Stupidest software design you've experienced

In My Humble Opinion
1

Companion thread to this:

I have two, both related to my music apps and devices.

The PC one, Media Go (yes it is no longer supported but is perfect for all of my needs, except as I am about to disclose) allows you to note which cuts are or are not on a playlist you made. Or which ones are on a device you have plugged in. But only if you are within the main music folder, and NOT within another playlist. Several updates ago (~2018), they inexplicably removed the ability to see if a playlist cut is on or can be added to another list, for no good reason that I can see. So now if I am swapping stuff from one list to another I have to go out to the main song library and back to the lists I am editing, over and over, rrr.

For my car I use a Sony portable music player (which has FLAC compatibility yay). Since I am usually playing off of one of my lists via random shuffle mode, I’ll hit pause when I park at home. But the software doesn’t like it being paused for 24 hours or more, and will reset the entire list if I don’t touch it before the time limit (meaning songs which had already played can get played again, which I may not want them to). I can’t think of a good reason why someone would have programmed it that way-it certainly isn’t going to get “stuck” or break or anything, is it?

2

We recently signed up for both Peacock and Paramount+ streaming services, and their apps, at least the Firestick versions, are awful. Here are some of the problems we’ve encountered with either or both apps:

  • Constantly crashing
  • Pause a show or movie in the middle, and half the time it doesn’t save the spot and goes to the beginning when you restart.
  • FF and rewind slowest setting is too fast, so you always overshoot by like 15 minutes the spot you’re trying to get to. Rewind often takes you instantly back to the beginning.
  • Choose something from the “Watching Now” list, and very often you get the false error message “oops, that isn’t available in your country”. You have to then do a search for the thing and choose it from any other listing area within the app than “Watching Now”.
  • If you have chosen a show from the “Watching Now” list and it happens to actually work, you can’t just hit “return” and get back to the main show screen to view episode listings and stuff, like you can if you choose the show from anywhere in the app other than “Watching Now”. You have to hit “pause”, then the “up” arrow, then navigate to a button menu that appears, which I had to learn by trial and error.

Other streaming apps, like Netflix’s and Hulu’s, just work, for the most part. Not sure why some multibillion dollar media corporations can’t produce a working streaming app.

3

Nested dropdown menus are the tool of the devil.

Almost all software that uses ‘infinite scrolling’. There are very few proper applications for this outside of facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like.

4

I’ve written about it before a few times.

I bought an entry-level graphics tablet for my computer back in the days when Macintosh computers had ADB ports on 'em. It was a SummaSketch, from Summa Graphics, a company that was competing with Wacom back in that era.

You had to configure what pixel position onscreen matched up with what x/y coordinate on the tablet, instead of it “just knowing”.

The way you did that was invoking a dialog that looked like this:

It didn’t accept keyboard input. So you had two choices:

a) Use your mouse to click the up or down arrows to change the number. You get no feedback so you don’t know if you’re anywhere close until you switch to the tablet and see how you’re doing; or

b) Use the tablet itself, in which case you go tap, tap, oops I’m no longer tapping on the arrow because the previous tap moved the mouse position off the damn arrow

5

They upgraded the software for a scanner I used at a library. To edit the original, scan, I looked in vain for the old “edit” button. It turned out the edit option was now called “compose”.

6

A constant bugbear for me is the Google apps. They all have so many features disabled that you can only access on the desktop webpage. I mean you realize you make a mobile operating system, right Google? Why would you force me to put down my Google Android phone and turn on my windows desktop just to access some basic feature in Gmail or Docs?

7

Most recently, you can’t link a specific timestamp in YouTube on your phone or on the app, you have to manually set it to Desktop mode to get that function. There is literally no reason for them to do this.

8

The Apple Carplay software prevalent in so many cars nowadays. Constantly wants to connect via bluetooth and start playing music wether you want it to or not. Repeatedly.
Get in the car and want to listen to the FM local radio on the way to work so put that on. Suddenly it self connects to the phone and starts playing music. Switch back to FM radio. Moments later it decides to connect again and switch over to the phones music. Finally give up and manually turn off the phone’s bluetooth connection.

9

Unfortunately, a guy I used to work with (though in a different department) designed some software that made you RE-LOGIN constantly. He was a security nut. Was crazy. Luckily I never had to use it. My Wife did though.

10

On my Roku, some channels do this when you use the >> or << buttons near the play button, but if you use the left or right arrow buttons (near the up and down arrows) instead, they jump forwards or backwards by ten seconds, or at least more slowly than with the >> or << buttons.

I discovered this by accident.

My contribution to the thread:

I have a minisplit heat pump system from Mitsubishi, with heating/cooling units in five rooms of the house. The app allows you to program each unit to heat or cool the room to certain temps at certain times.

Here’s what I wrote to them:

There are two obvious logical ways to order events: either 1) by room first, then chronologically within each room; or 2) chronologically first, followed by room.

For some reason, you have chosen neither of these options.

The result is that trying to figure out the order of events requires looking up and down through all them to find which one is next. It is extremely frustrating and inconvenient.

Ideally, ordering would be a user-defined function, and whichever order above was selected, users could also opt to order rooms either alphabetically or in a custom order to reflect their own priorities.

If that level of flexibility is for some reason not possible, even implementing one of the two as the fixed standard would be greatly preferable to the current random order. It seems to me that ordering by room first would be the preferred option in that case.

Here’s a screenshot of what I’m talking about (Click on the image to see the whole thing):

https://photos.app.goo.gl/1hoLUctVpaCyMtsc6

Mitsubishi “customer care” has not even acknowledged receipt of my fairly lengthy comments, much less thanked me or said they’d consider them.

11

On Spotify there is no way to queue up an album to play after the current album. The first time you select “add to queue”, it will imster the song/album into the queue after the current song. Todal behave the same.

Apple music does this with “Play Next” and “Play Last”. However, Apple music does not have anything as elegant as Spotify Connect for controlling music on another source. Sure, there is Airplay, but that is actually relaying the audio from one device to another.

12

My first one is generic, and generally applicable. Anything that has a scrolling list, where when you select an item on the list, it returns to the top of the list instead of the last position on the list.

My second one is more niche, but potentially far more rage inducing to a certain set of people: systemd. Many people hate it, primarily for three reasons: 1. it had some bugs when it was new 2. it had the gall to suggest that a spaghetti of shell scripts was a bad way to do things 3. it doesn’t adhere to a moving goalpost true Scotsman idea of the Unix philosophy.

Anyway, my complaint about systemd is far more petty. Services are controlled with commands like:
systemctl reload apache2
systemctl restart dnsmasq
so generally systemctl <verb> <noun> (or <verb> <direct-object> for the grammatically pedantic)

Except reloading systemd itself. That is done with
systemctl daemon-reload
so noun-verb. Yes, daemon-reload is a command (like restart) not an option (like apache2), but the complaint stands. Why isn’t it reload-daemon? Both word orders are perfectly valid in English, but one parallels the structure of other systemctl commands, and the other reverses it.

13

Reminds me of a closely related pet peeve. Scroll bars. You grab one, scroll to the top or bottom. At some point however (once your mouse arrow goes beyond the window’s limits) it will “bounce back” to where it was originally, and not “stick” at the very top or bottom once your mouse cursor slips off in that direction. When it is a very tall window it really does massively piss me off since now I have to go all the way back to the other side of the bloody thing and grab it again. I guess there is a good reason to have made it work that, but I can’t imagine what it would be.

14

There was a project planning software long ago (in fact, it may have been Microsoft Project) which did not autosave. If you backed out of a page or - god help you - closed the program before saving, you lost all of your work. Not just the last page, but your entire project with task connections, etc: GONE.

15

Regarding Gradescope, a pretty good tool embedded within Brightspace, for handling course grades at a university.

When I go to submit a file for a student, such as something submitted late, I am presented with a list (often long, because some classes have up to 160 students) of students to scroll through, to find the one whose name is on the assignment.

Can I search by name? No. Are the names in alphabetical order by first, or even last name? No. Does the list only include students who haven’t yet submitted their assignment (typically a much smaller subset of the whole)? No. You have to scroll through this peculiar order, the same every time, which (I believe) is chronological, the order that they registered for the class. This ordering has ZERO utility for me. Wastes maybe 15 minutes of my time per week.

16

Microsoft’s Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) implementation was designed by a moron. Whenever I try to copy any media file that isn’t a music file like an MP3 to an Android device, it pops up with a warning that the device may not be able to play it and do I want to go ahead and waste my time and copy it anyway.

Now this would be annoying enough if the device really couldn’t play it (I mean, why would Microsoft care – I’d find out soon enough!) but the thing is, MTP has no way of knowing what the device can or cannot do. It simply assumes that an Android device is a phone and only does what a phone will typically do, namely play music files. It doesn’t know or care that the device is actually an Android tablet. And downright enraging is that there is NO WAY to turn these stupid and useless warnings off. Most Microsoft software is pretty flexible even if you have to go into the registry to make changes, but not MTP. Pisses me off.

17

I once bought (and returned) a toaster that had such deep slots it was impossible to remove the toast without digging it out with a fork.

18

The slot depth setting is in a config file that you have to edit with a text editor. Very poor design for a GUI application.

19

In some toasters, you have to go into the registry with Regedit to change the slot depth. It’s usually:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\TOASTER\SLOT_DEPTH

and you have to change a DWORD value. Very annoying!

20

GUI? My toaster uses FTP. GET config file, edit config file, PUT config file. Like a real man.