Stupidest software design you've experienced

In My Humble Opinion
281

Speaking of USB and car media players, I’ll once again describe how my wife’s Honda CR-V plays audio files on USB thumb drives. (I’ve posted about this several times in other threads, but I don’t think I’ve posted about it in this one.)

The stock unit in her 2017 CR-V does not organize the music by folder, name, or artist. My USB of music has folders and each folder is an album (or collection of tracks). When displaying the list of folders, it lists them in the order they were written to the USB. Since Windows does not typically copy files and folders in strictly alphabetical order, I have to copy the Aerosmith folder, then The Beatles folder, then the Credence folder, then the Dead Kennedys folder, and so forth. If I want to add a folder (for example, Iron Butterfly), I have to delete everything after “I” and then add Iron Butterfly, and then add back (one at a time in alphabetical order) the original folders. If I don’t, Iron Butterfly will show up after ZZ Top.

And it does no good to try to create folders like “A to F” to make things more manageable. The player still searches for and catalogs ALL the individual folders and presents them on the display as it chooses.

282

If you’re familiar with Windows PowerShell, you can use it to change the various time-stamp parameters on a folder.

For instance, to change the creation date for a folder, launch PowerShell as an administrator, change to your USB drive letter, and run this command. (I’m assuming your USB drive letter is ‘D:’ ,and you will need to replace ‘01/01’2024’ with the desired date.)

D: $(Get-Item “Iron Butterfly”).Creationtime=$(Get-Date “01/01/2024”)

You may have to instead change the ‘last modified time’, like this:

D: $(Get-Item “Iron Butterfly”).Lastwritetime=$(Get-Date “01/01/2024”)

Or possibly you might have to change the ‘last accessed time’:

D: $(Get-Item “Iron Butterfly”).Lastaccessedtime=$(Get-Date “01/01/2024”)

I would recommend trying these commands on a Test folder first! But one of these should accomplish what you want to do, without all the deleting and re-copying.

283

Yes, thank you for the suggestion. But this only has to do with the date/time (sequence) the folder was written to the USB drive. I would still have to go back and change the parameters for the folders individually, or new ones as I copy them. It’s actually easier from me to write a brief script that sequentially copies my folders to the USB alphabetically. (For example, to add Foghat, I would have to go get the date/time of the folders between which I intend to insert it. Not a huge pain, but completely stupid that I have to do this at all.)

So I keep a copy of the music on a server. I add to it or edit it. Then I run a script that sequentially copies the folders one at a time to the USB drive in strict alphabetical order. Works fine, but should totally be unnecessary.

284

Most recent Windows update removed WordPad app. I’ve been searching for an alternative to open *.rtf files, and the one I found:

  • has black bars on sides for no reason, except to take away the valuable space
  • has a save function that straight up doesn’t work. Literally. You have to use Save As.
285

Yes, makes sense. PITA, to be sure!

286

I think I may have complained about this before, but in my 2018 Toyota RAV4 it takes about a minute or so to load the USB drive after the car has been started. If the song that was playing when I turned the car off has less than a minute to play, when I turn the car back on and it finishes that song it will not play the next song but will play the very first song it finds on the drive (which is currently the Beatles “Hard Day’s Night”). I have to remember to advance to the next track before I turn the car off, or pause the player for about a minute when I restart the car until the thumb drive loads. Or I forget and it plays Hard Day’s Night again and then I have to scroll through all my albums to find where it left off.

287

I think the real lesson here is that car manufacturers suck at making software interfaces for their entertainment and navigation systems. I wish Android Auto and Apple Carplay took off more :confused: But I think manufacturers are actually backing away from those partnerships and trying to make their own again, right?

I’ve never seen a car with a good interface for those :confused: I connect an external music player and GPS as soon as I can and never touch the built in car thing again…

288

I think AA and AC have taken off rather well in the minds of car owners as they are installed in something like 90% of late-model cars. And depending on the survey, something like 30 to 75% of car buyers won’t consider a model that doesn’t support AA or AC.

Right now, it’s only GM that intends to discontinue AA and AC support. They’ve already phased it out of at least some EVs. I guess if GM sales tank in the future, we’ll know if those 30-75% of car buyers stuck to their guns.

289

“Or”? Does that mean they won’t consider a model that only has the “wrong” one that won’t work with their phone?

290

Most of the reports of the survey I read phrased it as “Apple CarPlay or Android Auto,” but it looks like the original survey just asks if you would buy a car without “automatic smartphone integration interface.” It didn’t make a distinction between the two.

I’m going to guess that there aren’t a lot of late models that don’t support both, which probably makes the distinction kind of moot.

291

My local supermarket website has a section for the WEEKLY FLIER which you would think means it’s just a JPG or PDF scan of the actual flyer which would be super handy.

Instead the section has every single item on the flier part of a numbered list and each item can be clicked so you can add to cart for in-store pickup. This may seem not bad but its a complete mess because it lists EVERYTHING. So for example if there’s a sale for BUY 2 GET 1 FREE PEPSI PRODUCTS it will literally have a list of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Caffeine Free, Diet Pepsi Caffeine Free, Pepsi Zero, Cherry Pepsi, Diet Cherry Pepsi etc. I want to be able to quickly scan a one page image to see the sales at a glance, not have to dig through almost a thousand individual links.

292

Wegman’s does the same thing. If you set the filter to show only items which are on sale it will show, to give a similar example, every flavor of the brand of ice cream that is on sale. And it doesn’t group the sale items by brand, so you have to go through every page of the listing trying to find what you may be looking for.

There is, as I recall (it’s been a while since I’ve tried to do this), a search function where you can try to find things, but it’s not as helpful as it could be, since it seems to add random items with similar names to the search results.

293

The standard emoji set used in windows, android etc.

Yes, I’m sure some will say emojis are for stupid people, but consider me a stupid person then, who likes that emojis can quickly communicate the intent behind statements.

I miss the emojis I used to have in We Chat, which have been through several iterations and now have good images to communicate things as nuanced as nonchalance, smugness, sarcasm, embarrassment and more.

The standard set…doesn’t even have a good emoji for cheekiness; all the stick out tongue emojis look like he’s licking something. And then dozens of different emojis for very slightly different trains and buildings…I don’t think I’ve ever seen those used.

294

And they may look completely different to the person who receives them… iOS, Android, (each flavor of it) and Windows each have their own completely separate set of emoji. A study done a few years ago found that people on a different platform often completely misinterpret the meaning of an emoji sent from another system. Or from the exact same system, for that matter.

They don’t see what you sent. They see their own platform’s interpretation of what you sent, which often looks totally different.

There’s also cross cultural confusion. Emoji were invented by the Japanese, and there are some expressions from anime that don’t really make sense to people not familiar with their comics, like 😤 Face with Steam From Nose Emoji

295

Wow everything from grimace to raucous laughter.

And Microsoft seems to have gone with “child’s drawing of man eating marshmallows”

296

got a GOOD one …

Software that won’t let you say “No” …

**"Do you want to download our really crappy app,…

  • that installs 12 trojans,
  • tracks you like a wolf tracking wounded deer,
  • reduces your battery capacity by 25%
  • clogs up memory?

on your cel?"**

“YES” … or … “ASK ME LATER”

no, you stupid SOB, don’t ask me later, or I will poke you in the eye with a red-hot shashlik-skewer that was dragged around the floor of a public toilet in turkey - after having dumped a grand piano from the 16th floor on you

I do feel better now
297

Formerly, Apple iPhone users were able to manage the apps on their phones using iTunes software on their PCs. But Apple dropped that feature years ago. Now there seems to be no way to manage apps except by dragging them from one screen to another. I just downloaded a new app (which is rare for me) and in the process of getting it to the right folder, various other apps moved around. Very annoying.

298

My mom got a new iPhone a couple years ago, but lately has really been struggling with it. I had to dig for details, but turns out she was constantly running out of storage.

I was surprised, because all she ever does is take pictures and message people. Very few apps, and no downloaded movies, music or anything of the sort. iCloud sync was already on for her photos. What could be using all her storage?

In Androidland where I’m at, I have dozens of installed apps and games and hundreds of songs and tens of thousands of pictures and have never once run out of space, even on the smallest model. It’s just never been an issue. So what is she doing that’s so different?

I spent hours and hours investigating this issue, including talking to a software UX designer who loves and uses iPhones. She couldn’t figure it out either.

Turns out it’s the photo sync. On Android, pictures you’ve already synced to the cloud can be safely (and automatically) removed from your phone to free up local storage. This all happens seamlessly in the background, so all the pictures I’ve taken back to the late 2000s or so are all safely kept in my Google account, but my phone only keeps the last few hundred or so. If I look up an album from the past, it’ll just seamlessly fetch them from the internet. As I take pictures, they get backed up automatically, and old ones automatically get removed from the phone to free up storage. Makes sense, right, since smartphones are pretty much always connected to the internet these days? There’s never any wondering about whether your photo is safe to delete. If it’s already synced to the cloud, it’s handled automatically. If it’s not, it’ll warn you before it lets you delete anything.

Well, on Apple, it doesn’t work like that. No picture completely leaves your phone, ever. When you get a new iPhone, all the pictures you’ve ever taken from any of your previous devices get copied, in thumbnail form, to your latest phone. And any pictures you take on your new phone get synced to the cloud, yes, but still stay on your phone in that smaller thumbnail form. That means over the years, any new phone you get will just fill up with all your old pictures (that you never even look at). The thumbnails are smaller, but still several hundred kilobytes large. And if you want to keep iCloud sync on, there’s no way to delete them from your phone without also erasing them from the cloud. So your phone just becomes a shitty copy of the cloud, and as soon as you get it, it’s going to run out of space from all the old photos… and as far as I know, there’s nothing you can do except upgrade to a bigger model. It’s ridiculous and infuriating. There’s really no reason to design it this way except to sell bigger models…

I really hate Apple sometimes. I love my Mac for work, but their iPhones and iPads are so infuriating.

299

It’s probably not in the all time greatest hits (I’ve encountered so pretty awful software design over the years, hell it’s probably not in the top five for Windows OS alone).

But the Windows file action menu (sure it has a proper name) you get by right clicking on a file in explorer is pissing me off loads right now. In Windows 11 they decided to be “smart” about this menu and for your “convenience” to only give you small subset of the available commands, for everything else you need to click on “show more options”, completely defeating the point of that menu which is to quickly access actions on a file.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they were actually smart about which commands go in the cut down menu, but just like every time Windows has attempted to be smart in this way they’ve actually been really really dumb. I use that menu a lot, but the half dozen or so commands I use all day everyday, are NEVER in the menu I always need to click on “show more options” :angry:

300

This pissed me off too, and one of the first things after installing Win11 was to look for a workaround. If you are not too shy to edit the registry, try this: (I remember that back when I used it, I found a download for the corresponding reg file which made it even easier, but of course you execute a reg file from an unknown source at your own risk, so be cautious)

ETA: I just noticed that the article above contains a download with the reg file. So yeah, if you trust HowToGeek (and I’ve known them long enough that I would trust them), you can use that.