Software programmers who make the F1 button open up help. I cant tell you how many times i hit F1 and not ESC like i mean to
My Microsoft Keyboard has actually gotten this right (to a degree).
I tend not to use Function keys outside games, and my keyboard has an “F” key toggle (which is off by default IIRC). So unless I know I need to use the F key, I dont’ turn it on. So when I (invariably) do the “Oops, I missed Esc” dance, I don’t have to worry about waiting for the help menu to come up so I can close it so I can go back to what I’m doing. It’s good.
I own a razor (that functions as both a beard trimmer and head shaver) that is wonderful in all aspects related to shaving hair and all that entails. Doesn’t pull on my unusually wiry beard, doesn’t give up on my unusually dense hair, it just works. Except for the fact that it will ONLY function on battery power. Not only that, but it doesn’t take replaceable batteries. It only charges from the wall, and will not run from wall power. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, I’m a hairy guy, and sometimes, I’m not finished by the time the damn thing runs out of power, and I’m stuck half shaven. I hate whoever made this design decision with the fire of a thousand suns.
I thought F1 was the standard Help button on Windows?
On my Mac, I have a dedicated Help button. Right next to both Delete buttons on my external keyboard. Prime ‘hit by accident’ territory.
It is. Every Win app (at least commercial ones) use F1 for help; it’s mandated by Microsoft and it’s been that way just about forever.
My alarm clock has this feature. I don’t know how long the battery will last but it’s a very nice feature. We’ve had a bunch of brownouts in the area lately and my alarm clock hasn’t forgotten the time once, while all the other clocks in my apartment have.
After some RSI problems I moved the mouse to my left hand. I’m heavily right-handed but it took me less than two days to get used to it, now it’s second nature. Try it, it’s easy.
To the OP: If my microwave has even a second of time left up on the clock from the previous usage when you put something in, you can’t add time to the amount up on the screen. No, you have to clear it then enter the new cooking time.
The smoke alarm will go off when you make ordinary toast and there is no visible smoke, but if you put turkish bread or thick rolls in it, after a minute of inattention you can see thick roils of white smoke pouring out but no alarm.
Every fan (desk or standard) I’ve ever bought has a slowest speed that is too fast, blows a gale and is very noisy. Who ever uses the fastest speeds?
Yes you can scroll about, but you cannot get to the right or bottom quarter of the screen. And before you scroll it doesn’t zoom into the centre of the screen or even the top left corner which might make some sense. It goes to sort of off centre top left where there is unlikely to be anything interesting going on.
Not on this machine, for some reason you can’t use two functions at the same time. You can’t pause then zoom, or zoom then pause, it’s one or the other.
It also has the are you sure you want to do what you just tried to do feature.
Put in an unformatted disc and it detects it. Message “Unformatted DVD do you want to format”, um, like yeah. “Confirm/Cancel” (defaults to cancel of course) why would you want to cancel this? No! I want this very cheap and easily replaced blank disc that you just prompted me to format to remain unusable. Dumb.
I dunno - that makes sense to me - it’s pretty standard for the default action to be ‘do nothing’ in these sorts of dialogs.
You might accidentally confirm you want to format it, then have to wait longer than you expected (missing the programme you wanted to record).
The dialog also doesn’t only appear in the case of blank media - you might have inserted a disc that merely appears unformatted (perhaps it contains valuable content, but something about the disc is damaged or unsupported on this particular hardware) - and attempting a format would destroy it.
I get a similar thing in Windows when I plug in a USB hard drive that I formatted on a Linux machine (using a file system unsupported by Windows) - Windows says “This device appears to be unformatted - format it now?”. If ‘OK’ was the default option, I’m sure I’d have accidentally wiped valuable data by now.
I’m totally with you on this, but it’s not just the plugs that are the problem. My PC has two USB ports on the front of the tower, one above the other, and they are oriented in opposite directions! So even I knew which was the “top” of the plug, chances are I’d still get it wrong. I can’t remember whether the top socket is “right-side up” or the bottom one. And in any case, which is the “top”? Is it the side with the solid bit of plug or the hollow bit of plug? It’s a dumb design all round…
Except for wall warts used for cell phone chargers, in which case they’re six or twelve feet long. Every house I’ve lived in, every cell phone I’ve owned, I have to roll up most of the wall wart cord because it’s just so damn long.
Another addition to the list: a trend for buttons that you have to press and hold for a function to work. It’s common in cell phones, even clamshell models; you just can’t turn the phone on, but you have to turn hold an “on” button for several seconds. On my phone, you have to press and hold the off button for five seconds to turn the phone on.
That’s to guard against accidental keypresses because the devices fit in our pockets nowadays. Admittedly is does, as you say, appear on devices now even when the button in question is physically inaccessible due to a clamshell design.
The first mobile phone I owned did not have these features and it accidentally dialled random numbers from my pocket on a couple of occasions (one time it managed to dial 123 - the speaking clock - and remained connected until the battery died twenty minutes later).
One thing that annoys me is the way a lot of stoves have the controls along the back, requiring you to reach across the top of hot, steaming, bubbling, spattering pots and pans to use them. Makes more sense from an ergonomics and safety perspective to put the controls on the front, though I’m sure it’s cheaper for the manufacturers to build when all of the gas lines and/or wiring is in one spot under the back panel.
It’s a matter of taste and lifestyle. I’ve had stoves with controls in front and ones with them in the back. In the back keeps them away from young kids and closer to eye level. In front may be easier to reach but harder to read and more vulnerable to accidental bumping.
A neighbor has a cooktop he custom mounted himself, with the controls near eye level, but on a panel next to the stove, facing the room. It’s the best of both!
Any television that I’ve ever owned because I can’t correct the width of the picture. You watch a sporting event and can’t see one team’s score because it’s too far on the right to appear on my screen. If I could tweak that, maybe I’d be able to see the entire picture. But no, mere mortals like myself can’t be trusted to make such an adjustment.
VCRs without the VCR/TV button on the console. Can’t find the remote, can’t use the VCR. Just ONE button on the console would make it usable or make it so that pressing PLAY on the console makes it go to VCR mode.
VCRs, TVs, DVD players, everything. You’re in the back of your wall unit trying to hook things up, there isn’t too much light back there and now you have to figure out which socket is input, which is output, which goes with what component, etc. Raised black lettering on a black plastic surface doesn’t show up terribly well when you’re trying to hook things up in a poorly lit area. How much would it cost to have a little roller add some white paint to those letters so we can read them?
Remotes that work fine until the instant the batteries die. Can’t they have a low battery light on them?
Remotes with 3 dozen identically sized and shaped buttons. Get real, manufacturers! If your remote has more than 15 buttons, go back to the drawing board.
Old TVs like our RCA floor cabinet set used to have adjustment knobs like that on the back.
CRTs always seem to have some of the screen hidden by the cabinet trim. The newer LCD and Plasma TVs don’t seem to have any of the screen hidden, or at least not much.
Speaking of Macs… why oh why do they not have a physical manual spring-loaded hardware eject mechanism for the DVD drive? IMHO Apple usually does good design, but on this one they have erred.
I have a few CDs that my Mac can’t read (too many scratches, whetever). The computer got stuck in a loop trying to read the disc, and I had to go into terminal and kill off iTunes because it wasn’t letting go. Even rebooting, the disc was still in the drive, and it would try to read it and boot off it. Better if I could pop the disk myself while the computer was shut off.
Do the Mac Pros with tray-loading drives have this problem?
This is actually a similar design issue to the “soft” power switch mentioned above. In days of yore, Macs ran on floppies, so ejecting one would cause bad things to happen. Alternately, the floppy could be writing your data file, and ejecting it would hose the data. So you had to request the disk be ejected through the OS. Apple apparently thought this was a neat thing, so they made CDs act the same.
Yes.
This has been a style-over-function design decision for a long time. Did you know that if you hold the mouse button down while the machine is booting, it will eject any removable media? One of the features that’s been unchanged since 1984…
The eject button on the keyboard is soft (mediated by the OS), so that’s not a surprise. I just want an emergency hard eject for when it goes wrong.
What if you don’t have a mouse? 
I have a laptop and a drawing tablet.
I noticed that Apple finally made the trash icon turn into an eject symbol when you drag the icon for a mounted disc to it, so at least that removed one of the most inconsistent tings about the old interface.