Many programs let you redefine the keyboard shortcuts. I use GIMP and it does so Photoshop might. It would be a convenience to you to redefine if you can.
It would be easy enough to have two shortcut keys do the same function, though
There are 13 zip codes that straddle state lines
02861 Massachusetts Rhode Island
42223 Kentucky Tennessee
59221 Montana North Dakota
63673 Illinois Missouri
71749 Arkansas Louisiana
73949 Oklahoma Texas
81137 Colorado New Mexico
84536 Arizona Utah
86044 Arizona Utah
86515 Arizona New Mexico
88063 New Mexico Texas
89439 California Nevada
97635 California Oregon
I’ve been using computers on a daily basis since the days when “windows” were exclusively things that you opened to get fresh air, and if you had mice, you would set out traps for them. PCs had not even been invented yet. So I would certainly count myself as being among those who are intimately familiar with the command line interface and the efficient use of the keyboard. In later years, in fact, with the introduction of timesharing systems like the PDP-10, my favorite text editor was TECO, which could do almost anything with a set of cryptic one- and two-letter commands that could be infinitely concatenated, nested, looped, and branched, and constituted nothing less than a full-fledged shorthand programming language for text editing. So I don’t need to be taught about the power of the keyboard. Yet in the modern era I still find shortcuts, as inflicted on us by Microsoft UI design, to be counterproductive and annoying 99% of the time.
Also, I’m sure that the creators of the original windows paradigm at Xerox PARC – the paradigm that has now been adopted by every computing device in existence – would be surprised to hear it called “a clunky add-on”. The reality is that whether you have your hand on the mouse 5% of the time, or 100% of the time, or no time at all, depends entirely on what you’re doing. When I’m entering text as I am now, I have both hands on the keyboard in the standard touch-typing position, but when I’m interacting with the system, I almost always use the GUI features because they are intuitive and consistent – consistency is the whole damn point of an object-oriented GUI. But it all depends on what you’re doing. I even have a version of the ancient and venerable TECO on my system for unusual situations where only a programmatic approach can solve some quirky text editing problem.
The basic design failure of many keyboard shortcuts is that the functions they purport to facilitate tend to be rarely used, they’re too easy to hit accidentally, they can have dramatic undesired effects, and the stupid things usually cannot be turned off.
That makes sense but it has nothing to do with the discussion of keyboard shortcuts. The usefulness of a simple command line interface in the appropriate circumstances is not in dispute, as I was just saying. In fact an interface like TECO takes it a step further – it’s not command line oriented, but rather command character oriented, where individual command characters can be concatenated in strings of arbitrary length. The result being that once you’ve learned it, you can do very powerful things very simply – and I loved it. The flip side of the coin was that for that very reason, it was easy to make a mistake and totally mess up your document – which is why there was always a backup. The tradeoff was worth it, and when you were actually composing the command sequences you knew to be careful. It was a terrific design for its intended purpose, but would be a very poor approach to a general user interface for many other purposes. All these approaches are useful in the right circumstances.
But how would you feel if your 911 dispatch system was designed so that a finger slip could accidentally launch a “shortcut” that put the system out of commission for several seconds or longer, because it was busy doing something stupid that you never intended?
US-based websites that claim to handle international orders (i.e., they have a “country” list to select from or a field to enter), but:
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require you to select from a pull-down menu of US states with no option of “other” or “Not Applicable”.
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will only accept a 5-digit postal code (I got around this by saying I live in the city of “Tokyo 100-0001” and hoping the post office will have the brains to figure it out).
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will only accept phone numbers that fit a “(123) 456-7890” format.
It’s getting better, but in the early days of e-commerce you might as well have cut your address into pieces and drawn them from a hat, based on what ended up (or didn’t end up) on the shipping label.
I hate that the damn Mute button on my iPhone is always getting accidentally pressed when I bring the phone up to my face to speak. It’s idiotic that they make this so easy to do.
I have a peeve with a hardware user interface: the Dell laptop issued to me by my company. The eject button for the DVD tray protrudes just slightly, so that when I’m carrying the thing around I’ll often press it by accident and then the tray pops out. I damaged it once when that happened and the IT guys had to give me a new DVD drive.
Similarly, the other day I was walking into a meeting room and the battery fell out. Apparently I was pressing the battery release tab without realizing it as I was carrying the machine. I was bemused, as was Windows when I restarted it.
It’s not a tech gadget, but my iron has a fatal flaw. The heat setting is right where the top of your hand meets the iron, so as you iron, you inadvertantly reset the setting. Or even turn off the iron!
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when you click browser’s “back” button to make some changes and all information on the form is gone
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when you have to explicitly agree to accept cookies
(even when it’s not a legal requirement) -
horizontal scrolling is hardly ever justified
I love my Apple Watch. I have run close to two thousand miles wearing my Apple Watch.
I appreciate how they upgraded the OS to be more sports-centric.
Has anyone at Apple actually gone for a run while listening to music? Why do I have to press the side button to go to the app dock, swipe over to the “what’s playing” widget and tap it, before I can adjust the volume or skip a song? Each time. On a ten mile run. A sweaty ten mile run. The touch screen doesn’t work with sweat too well.
With each release I dream that they made volume/song-navigation part of the running app, but it never happens.
They do, and that would be fine if I had three apps to work with. Many applications I use are relatively uncommon (anyone here using Informatica Power Center? Pipeline Pilot? Spotfire?) , and it’s those kinds of applications that have weird interfaces and don’t support customizations I want (I haven’t checked those three). Besides, I’m not much of a settings tweaker, as it is too painful to switch machines. Easier to use defaults for everything.
Thankfully, when this kind of inflexibility gets to be too much there are macro tools available to fill in the gaps!
Does the state really matter on a “border” ZIP code? Are there two separate post offices handling the mail.? I guess there could be a Main St. in both states that would make it necessary.
I haven’t been involved with USPO bulk mailing for 20 years or more, but requirements were in place then that required all mail to be “sanitized” and every printed address to be correct or the mailer would get an entire batch rejected and/or lose the discount.
The terms may have changed, but we (a mass mailer) had to compare 100% of our database to an official one not more than 6 months old, and correct any items that weren’t perfect. This was called CASS Certification.
The idea was that if a non-USPO entity was doing part of the USPO’s work (pre-sorting), they could get a discount. But if there were too many undeliverable or problem addresses that required hand work, the discount was not applicable.
So even if a ZIP was correct, if it didn’t match the city or state or even the street address, that label was invalid. Even though minor errors might not cause a letter to be undelivered, the post office wasn’t going to let it slip by without penalty.
Very simple plea - if you’re asking a series of yes/no questions, don’t switch positions of the responses.
Our electronic case file system automatically thinks ALL docs we generate go to one party. If we want to send to the other party, we have to manually uncheck one box, go to a different screen, select the correct party, go to yet another screen to select the correct party again and their address, then go back to the doc and confirm you want to proceed. I’ll ignore the serious lag time our system has between screens. Because pretty much everything we mail out is data private, if we accidentally mail to the wrong party, it’s a Very Big Deal. They tried having it so no party was automatically selected, which caused mail to print out and not go anywhere, as the addressed coversheet (obviously) didn’t print. There must be a happy medium, but I work for the government, so that will never happen.
The keypads on microwave ovens are often horrible for the user. On one that I have, you have to hit “cook time,” then enter a number, then Start. I was talking to my son this past weekend about this particular bad UI design, and he (a high school sophomore) couldn’t even imagine how they could release a product like that. Did the people who built it never use a microwave before?
My other microwave is a more modern Samsung with an “Add 30 Seconds” button. I will never again own a microwave that doesn’t have this feature. It’s pretty much the only button you need.
Edit controls on websites that do not delete the default text when you click in them.
So: [Enter text here]
Click inside and type “Menu”
And you get this: [Enter teMenuxt here]
YouTube in particular is bad at this, but any program or app that repurposes the arrow keys depending on context when it is never the context that you want. YouTube randomly decides that it wants to do fwd/rewind with the arrow keys until I manually click on some whitespace to make it control the scroll bar like it should by default.
Any program that steals focus from the active window. Home-brewed corporate programs are horribly bad at this. It’s rage-inducing when I’m deep into technical document editing only to have my cursor stolen by some stupid refresh or update.
All the most irritating interfaces seem to have been covered. So ill say that if you’re gonna skimp on the design you better make it fast. Whenever I enter my pin number at a gas station in my area there’s about a half second delay between the press and a feedback sound. Don’t even get me started about card readers since the whole chip fiasco started…
I just pulled out my phone to make a call and after I unlocked it a little popup window appeared asking me for my Apple Id login credentials, with no explanation why. If I cancel, I might not be prompted again, and it will stop doing … something.
But I can’t use the phone or do anything else without dealing with this prompt first. I can’t even open my password manager to get my Apple Id login to do the login.
Worst user interface of all times nomination: The SummaSketch Tablet Control Panel
(mock-up; I can’t find any real screen shots)
This was a control panel for controlling the initial x, y coordinates of a graphics tablet on a Mac, in the System 7 era. the SummaSketch tablet was similar to the Wacom tablets you may be familiar with nowadays, except not wireless. It did not auto-configure, though; when you first tried to use it, the far upper left corner of the tablet might correspond to the middle of your monitor screen, so you had to use the control panel to set up the proper x/y correspondence.
Not a great situation, but it was the control panel itself that sucked.
• See those numbers? (204 for x axis, 127 for y axis)? It wouldn’t let you type them in, you had to use the stupid up and down arrows to increment the numbers.
• You had your choice of either using the mouse or the Summa tablet itself to tap on the up or down arrows in order to do so.
• If you used the Summa tablet, you could position the control panel window to the upper left hand corner of your monitor screen (and/or the farthest up and left that you could access using the Summa tablet at the moment) and then, as you change the numbers you would see the mouse arrow MOVE, and hence move it to the far upper left hand corner of your monitor screen. Or, well, you could, except that as changing the numbers moved the mouse arrow, it moves the mouse arrow off the control panel arrow you’re trying to click on so you have to reposition the tablet pen over and over and over.
• If, on the other hand, you used the mouse to click the arrows, you don’t have that problem, the mouse cursor on screen stays put. But now you don’t have any visual feedback for how far you’ve moved the damn thing.
Seriously, what the fuck were they thinking?!??
I got a text message saying that there was a new upgrade of the firmware for my wi-fi hot spot. The instructions told me how to install the firmware, but it required me to connect my wi-fi to my laptop and install it using Windows 10. I never connect the wi-fi to the laptop, I only use it for my phone. But there was no option for connecting via a phone. I had to take the phone charger, disconnect the USB plug from the power plug, attach the charger to the hotspot, plug the other end into the USB port I use on my laptop to connect to a printer, connect my laptop to the wi-fi device, and then install the update that way.
I went to the Verizon store to verify that I had to use a Windows device to install the firmware and they told me that yes, it was the only way to do it.
The hotspot in question: https://www.verizonwireless.com/internet-devices/ellipsis-jetpack-mhs815l/#sku=sku2100198?cmp=CSE-C-HQ-NON-R-AC-NONE-NONE-2C0PX0-PX-PLA-MHS815L&cvosrc=cse.google.MHS815L&cvo_crid=100628079567