. At least we managed to transition from FogBugz.
sawmurai 10y ago
Not right now but had the "pleasure" of using and administering it ... "HP Service Center".
- tradersam 10y ago
  Recently got a new HP laptop strictly for playing games. Almost threw it out the window because of the stupid HP Service Center. Even when you disable it in every possible way, it doesn't leave you alone.
  - sawmurai 10y ago
    Ah, I meant HP OpenView Service Center, nowadays known as HP Service Manager.
viraptor 10y ago
Quickbase and NetSuite. Can't decide which one is worse.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
Probably (Linux) Skype. I have a phone number with them that I depend on, so I keep using it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Underqualified 10y ago
Lotus Notes.
- LVB 10y ago
  I put up with it for 12 years. It was genuinely a highlight of switching jobs when I got to leave that behind.
- beat 10y ago
  I want to both upvote and downvote this. Upvote because it's just spectacularly bad, downvote because being reminded of its existence made me throw up in my mouth a little.
- n2dasun 10y ago
  I opened this thread to look for Lotus Notes.
- citrusx 10y ago
  You know, I spent a lot of profitable years building apps on top of Notes/Domino during the height of its existence. And, I have to say - for all its flaws, quirks, and limitations, there was no faster way (except perhaps Delphi?) to get small, simple, and highly business-specific internal apps done in a large organization. The reason was that it was totally batteries-included. You had authentication, authorization, a decent NoSQL database (it was the inspiration for CouchDB, if you weren't aware), two (eventually three, when Java was added) languages for writing apps (one of which was kind-of functional), local and server-based event buses, full-text search, integrated email... The list keeps going. 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.
oldsklgdfth 10y ago
Serena Dimensions, proprietary configuration management
gii2 10y ago
Sharepoint, Rally, Chatter by Salesforce
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sornars 10y ago
Cognos
ndespres 10y ago
Lately for me it's the iOS Music app. Every iOS release it gets further away from the original purpose. Off the top of my head, the "Search" screen used to show the last 10+ things I searched for (artists, playlists, songs, etc). Now it only shows the last 3 things I searched for, and fills the rest of the screen up with what's trending on the iTunes store. I didn't ask for that! 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.
- chrismealy 10y ago
  I feel like they're trying to be like Spotify, but as every change they make to Music makes it worse, they're just driving me to use Spotify more. For example, the list of albums from an artist is almost unusable now. Everything looks pretty but usability is poor.
corobo 10y ago
Basecamp 3. 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.
- danpalmer 10y ago
  Basecamp is Omakase.
  - corobo 10y ago
    I can only assume (without Googling the answer) that's that Japanese thing where someone pokes another person in the backside with their two index fingers because that's what using Basecamp feels like.
    - meerita 10y ago
      That's actually called "Kancho" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanch%C5%8D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanch%C5%8D :D and it hurts.
    - danpalmer 10y ago
      http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.htm...
masterleep 10y ago
Siri via CarPlay, because it makes me scream with frustration with 75% likelihood upon use.
williadc 10y ago
Outlook
- tradersam 10y ago
  Outlook is incredibly powerful, but wow is it a pain to use and terribly laid out.
  - Drdrdrq 10y ago
    I always Google when I need to figure out how to change anything. The person who came up with ribbon bar should be... fired.
    - tradersam 10y ago
      The person who allowed them to put it on every Office product should be as well.
benmorris 10y ago
Quickbooks Desktop - I've had a long history with it going back well over 10 years, the basic edition all the way to Enterprise. It is consistently a headache at wherever I was working at the time. I still to this day see businesses struggle with it when they move beyond just one computer using it especially. Performance, stability and data corruption all issues that still come up even in the latest versions.
- soundlab 10y ago
  100%- what an abomination it is moving beyond one machine. Moving to the hosted Enterprise version was a complete nightmare. Finally pulled the plug and went with Xero and a series of API-based add-ons and it's like being handed the keys to a P100D in Ludicrous Speed mode. Trouble with QB is how entrenched the CPA community is around it. Our CPA howled at the idea of Xero and was the reason we stayed with QB for as long as we did.
pudo 10y ago
Atom. Because I sort of love it, and then it freezes up for just long enough to kill my train of thought.
angry-hacker 10y ago
Asana. I don't want to open links I get by email, because I know it takes always forever to load all the js crap. 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.
- rogy 10y ago
  i honestly do not understand how any text based web application can be so slow. like, WTF. 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.
- gtf21 10y ago
  Yes, we use Asana and loading it up is just too painful. I wish they'd at least use service workers or something to keep it cached and ready to go.
blaerk 10y ago
VMware vcenter, hey, let's make vcenter fresh and modern, let's make the management tool in freaking flash! This was even after the 'rise of' html5. It is by far the most painful tool I've ever used, it's so bad that you eventually start to miss the horrid Windows only client
- nxc18 10y ago
  Been there. It was the worst tech-related experience of my life. I think possibly worse than installing the Oracle db client on a RHEL server. I now understand why the sysadmins in my life are so hardened/grumpy at times.
gxespino 10y ago
JIRA - nothing is intuitive. 20+ clicks to do what I would consider the most fundamental of tasks.
- meerita 10y ago
  The "ticket" icon and the "bugs" ones are identical. You look the backlog and your eyes starts bleeding.
jakebasile 10y ago
Slack. - 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.
- mjolk 10y ago
  > so much so that even open source projects use it over IRC. 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 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).
  - jakebasile 10y ago
    I've used IRCCloud before, and I thought it worked well. They have an "internal" type plan as well with a private server, but as above I can't get anyone to try it because Slack owns the mindshare.
- falcolas 10y ago
  I'm happy (unhappy?) to inform you that hipchat is no better. In many ways, it's worse. - 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)
joshu 10y ago
Mach3. Requires Windows, is ugly, programs in VB.
PebblesHD 10y ago
Without a doubt it's either BMC Remedy Incident Management or LotusNotes. Both from a period where clutter and buttons were the norm and both long overdue to be scrapped. Remedy wins I think only because I spend hours a day trying to gather detail from its many nested screens.
zazibar 10y ago
Surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet - Xcode! 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.
- ndh2 10y ago
  https://github.com/dear-apple/dear-apple https://github.com/dear-apple/dear-apple
tradersam 10y ago
Windows 10.
sfifs 10y ago
A corporate expense reporting Java app developed by IBM. It's a lesson in how NOT to design a user interface. Everyone outside of Finance hates it.
jmuguy 10y ago
Logmein Central but thankfully we dumped them a few weeks ago when they tried to raise the price again even though we haven't seen a single new feature in years. Client is buggy, crashes all the time. Client also does this thing when you're searching for a system to conenct to where the window loses focus after every key you press so you have to type one letter at a time, clicking to focus the window in between each. Copy/paste between local system and remote breaks constantly and has literally been doing that since I started using it like 8 years ago. Up until very recently it bugged every single one of our clients to update at least one every other week so they of course ignored the prompt after a while. Since it stopped being free they've raised the price dramatically every time we renew service (again with zero new features). Their support is a joke and tells you to go post on their worthless forums where no one answers you.
arethuza 10y ago
Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) - which was rather awesome in what it did but managed to do it in a supremely crappy way.
tacostakohashi 10y ago
Wow, almost all of the applications mentioned here are of the multi-user, hosted in your local intranet, "enterprise" variety. 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.
LVB 10y ago
HipChat
obombration 10y ago
At work, it's probably JIRA. Tons of UI noise, text markup isn't what I expect it to be and nobody around here can seem to agree on what features should be used for a particular scenario. 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.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  Re: iTunes, I would love a separate Apple Music app for desktop. 95% of the time I open iTunes on desktop it's just to play music. It's cluttered with so much stuff I rarely or never use.
- kyriakos 10y ago
  Problem with jira is that there's always multiple ways of doing something and the quickest ones are the least obvious ones.
- Mandatum 10y ago
  JIRA definitely comes down to implementation and policy. I've used it in places and it has been amazingly helpful as a developer, to the point I don't know how we did anything before it.. Then going to a place that totally misuses it and causes me to triple-handle everything. 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.
- iLemming 10y ago
  JIRA. OMG. It's really awful. Its UI is cluttered and inconsistent. Search is slow. It's impossible to find things. Markup syntax is horrendous. It's easy to make mistakes and extremely difficult to fix them.
lfowles 10y ago
My first place award goes to SAP, which I have to use for time entry. 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.png https://technews.blog.olemiss.edu/files/2012/12/SAP-Logon.pn...
- synicalx 10y ago
  I'll have to say with SAP, it's really down to how it's implemented. I've seen AWFUL implementations of it (like the one you're describing) and I've seen amazing ones, generally the ones either done by SAP themselves or by their recommended partners are the best. 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.
  - lfowles 10y ago
    Maybe you can clear up some confusion I have about SAP. All I know is that it is generally customized to the business. How extensive is that customization? Slapping on business logos? Checking boxes to match the logic to current business procedures? Writing custom code? Edit: Geeze, it has its own wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_implementation
    - synicalx 10y ago
      Oh it goes way deeper than that. I used to work at a mid-sized business, maybe 220 staff at peak and they wanted SAP as a straight up CRM - cost for the building was about $120k + licencing (I don't know how much that was). 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.
Xcelerate 10y ago
MayaVi. So. Many. Bugs. And dependencies — pretty sure it never installs correctly without manually installing seventeen other packages (specific versions too). Even downloading the Enthought Canopy Suite isn't enough for it to work correctly on the first try. Also, strange rendering issues appear where the depth is out of order for density plots. And then as soon as a new version is released, the whole thing breaks and I have to "compatibility search" all the packages again. 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.
scopecreep 10y ago
Blackboard LMS They've been more worried about acquiring competitors and patent portfolios than they have about improving the software for about 10 years now.
- apricot13 10y ago
  and Moodle... no matter how good the theme, the logistics of using (and administrating/developing for) that platform is so confusing.
meerita 10y ago
Cisco's Jabber and Play Music from Google. The first, is the most horrible messaging app ever made for OS X. The second is the slowest HTML5, material design bloated app ever designed. the Android version is also a UX pain.
pasbesoin 10y ago
IBM Rational suite, in the mid-2000s. OMFG!
bodski 10y ago
Delphi XE IDE (2010): 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!
ry4n413 10y ago
Anything Apple.
pjc50 10y ago
Microsoft EVC4: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=16683 https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=166... It's wildly obsolete and only runs on XP. Previous contenders include http://source.sierrawireless.com/resources/airprime/software/open-at-application-framework/ 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.
alphabettsy 10y ago
Facebook - not 'required' though Credit Union online banking and mobile app Siri - also not 'required' AWS Web Console
- gtf21 10y ago
  +1 for the AWS Web Console. Whenever I open it I stare in panic for a few seconds as I try to understand where the one thing I'm looking for is.
greenhatman 10y ago
It used to be MySQL Workbench. But I use DataGrip now instead.
spanktheuser 10y ago
Surprised no one has mentioned iTunes yet. 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.
- joemi 10y ago
  It's never been ideal for me, but it's usually been "good enough" for me. But with each new release, it gets less so. My needs aren't really changing, but what and how iTunes delivers is changing, getting further and further away from my needs.
joeseeder 10y ago
Azures various APIs, so inconsistent and with missing different functionality in each...
odabaxok 10y ago
VersionOne
- citrusx 10y ago
  For anyone ready to hate on JIRA, spend some time using VersionOne instead. It'll take a week for you to want to run back to JIRA, screaming.
slouch 10y ago
The website where I pay my water bill.
hfsktr 10y ago
iTunes (on Windows) -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.
vmasto 10y ago
LastPass. It's amazing how bad the UI and user experience is.
- singularity2001 10y ago
  It's a love-hate thing: when Autofill works everything is perfect. if not you have to walk the "narrow path of 5 clicks" with your mouse.
iank10 10y ago
Pegasus Mail. An organization I work with still use this software... because it's free. 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.
ggreer 10y ago
Pivotal Tracker. 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.
gtf21 10y ago
Some of our customers use a "document control system" called Asite[1]. This is, without a doubt, the worst piece of software I have ever had to use. [1]: http://www.asite.com/ http://www.asite.com/
tcpekin 10y ago
Microsoft Word - after using LaTeX, especially ShareLaTeX, it's such a pain to write documents in Word that require multiple images, references, or even semi-unique formatting.
allard 10y ago
ServiceNow (don't know how much is our particular "implementation")
tilt_error 10y ago
Papyrus on Eclipse. Come to think of it... anything Eclipse.
gotofritz 10y ago
* Jira / Confluence (started out well, and now it's became basically useless. WHY NOT ALLOW MARKDOWN BY DEFAULT for a start * 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
cagey 10y ago
Accurev: I concurred with the majority of colleagues that it is "defective by design".
reustle 10y ago
Spotify. On OSX it will occasionally (every 2 or 3 days) use 100% of my cpu (pretty powerful MacBook air). Thosands of people have complained about the issue for years, yet it still isn't fixdd. I'd like to think a company with the size of Spotify could fix an issue causing so many computers to heat up and waste resources. The desktop app also loves to say I'm offline when I'm not. Additionally, the UI of their iPad app is so odd, with these sliding panels.
DougN7 10y ago
QT when building apps for iOS. It generates a bunch of files, then requires using XCode and doing more configutation on the generated files to finally get an app built.
spinupol 10y ago
Pgadmin
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kazinator 10y ago
Android 6. 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.
frik 10y ago
I avoid to use the following, and delegate: 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/Index.6.jpg 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.
rgloeckner 10y ago
www.dreckstool.de
rgloeckner 10y ago
www.dreckstool.de sort of a punching ball for some years now...
gremlinsinc 10y ago
WHMCS is bloated, antiquated but when starting up a small hosting company from scratch it's about all there is really in terms of full-coverage hosting billing platforms. Tried a few others, that just weren't etched out enough. Had to build a few custom plugins to get it to sync w/ my domains reseller, and more, it's a bit scrappy. I'd love to see someone create an open source whmcs clone using laravel, or django, or even phoenix framework. Even cooler would be a full cpanel clone w/ billing addon included for hosts, all built on phoenix w/ multi-threaded support (cpanel can itself be slow from time to time)
- tmikaeld 10y ago
  My company struggled with it for years and there is still no end in sight, we have been "hacked" several times through vulnerabilities in WHMCS. Mid last year we changed to https://www.blesta.com/ 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.
holydude 10y ago
Worst Osx mail app Linux on desktop RHEL on the server side Chrome Slack Atom Itunes Best Emacs Osx
aries1980 10y ago
WebEx: I have to use a VM on Linux to be able to speak with corporate bigshots <sarcasm>who advocate diversity</sarcasm>.
palerdot 10y ago
macos finder and built-in open/save dialog windows 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!
acidshards 10y ago
Nobody answered the Azure portal?
mdumic 10y ago
Google Calendar (web) - Come on, Google, it's 2017!
skunkiferous 10y ago
OmniTracker, the web UI! 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.
westondeboer 10y ago
Worldship. I shipping software by UPS.
jpl56 10y ago
Skype Entreprise. The UI takes a huge space on screen, parameters are hard to find, notifications are invasive.
daliwali 10y ago
The question asks about software and not specifically applications, so the worst software that I have to use are all of the web developer "tools" and frameworks that I have to deal with. 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.
philippz 10y ago
Skype. Worst software ever.

42 points by zxcvvcxz 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

misiti3780 10y ago

JIRA and a very close second is Confluence.

psjoholm 10y ago
I would rate them the other way around, barely...
- viraptor 10y ago
  Which is sad because the pre-acquisition confluence wasn't even bad...
  - elbrian 10y ago
    It still isn't. People just like to complain about popular things on HN.
    - viraptor 10y ago
      I do think it's bad now. It crossed the line with the removal of markup editing.
ndespres 10y ago
I administer my company's internal Confluence server and author most of the content, and I have a few complaints but overall I love using it. What do you dislike about it?
- spanktheuser 10y ago
  My 2¢: Confluence's primary job is to share and manage lots of written documentation. If I wanted to make such software I'd make it fast, the curation/management job lightweight and inline, and emphasize readability and promote fast comprehension of information with layout and design. Confluence is slow, curation/management is ponderous and the design ignores hundreds of years of research / practice in visual processing of information.
  - misiti3780 10y ago
    My biggest complaint is that it doesnt support markdown correctly.
Underqualified 10y ago
We have Bamboo which I would consider the worst of the Atlassian stack. Access rights, submodules and remote agents don't mix well.
jensvdh 10y ago
JIRA is horrendous. The search is a pain.
- kyriakos 10y ago
  Probably the only end user software you need to look at the documentation to do any search but a simple keyword search
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
clay_to_n 10y ago
For Confluence: we've found a much better alternative is Quip - we all love it after the switch. Dropbox Paper is another new alternative that people seem to like.
meerita 10y ago
I like Confluence, I hate some pre/styled things they do, but in general is not a bad wiki software and it's integrated with Jira. The worst is no one at my company reads these docs :)

benmarks 10y ago

iOS mail app. New threading is just... confusing.

sawmurai 10y ago
Yes, this is by far the worst app on my phone.
mamon 10y ago
... and composing email with more than one attachment is next to impossible due to lack of file system. There's (allegedly) workaround with uploading one of the attachment to iCloud first, but I'm refusing to use cloud storage for any piece of my private data.
altern8tif 10y ago
Airmail is awesome. Just putting it out here.

greencore 10y ago

MS Team Foundation Server (SVC)

swanson 10y ago

Sharepoint

paragraft 10y ago

Kiln from Fogcreek. Slow on a good day, it just mysteriously stopped noticing my commits in my activity stream some four years ago, you can't have reviews spanning multiple repos, they've blown off pull-requests as a feature for years. At least we managed to transition from FogBugz.

sawmurai 10y ago

Not right now but had the "pleasure" of using and administering it ... "HP Service Center".

tradersam 10y ago
Recently got a new HP laptop strictly for playing games. Almost threw it out the window because of the stupid HP Service Center. Even when you disable it in every possible way, it doesn't leave you alone.
- sawmurai 10y ago
  Ah, I meant HP OpenView Service Center, nowadays known as HP Service Manager.

viraptor 10y ago

Quickbase and NetSuite. Can't decide which one is worse.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

Probably (Linux) Skype. I have a phone number with them that I depend on, so I keep using it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Underqualified 10y ago

Lotus Notes.

LVB 10y ago
I put up with it for 12 years. It was genuinely a highlight of switching jobs when I got to leave that behind.
beat 10y ago
I want to both upvote and downvote this. Upvote because it's just spectacularly bad, downvote because being reminded of its existence made me throw up in my mouth a little.
n2dasun 10y ago
I opened this thread to look for Lotus Notes.
citrusx 10y ago
You know, I spent a lot of profitable years building apps on top of Notes/Domino during the height of its existence. And, I have to say - for all its flaws, quirks, and limitations, there was no faster way (except perhaps Delphi?) to get small, simple, and highly business-specific internal apps done in a large organization. The reason was that it was totally batteries-included. You had authentication, authorization, a decent NoSQL database (it was the inspiration for CouchDB, if you weren't aware), two (eventually three, when Java was added) languages for writing apps (one of which was kind-of functional), local and server-based event buses, full-text search, integrated email... The list keeps going. 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.

oldsklgdfth 10y ago

Serena Dimensions, proprietary configuration management

gii2 10y ago

Sharepoint, Rally, Chatter by Salesforce

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

sornars 10y ago

Cognos

ndespres 10y ago

Lately for me it's the iOS Music app. Every iOS release it gets further away from the original purpose. Off the top of my head, the "Search" screen used to show the last 10+ things I searched for (artists, playlists, songs, etc). Now it only shows the last 3 things I searched for, and fills the rest of the screen up with what's trending on the iTunes store. I didn't ask for that! 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.

chrismealy 10y ago
I feel like they're trying to be like Spotify, but as every change they make to Music makes it worse, they're just driving me to use Spotify more. For example, the list of albums from an artist is almost unusable now. Everything looks pretty but usability is poor.

corobo 10y ago

Basecamp 3. 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.

danpalmer 10y ago
Basecamp is Omakase.
- corobo 10y ago
  I can only assume (without Googling the answer) that's that Japanese thing where someone pokes another person in the backside with their two index fingers because that's what using Basecamp feels like.
  - meerita 10y ago
    That's actually called "Kancho" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanch%C5%8D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanch%C5%8D :D and it hurts.
  - danpalmer 10y ago
    http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.htm...

masterleep 10y ago

Siri via CarPlay, because it makes me scream with frustration with 75% likelihood upon use.

williadc 10y ago

Outlook

tradersam 10y ago
Outlook is incredibly powerful, but wow is it a pain to use and terribly laid out.
- Drdrdrq 10y ago
  I always Google when I need to figure out how to change anything. The person who came up with ribbon bar should be... fired.
  - tradersam 10y ago
    The person who allowed them to put it on every Office product should be as well.

benmorris 10y ago

Quickbooks Desktop - I've had a long history with it going back well over 10 years, the basic edition all the way to Enterprise. It is consistently a headache at wherever I was working at the time. I still to this day see businesses struggle with it when they move beyond just one computer using it especially. Performance, stability and data corruption all issues that still come up even in the latest versions.

soundlab 10y ago
100%- what an abomination it is moving beyond one machine. Moving to the hosted Enterprise version was a complete nightmare. Finally pulled the plug and went with Xero and a series of API-based add-ons and it's like being handed the keys to a P100D in Ludicrous Speed mode. Trouble with QB is how entrenched the CPA community is around it. Our CPA howled at the idea of Xero and was the reason we stayed with QB for as long as we did.

pudo 10y ago

Atom. Because I sort of love it, and then it freezes up for just long enough to kill my train of thought.

angry-hacker 10y ago

Asana. I don't want to open links I get by email, because I know it takes always forever to load all the js crap. 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.

rogy 10y ago
i honestly do not understand how any text based web application can be so slow. like, WTF. 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.
gtf21 10y ago
Yes, we use Asana and loading it up is just too painful. I wish they'd at least use service workers or something to keep it cached and ready to go.

blaerk 10y ago

VMware vcenter, hey, let's make vcenter fresh and modern, let's make the management tool in freaking flash! This was even after the 'rise of' html5. It is by far the most painful tool I've ever used, it's so bad that you eventually start to miss the horrid Windows only client

nxc18 10y ago
Been there. It was the worst tech-related experience of my life. I think possibly worse than installing the Oracle db client on a RHEL server. I now understand why the sysadmins in my life are so hardened/grumpy at times.

gxespino 10y ago

JIRA - nothing is intuitive. 20+ clicks to do what I would consider the most fundamental of tasks.

meerita 10y ago
The "ticket" icon and the "bugs" ones are identical. You look the backlog and your eyes starts bleeding.

jakebasile 10y ago

Slack. - 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.

mjolk 10y ago
> so much so that even open source projects use it over IRC. 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 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).
- jakebasile 10y ago
  I've used IRCCloud before, and I thought it worked well. They have an "internal" type plan as well with a private server, but as above I can't get anyone to try it because Slack owns the mindshare.
falcolas 10y ago
I'm happy (unhappy?) to inform you that hipchat is no better. In many ways, it's worse. - 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)

joshu 10y ago

Mach3. Requires Windows, is ugly, programs in VB.

PebblesHD 10y ago

Without a doubt it's either BMC Remedy Incident Management or LotusNotes. Both from a period where clutter and buttons were the norm and both long overdue to be scrapped. Remedy wins I think only because I spend hours a day trying to gather detail from its many nested screens.

zazibar 10y ago

Surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet - Xcode! 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.

ndh2 10y ago
https://github.com/dear-apple/dear-apple https://github.com/dear-apple/dear-apple

tradersam 10y ago

Windows 10.

sfifs 10y ago

A corporate expense reporting Java app developed by IBM. It's a lesson in how NOT to design a user interface. Everyone outside of Finance hates it.

jmuguy 10y ago

Logmein Central but thankfully we dumped them a few weeks ago when they tried to raise the price again even though we haven't seen a single new feature in years. Client is buggy, crashes all the time. Client also does this thing when you're searching for a system to conenct to where the window loses focus after every key you press so you have to type one letter at a time, clicking to focus the window in between each. Copy/paste between local system and remote breaks constantly and has literally been doing that since I started using it like 8 years ago. Up until very recently it bugged every single one of our clients to update at least one every other week so they of course ignored the prompt after a while. Since it stopped being free they've raised the price dramatically every time we renew service (again with zero new features). Their support is a joke and tells you to go post on their worthless forums where no one answers you.

arethuza 10y ago

Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) - which was rather awesome in what it did but managed to do it in a supremely crappy way.

tacostakohashi 10y ago

Wow, almost all of the applications mentioned here are of the multi-user, hosted in your local intranet, "enterprise" variety. 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.

LVB 10y ago

HipChat

obombration 10y ago

At work, it's probably JIRA. Tons of UI noise, text markup isn't what I expect it to be and nobody around here can seem to agree on what features should be used for a particular scenario. 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.

jakebasile 10y ago
Re: iTunes, I would love a separate Apple Music app for desktop. 95% of the time I open iTunes on desktop it's just to play music. It's cluttered with so much stuff I rarely or never use.
kyriakos 10y ago
Problem with jira is that there's always multiple ways of doing something and the quickest ones are the least obvious ones.
Mandatum 10y ago
JIRA definitely comes down to implementation and policy. I've used it in places and it has been amazingly helpful as a developer, to the point I don't know how we did anything before it.. Then going to a place that totally misuses it and causes me to triple-handle everything. 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.
iLemming 10y ago
JIRA. OMG. It's really awful. Its UI is cluttered and inconsistent. Search is slow. It's impossible to find things. Markup syntax is horrendous. It's easy to make mistakes and extremely difficult to fix them.

lfowles 10y ago

My first place award goes to SAP, which I have to use for time entry. 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.png https://technews.blog.olemiss.edu/files/2012/12/SAP-Logon.pn...

synicalx 10y ago
I'll have to say with SAP, it's really down to how it's implemented. I've seen AWFUL implementations of it (like the one you're describing) and I've seen amazing ones, generally the ones either done by SAP themselves or by their recommended partners are the best. 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.
- lfowles 10y ago
  Maybe you can clear up some confusion I have about SAP. All I know is that it is generally customized to the business. How extensive is that customization? Slapping on business logos? Checking boxes to match the logic to current business procedures? Writing custom code? Edit: Geeze, it has its own wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_implementation
  - synicalx 10y ago
    Oh it goes way deeper than that. I used to work at a mid-sized business, maybe 220 staff at peak and they wanted SAP as a straight up CRM - cost for the building was about $120k + licencing (I don't know how much that was). 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.

Xcelerate 10y ago

MayaVi. So. Many. Bugs. And dependencies — pretty sure it never installs correctly without manually installing seventeen other packages (specific versions too). Even downloading the Enthought Canopy Suite isn't enough for it to work correctly on the first try. Also, strange rendering issues appear where the depth is out of order for density plots. And then as soon as a new version is released, the whole thing breaks and I have to "compatibility search" all the packages again. 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.

scopecreep 10y ago

Blackboard LMS They've been more worried about acquiring competitors and patent portfolios than they have about improving the software for about 10 years now.

apricot13 10y ago
and Moodle... no matter how good the theme, the logistics of using (and administrating/developing for) that platform is so confusing.

meerita 10y ago

Cisco's Jabber and Play Music from Google. The first, is the most horrible messaging app ever made for OS X. The second is the slowest HTML5, material design bloated app ever designed. the Android version is also a UX pain.

pasbesoin 10y ago

IBM Rational suite, in the mid-2000s. OMFG!

bodski 10y ago

Delphi XE IDE (2010): 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!

ry4n413 10y ago

Anything Apple.

pjc50 10y ago

Microsoft EVC4: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=16683 https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=166... It's wildly obsolete and only runs on XP. Previous contenders include http://source.sierrawireless.com/resources/airprime/software/open-at-application-framework/ 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.

alphabettsy 10y ago

Facebook - not 'required' though Credit Union online banking and mobile app Siri - also not 'required' AWS Web Console

gtf21 10y ago
+1 for the AWS Web Console. Whenever I open it I stare in panic for a few seconds as I try to understand where the one thing I'm looking for is.

greenhatman 10y ago

It used to be MySQL Workbench. But I use DataGrip now instead.

spanktheuser 10y ago

Surprised no one has mentioned iTunes yet. 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.

joemi 10y ago
It's never been ideal for me, but it's usually been "good enough" for me. But with each new release, it gets less so. My needs aren't really changing, but what and how iTunes delivers is changing, getting further and further away from my needs.

joeseeder 10y ago

Azures various APIs, so inconsistent and with missing different functionality in each...

odabaxok 10y ago

VersionOne

citrusx 10y ago
For anyone ready to hate on JIRA, spend some time using VersionOne instead. It'll take a week for you to want to run back to JIRA, screaming.

slouch 10y ago

The website where I pay my water bill.

hfsktr 10y ago

iTunes (on Windows) -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.

vmasto 10y ago

LastPass. It's amazing how bad the UI and user experience is.

singularity2001 10y ago
It's a love-hate thing: when Autofill works everything is perfect. if not you have to walk the "narrow path of 5 clicks" with your mouse.

iank10 10y ago

Pegasus Mail. An organization I work with still use this software... because it's free. 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.

ggreer 10y ago

Pivotal Tracker. 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.

gtf21 10y ago

Some of our customers use a "document control system" called Asite[1]. This is, without a doubt, the worst piece of software I have ever had to use. [1]: http://www.asite.com/ http://www.asite.com/

tcpekin 10y ago

Microsoft Word - after using LaTeX, especially ShareLaTeX, it's such a pain to write documents in Word that require multiple images, references, or even semi-unique formatting.

allard 10y ago

ServiceNow (don't know how much is our particular "implementation")

tilt_error 10y ago

Papyrus on Eclipse. Come to think of it... anything Eclipse.

gotofritz 10y ago

* Jira / Confluence (started out well, and now it's became basically useless. WHY NOT ALLOW MARKDOWN BY DEFAULT for a start * 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

cagey 10y ago

Accurev: I concurred with the majority of colleagues that it is "defective by design".

reustle 10y ago

Spotify. On OSX it will occasionally (every 2 or 3 days) use 100% of my cpu (pretty powerful MacBook air). Thosands of people have complained about the issue for years, yet it still isn't fixdd. I'd like to think a company with the size of Spotify could fix an issue causing so many computers to heat up and waste resources. The desktop app also loves to say I'm offline when I'm not. Additionally, the UI of their iPad app is so odd, with these sliding panels.

DougN7 10y ago

QT when building apps for iOS. It generates a bunch of files, then requires using XCode and doing more configutation on the generated files to finally get an app built.

spinupol 10y ago

Pgadmin

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kazinator 10y ago

Android 6. 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.

frik 10y ago

I avoid to use the following, and delegate: 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/Index.6.jpg 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.

rgloeckner 10y ago

www.dreckstool.de

rgloeckner 10y ago

www.dreckstool.de sort of a punching ball for some years now...

gremlinsinc 10y ago

WHMCS is bloated, antiquated but when starting up a small hosting company from scratch it's about all there is really in terms of full-coverage hosting billing platforms. Tried a few others, that just weren't etched out enough. Had to build a few custom plugins to get it to sync w/ my domains reseller, and more, it's a bit scrappy. I'd love to see someone create an open source whmcs clone using laravel, or django, or even phoenix framework. Even cooler would be a full cpanel clone w/ billing addon included for hosts, all built on phoenix w/ multi-threaded support (cpanel can itself be slow from time to time)

tmikaeld 10y ago
My company struggled with it for years and there is still no end in sight, we have been "hacked" several times through vulnerabilities in WHMCS. Mid last year we changed to https://www.blesta.com/ 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.

holydude 10y ago

Worst Osx mail app Linux on desktop RHEL on the server side Chrome Slack Atom Itunes Best Emacs Osx

aries1980 10y ago

WebEx: I have to use a VM on Linux to be able to speak with corporate bigshots <sarcasm>who advocate diversity</sarcasm>.

palerdot 10y ago

macos finder and built-in open/save dialog windows 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!

acidshards 10y ago

Nobody answered the Azure portal?

mdumic 10y ago

Google Calendar (web) - Come on, Google, it's 2017!

skunkiferous 10y ago

OmniTracker, the web UI! 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.

westondeboer 10y ago

Worldship. I shipping software by UPS.

jpl56 10y ago

Skype Entreprise. The UI takes a huge space on screen, parameters are hard to find, notifications are invasive.

daliwali 10y ago

The question asks about software and not specifically applications, so the worst software that I have to use are all of the web developer "tools" and frameworks that I have to deal with. 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.

philippz 10y ago

Skype. Worst software ever.