Not sure this is a software issue, more of a WTF between the dev team, the UI team and the QA team.
Surely someone in one of those responsibilities should have realised that the number 90.88589% is several significant figures more than the average user really cares about while waiting for a download to complete.
How about rounding it into a nice 2 digit 91% and not having the text over-run the allocated space set aside in the design?
Agree with the complaint. But this is one situation where I’d always round down, so you don’t get to 100% and it’s not finished.
Yeah, you are right about that. Otherwise the next post in this thread will be someone really angry their download is actually incomplete and unuseable.
Obligatory xkcd link:
Like art, downloads are never completed but only abandoned.
One of the many things I like about Macs is that when the OS reports an estimated time to complete something, it reports it as an estimate. It’ll say things like “About five minutes”, or “less than a minute”, or “a few seconds”.
To add a new one: It’s summer, I’m off school, so I’ve been replaying the Starcraft 2 single-player campaign. OK, I finished a mission, that’s a good stopping point, let me close the game… I have to actually go through two loading screens to do that. First, hit the continue button or whatever it is on the mission debrief to go back to the campaign interface (loading), and then exit to main menu (loading), and then from there I can finally exit program.
When I get an email confirming an appointment, my phone helpfully offers to add the event to my calendar. Which would be nice, except for some reason it assumes the appointment time in the email is UTC, and adds it to my calendar at the completely wrong local time. For example it just put my 6:00 pm dinner reservation on my calendar at 1:00 am the next morning. I have to go edit the appointment manually to get it to appear at the correct local time.
No one uses UTC to schedule everyday appointments (except for the Brits, but only because that is their local time). There’s no good reason for it to treat the time as UTC. It’s perfectly fine to assume the time is the local time at the location of the event, which my phone correctly extracted from the the email and added to the calendar entry, so it knew the location. It could have easily used that information to determine the local time zone. Or if that’s too hard just assume it’s in the time zone I’m currently in; that’s going to be correct the vast majority of the time.
Possibly a settings issue, my friend. On my android, I have the option to use “Automatic Time Zone” in my settings.
Hope this helps!
Tag: @WildaBeast
The first GMail bug I ever reported was one where it would parse a date in the format AA/BB/YYYY using the language settings of my account (Canadian English, which would prefer AA=day, BB=month) instead of the language settings of the sender (American English, which would prefer AA=month, BB=day).
It could be just a conventions ambiguity, but it would do it even if the date didn’t make sense in the convention it was using. E.g., seeing 05/25/2012, it would still insist that it meant the 25th month of 2012 (i.e. the first month of 2014) and add the even to my calendar then.
And not even them in the summer. 
The Windows print dialog box gives you the option to print in portrait or landscape, and helpfully provides a little rectangle icon for each.
The word “portrait” has a horizontal rectangle next to it, and the word “landscape” has a vertical rectangle next to it.
Ran into this one yesterday. Logged into the NHS app on my phone to check a message. I got a pop-up saying that the email address I use for the app is not the same as in my main NHS record and would I like to review it. I take a look and it tells me that firstname.lastname@provider.com is not the same as Firstname.Lastname@provider.com. Whoever coded that didn’t know that email addresses are not case sensitive.
Actually they can be, the RFC standard (RFC 5321: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol | RFC Editor) allows for case sensitivity in the local part (the part before the @ symbol) of the address. Although most mail systems handle it these days by converting things to lowercase behind the scenes, some older mail servers may still enforce it. I even remember encountering problems with undelivered mail because of case sensitivity before.
The one software problem that just recently (again) aggravated me is form fields on any number of websites that just don’t seem to know that you can try white space before and after text. I will copy and paste something like a number which will be like <tab>##### or <space>##### and it will refuse it. I have been trimming leading spaces from web forms for ages, but these new high-faulting pages apparently have never heard of doing so.
And while I am ranting. Can Youtube Music and its Android Auto integration be more daft? It runs on your phone, it knows what your internet connection is like, so when you are not on wifi, it should know to show you the downloaded files/offline library options. Instead you sometimes have to select downloads manually before you can play anything, when the whole point is for you not to have to touch your phone when you are driving. Occasionally it works right away, but often I have to reach for the phone times.
//i\\
OK, I didn’t know that. But a strange thing is that I never use the Firstname.Lastname version, only the lowercase version so I don’t know where they got the mixed case version.
I ran into a dumb one today. Trying to log in to my pharmacy website, and it asked me to type in my birth date for verification. It’s a single text entry box, and under the box it says “mm/dd/yyyy”. So I type in the two digits of my birth month fine. Then I type a slash, and nothing happens. The slash is not echoed. Puzzled, I try TAB, but that just moves the cursor out of the box. Maybe slash on the numeric keypad? Nope. Couldn’t be backslash they’re looking for, could it? Nope. After a few moments of frustration I tried just entering the first digit of the day. That causes a slash to appear, along with the digit. That’s nice that you’re making the slash optional I guess, but if the user types one, just echo it and move on, ok?
That reminds me of one I’ve encountered, though no example to provide. The page creator had the exact same thought you did, but didn’t quite get it implemented right. When typing a / it fills in the / and moves to the next field, but then when typing another number, it moves again to the next field. So if you intend to type 1/15/1988 what you get is 1//1519, and what you should have typed is 01151988.
I’ve encountered this bug enough that I expect there exists a broken Stackexchange code snippet.
I stopped getting DSL internet in 2021 because the company discontinued the service. That company just started sending me a monthly bill in the mail (2 so far). Two double sided pages and a return envelope.
0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Unfortunately, the return envelope is not postage paid.
I have all my retirement stuff (besides current employer 401k) at Fidelity, and have generally been happy with them. In 2017, a new account showed up, with a $0.00 balance. It looked like a 401k and had the name of a company I had never heard of. I called Fidelity, and found that a company I had worked for 1991-93 had been sold a few times, and wound up under this new company, and they for some reason were putting any and all historical employees into their 401k plan, and there was nothing I could do about it. So there’s this phantom account that keeps showing up in my statements & tax documents.
The blood donation center I go to has a website where you can do things like schedule appointments and redeem rewards, except it’s unusable, because it’s impossible to log in. I think that what happened is that my password expired when they migrated the system some years back, and so now I need to change it. Except you need a valid password in order to be able to change your password, and the password that needs to be changed isn’t valid any more.
And of course, it’s also impossible to make a new account, because there’s already an account with my email address.
If the account is connected to a email address you still have access to, it seems like you should be able to do a simple “forgot password” reset.
Yup, it does seem like you should be able to do that.