UKC

Since it's friday and nearly time to go home, we are compiling a list of the World's Sh*test Software ;-

(One entry per user) So in this office we have :-

Vista
itunes
CiscoWorks

Feel free to make your own contribution !

In reply to David Peters:

Siemens Step7 Which wins because they dont sell step5 any more

In reply to 999thAndy: lotus notes

In reply to David Peters:

Internet Explorer (ALL versions, no exceptions)
my recent rants have been at software written for windows that uses massive amounts of space on my disk / RAM and yet i only need it to do simple tasks
MS office is a classic example ... outlook 2003 using 150Mb of RAM to display a couple of blinking text files?
Nero7 suggesting it "needs" up to 1.9Gb of space (i just want you to burn a damn cd / dvd, why the feck do i need all your stupid extras?)

In reply to David Peters:

Internet Explorer (5, 6 & 7)

In reply to Arnoid:
which is soooo much worse than exchange.......NOT!

In reply to David Peters:
are you familiar with windows mojave?
itunes is ace on the right platform, ie a mac. shit on a pc though; i think it's a ploy by jobs to get more PC users to buy real computers.

i'm not too keen on i-photo as it happens.

In reply to Arnoid:

Step5 required the partitioning of the hard drive, so you could run CPM as the OS. It just got worse from that point

In reply to David Peters:

Itunes followed by IE6&7 then vista due to its huge addiction to drinking memory.

In reply to David Peters:

Micro$oft (i.e. Windows3.11/96/NT/Server/XP/Vista/Office/Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook/IE/etc./etc.)

In reply to Arnoid:
Boll~@cks, though why do you say that?

Anyway, Windows 9598ME

In reply to David Peters:
in no specfic order.

another vote for

Internet Explorer (5, 6 & 7)

MS Vista

In reply to David Peters:

Any one in Insurance will know TAM (The Agency Manager) ..complete balls. It looks and feels like a GCSE project.

In reply to David Peters:

Office (97 specifically)
Aperture Vista (CAD/database package, not the photo thingy...)

In reply to rallymania:


Why do you say that, I've always thought Exchange to be better than Notes (andOutlook better than the Notes client)

In reply to David Peters:
Anything with it's name preceded by 'Microsoft (r)'...

In reply to jamesboyle:
Or Norton. What a crock...

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

After the various threads a few weeks ago I decided to try the various alternatives to IE. Chrome is alright, but both Safari and Firefox were ditched within the hour. Amongst other things, they were rubbish when browsing UKC !

Worst software I've encountered was some security package produced by CA - etrust Admin. Absolute heap of crap which I had to try and develop an interface with.

Windows ME is undoubtedly the worst of the various release - never name an O/S after a debilitating disease. It also had a very peculiar feature. If your program was called setup.exe, and you tried to determine what the OS was (a common thing for a setup program to do) it would give you the wrong answer and say it was Windows 95 or something. Took me days to get to the bottom of that

In reply to jamesboyle:

Ahhhh forgot about norton, i dont trust that software mainly due to how deeply embedded it gets into your conmputer system and how it grinds any pc to a hault.

In reply to David Peters: Based on its 'performance' on my father in laws PC, Norton anti virus

In reply to peewee2008:

Probably something I wrote!

In reply to peewee2008:


Ah that reminds me; AOL. It only needs to set up a network connection (more or less)on your PC but it takes over your whole life, moves into the spare room and then spends the evening sitting on the sofa watching your telly, drinking your beer!

In reply to David Peters: Sony Sonic Stage.

Or for sheer instability despite ridiculous cost - ArcGIS.

In reply to Dom Whillans:


Then it's a shit ploy:

iTunes users on PCs see that iTunes is shit. It would be a perfectly sensible to assume that this is because Apple programmers are shit. So why would shit Apple software encourage a PC user to buy an Apple that they would naturally assume would also be shit? They'll just use something other than iTunes to manage their music.

Now, if iTunes ran brilliantly on a PC, and was far and away better and easier to use than any other PC software, that might encourage PC users to buy an Apple...

In reply to David Peters: The Survey System. A bit of software that we use for a core part of our business and it's utterly rubbish. I'm not even sure that the people who wrote and sold the thing have heard of it...

In reply to David Peters:

Sonic Stage, that comes with Sony mp3 players. Really really appauling.

Vista - it is so unbelievably slow, but running a tablet there's nothing close to as good for that side of it so I can't switch.

I actually really like itunes! So much better than windows media player!

In reply to David Peters: Anyone had to use SAP? You have my deepest sympathy.

In reply to Chris the Tall:


Really? What did they do wrong? I switched to Firefox 5.0 a few weeks ago, and UKC works seamlessly. Only without the Flash ads and other rubbish...

In reply to captain paranoia:

iTunes does run well on a PC though. It does on mine anyway and I've got it linked up to 80+ Gb of music stored on my external HDD. Vastly prefer it to Windows Media Player.

I'll second the suggestion for Lotus Notes, it's utter shite. We used to run Novell on our network, that was crap too.

Sage Line 500 - crud.

In reply to David Peters:

Most people's spell checkers, by the looks of things on here!

We have an in-house timesheet system that is terrible to use and needs to be replaced.

In reply to mark burley: ah SAP, I was doubly unfortunate to have to (try) and use it via VNC client over a very slow connection.

Must say I quite like iTunes it has yet to annoy me in any significant way.

SonicStage was a festering turd of an application.

Vista is not bad pursay but even will all the fancy graphical crap turned off still manages to use twice the memory to do the same thing. That said I cant see that it offers anything over XP other than whoops of delight from RAM manufactures.

Some of the releases for Matlab that replaced resonable stable application with a new one that used twice the memory and crashed if you so much as farted out of turn. This was generally solved by keeping three releases behind the current one and hoping by the time you were forced to upgrade they'd have sorted the worst of the bugs out.

In reply to a concerned citizen: Oh and another votes for LotusNotes, I'd rather carve my calender on my scrotum with an old rusty razor than use that.

In reply to David Peters:


By an odd coincidence, today's xkcd:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/windows_7.png

In reply to captain paranoia:

I think it may have been the ads that were causing one of the problems - threads just seemed to be taking ages to load, or only being partly displayed. Of course it could be out proxy server, but there were also other issues such as the inability to get the font right.

Maybe it's because I'm a software developer, and use MS tools for that, that I just find MS software more intuitive than other stuff. For example I much prefer Windows Media Player to iTunes.

In reply to Jaffacake:

That's the one I was trying to remember. It pretends to uninstall itself. You clean out all the files you can find, but like a bloody weed it pops back and takes over. Arrrgggghhhhh. Just horrible.

In reply to David Peters:

here's my top ten:

1 through to 8: Microsoft Project, hateful, incomprehensible and (as a bonus) fewer features than doodling on a calendar offered. The only redeeming feature was that as the entire program is essentially pointless there was no reason to continue to use it.

9: Lotus Notes. Is there anything that Lotus Notes doesn't attempt to do badly? Bloated, badly supported and poorly implemented, if Outlook was like this the spam market would collapse instantly.

10: Crystal Reports. I don't see how they can make this any less accessible, short of electrifying my keyboard.

In reply to David Peters:
I reckon:
1)Vista (Sheer iritation)
2)Windows explorer
3)The script that appears after windows explorer crashes.
4)Matlab (For the misery factor)
5)Windows updates (Does whatever the f*ck it likes!)

In reply to psd:

Old work used to have a web based email system, simple things like creating contact groups to send emails to was beyond it (only had a 20mb limit as well), I longed for something as sophisticated as Lotus Notes!

I quite like Crystal Reports

In reply to David Peters:

The world's scariest has got to be TECO - Type your name <esc> <esc> and try to guess what will happen next

The world's best was UCSD P-System - Captain, the ship is yours! You have the Con.

In reply to David Peters: Definately internet explorer

In reply to David Peters:

another votes for notes. as an email client is tolerable but its all the shitty "databases" people try and use it for.
carpe diem time recording software - pile of pants
macafee and norton as well.

In reply to David Peters: Vista coupled with Norton...this should stop your PC from doing anything, not so much slow as full stop!!! And getting rid of Norton is even worse. Why do they persist on installing this piece of useless software in the first place?

AutoCad - People only use it because everyone uses it and AutoDesk make such a hash of their .dwg translators.

In reply to David Peters:
Anything that 'Brother' put out

In reply to David Peters: Why don't folk like Itunes?

In reply to David Peters: I don't know why Word (any version) hasn't made the cut. Probably because most people here are too young to remember word processors that used to ... just work. It was a botched job to start with, and has just got steadily worse.

In reply to David Peters: Office 2007 when it's running on Windows Vista

In reply to David Peters:

Nero Burning Rom - any version!

Unless you have the fastest dam computer in the world i guarantee it will freeze at least once every time its used

In reply to Mckenzie:

oh and avg free version

In reply to David Peters:

EMACS [Hoists "Vi forever!" banner, then dives for cover]

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

It's awesomely poor, really, isn't it? Your last sentence sums it up perfectly. Imagine if Adobe, for example, were ever to have a go a it ...

In reply to David Peters: so folks. what if you were getting a new PC with 4Gb RAM and a good processor etc. then would you still look to have XP instead of Vista???

I'm in the market and buying soon probably from MESH.

In reply to David Peters: Quark Express

Yes, another vote for Norton. I utterly despise that program.

I remember Windows ME being a dog, I have managed to avoid Vista so far.

I too, quite like iTunes.

In reply to David Peters: cubase!

In reply to David Peters:

SAP - for telling you to click on the whatever button, except that the whatever button has something else written on it - how the hell did that ever get thought QA - and it's everywhere. SAP for generating error messages in German - thank you for your valued assistance....

Siebel - for being utterly counter-intuitive, and for having some search fields that are case sensitive and some that are not (secretly)- really effing helpful when you're trying to find something that. And for asking you to input some data which you can't, because it comes from another area which isn't populated yet, except it won't let you go there to populate it, until you fill in the field which you can't because.... Ctrl Alt Delete

In reply to mark burley:


All of the tailored applications that go along with SAP. SAP seems to be an application(s) that are designed to make life easy for 2% of the company (Finance) whilst making life hell for the other 98%. Having been involved now with 2 companies that have "migrated" to SAP, I'm now sure that it's utter sh1te.

In reply to David Peters: anything windows !!

Vista
Lotus Notes
Hauppage wintv (the hardware is great the interface is shockingly bad)
system mechanic
Win ME
Norton Anti virus

Another vote for Sony Sonic Stage, nothing else comes close.

In reply to David Peters:

Wordstar!

People these days just don't know what user-unfriendly really is

In reply to Serpico:

To put it into context, how many other pieces of software have online petitions dedicated to them?
http://www.petitiononline.com/Sonymd/petition.html

In reply to steve taylor:

Ooh, I've just remembered the one thing about SAP that used to wind me up when I was working for the BBC's training department. There was a way of booking a resource for zero length of time (if I remember correctly you had to cancel the allocation in a slightly odd way) - at which point the booking was invisible to the rest of the corporation, couldn't be cancelled properly and prevented anyone from using it for any time period that covered or abutted the booking. This could rapidly become very tedious...

In reply to psd:

By far the worst I've experienced is Pinnacle Studio Plus 10. Utter @%$&

In reply to David Peters:

Windows ME. No question. For all it's problems, Vista doesn't even come close to ME; the all time biggest sack of digital shite ever to make it on to a PC.

In reply to Mr_Yeti:

I used to work for them and insurEcom and yes it is crap. Ah the good old bad old days eh!

In reply to yer maw: Personally, I wouldn't touch Vista with a bargepole. Stick with XP, even if it does cost a bit more to have on your pc 'cos you have to buy it separately.

In reply to David Peters:

Forgive my ignorance but what's wrong with itunes?

In reply to Tyler:

exchange is much better now than it was recently. outlook on the surface seems very good and quite easy to operate, but like many MS applications seems a little weak on security.
notes / domino is more complicated in many ways but simpler in others
ask an exchange admin to restore a users mailbox and see the response
(exchange stores all users mailboxes in a single file, to restore one you have to restore the lot... which needs another server normally... domino, yeah that's right, just restore the affected users mailfile)

it sounds a bit weird but notes was never designed as an email system, that's why it seems clunky compared to outlook

In reply to Arnoid:


Oh, seconded, thirded etc. Surely this must be the winner - what other software has a website dedicated to its flaws (google "lotus notes sucks")

In reply to Nic: Some of my software is pretty poor - especially the stuff I wrote at 5.00 pm in Formby on a Friday afternoon with the customer breathing down my neck.

It's still going after 10 years though.

In reply to Nic:
lol

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&...

In reply to Arnoid:

Another vote for Lotus Notes. How is it possible to do something so simple so badly?

In reply to David Peters:


we use a program called sample manager in my lab. desperately unstable - although that might be to do with it being on a citrix server.

In reply to 33% Longer:
1) Citrix ICA client for OSX. Like pulling out your own teeth with pliers, but less rewarding.
2) Win ME. "Never name your OS after a debilitating disease" - marvellous, will remember that.
3) tpath results reporter. I can't really blame it - 20 years out of date DOS based software ahoy - but I vividly recall having to run and use two programs simultaneously, one of which required caps lock on and the other caps lock off. For 6 months FFS! And so intuitive - press f1 for this, shift and I for print, f11 to go back, f12 to print in this screen, etc.
4) And an honourable mention to Adobe, for making the world's worst installers - fat, slow, random and unhelpful, they are the lardy-arsed pasty scoffing waddlers somehow always in front of you on the pavement of progress.
5) EndNote for OSX. And yet, somehow, unbelievably, despite itself - it usually works.

B

In reply to ben b:

At last, someone has named and shamed this software, our work's network operates (if that is the word) on this P.O.S.

In reply to David Peters: No t that most users will be familiar with either of these but the AGFA PACS combined with GEM authenticate is a very expensive rubbish peice of software used to display images in hospital funded by me and you.

In reply to CM: GE PACS systems, oh yes, the most irritating and feeble PACS system I've ever used. Given that their are whole open source versions of this that are infinitely better - and free - it's another triumph of the NHS IT system. Why not pay through the teeth for rubbish when you could get something better for free?

B

In reply to David Peters:

1. AutoCAD
2. LSS
3. ArcGIS

In reply to Goodwin912:

OS9 (not the Mac version) made MS-DOS(any version) look sophisticated, elegant, fit for purpose, desirable!

ALC

Windows ME was brill, mine kept crashing during the installation proces before it was even up and running! I still have it on CD incase I ever need it

In reply to David Peters:

Another vote for Lotus Notes here.

That said, for various strange reasons, I bought the Adobe CS4 suite a few days ago which bundles Acrobat 9 Pro. I was absolutely stunned to find that it won't directly create a PDF from a .doc file ... which I had previously thought was the only thing Acrobat did do. Am I missing something? On Mac OS X.

In reply to captain paranoia:

That's more or less the train of thought that wrestling with sh*tty itunes on a pc sets off in my mind.

To those who've asked what's wrong with it. I've found that it's very counter-intuitive and has taken me ages to get used to - and some things I still just can't figure out. E.g., I can't seem to find a simple way of just cueing tracks as you browse without arsing about with playlists. It also seems to take forever to open and close. Of course some of these things could be to do with other aspects of my PC. I just find it very fiddly and counter-intuitive really.

I'd like to make Groupwise my number one vote though. We have to use that mail software at work and I *hate* it.

In reply to tobyfk:


i will sneak in another vote, god i hate it especially its innovative approach to showing meeting times for multi time zones.


looking at this
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/matrix.html

it seems to indicate it is only in windows (although whether that is one button or at all is left vague).

In reply to David Peters:

Far too many spring to mind to pick just one.

As a meta contribution, I'll suggest almost every piece of software Microsoft has produced, with a few exceptions which they have largely killed for being too useful. Somehow they manage to take various reasonably good ideas (usually from other companies, and often from earlier decades) and turn them into astoundingly awkward software which has huge hardware requirements and is frighteningly unreliable.

Of the tools I've had to use in the past, Visual Cafe was by far the worst editor ever, and MS SourceSafe should get a dishonorable mention for being almost exactly the opposite of its name.

For general office tools, Notes is probably the worst I've had to use, with Adobe Reader being almost as irritating, but not nearly as hard to replace.

For operating systems, the early versions of the MS WinCE were definitely the worst I've had to deal with. It was a very well chosen name. Luckily I have had no need to even look at Vista or Win7, and hopefully never will.

In reply to Goodwin912:

Holy Sh!t!! You've never used SolidWorks then. AutoCad is approximately 2 or three orders of magnitude more stable.

In reply to David Peters:

I have risen from my deathbed purely to vocalise my hatred for

a) SAGE 50 ACT! whatever it was called that was designed as a marketing library type thing. Absolute shit pile of wank that could do about 5% of what it proclaimed on a good day and ground your PC to a full stop.

b) Opera. Firefox and IE (any release) are crap and this was the best of a bad bunch but its compatible with UKC and one other site and anything else just takes forever.

c) Kapersky. For f*ck sake. I'm toying with the idea of just advertising my bank details online so they can suck it dry and I can not have to bother with sodding 'security' that kills my laptop.

In reply to David Peters: Sorry no one has yet mentioned any software that comes close to what I would consider to the worlds worst.

That will probably be due to the fact that the acolade would probably go to an in house system somewhere written on very old hardware in a language that has died out on a compiler that is flakey, writen buy people who if you said they wrote bad code would see it as a complement
:-S

Think how bad that could be, then try to consider software that is 100% worse.....

I have seen such software :-S

In reply to Jo Horne:

Eh? Which one of the three? Or is it all three?

ALC

In reply to a lakeland climber:

Check my punctuation

Using Opera (rubbish). Tried IE and Firefox and threw in proverbial bin.

In reply to Jo Horne:

OK, so which was the best of a bad bunch, Opera? Which did you throw in the proverbial? The punctuation doesn't make it clear.

Any browser is just part of a long chain of comms, any part of which can slow things down. IE (any version) is still the worst browser of the current crop.

ALC

In reply to tobyfk:

Been shopping in Buraimi recently?

In reply to Jo Horne: opera is great, what doesn't it do that it should? (written on my phone using opera mini which is even greater ) As someone else said, nearly everything listed here is great in comparison to some in house stuff.

In reply to ebygomm:

Its agonisingly slow to load pages (compared to IE which I hate for other reasons) and for some reason the majority of sites I use don't support it and tell me so, so I have to keep IE especially for those sites so have two browsers operating. I'd love to love it believe me.

In reply to David Peters:
Pretty much anything written by HP. Jetadmin? Friendly as a cornered rat. Printer software that won't uninstall, 100Mb+ printer drivers, printer drivers that take half an hour to install on a fast modern PC.

I reckon when HP want coders they go down the Job Centre and have a conversation like this:

HP: Have you got any people with serious human-interaction problems, and preferably a grudge against the world?

JC: Hmm, let's see......yep Yep, we have.

HP: How many have you got?

JC: Ooh....about 200.

HP: Can they code?

JC: Ah, no. Sorry.

HP: Great. I'll take the lot.

In reply to Jo Horne: & al :-

Just to antagonise all you people who decry anything made by Microsoft.

I enjoy using VISTA-no problems and my machine has the RAM to run it properly.

I.E is still faster,IMHO then anything else available and crashes rarely.
What do all you moaners want a browser to do for Christs sake ?

William Portail

In reply to Jo Horne:

You can tell it to pretend to be IE.

ALC

In reply to Anonymous:

I.E is still faster,IMHO then anything else available and crashes rarely.
What do all you moaners want a browser to do for Christs sake ?

Well, the one piece of software I use that can be guaranteed to crash (and even bring down the whole system) is IE. Cue message to contact the supplier of the software, ho-hum.

IE faster? If I load a local page, i.e. one that doesn't require internet access, so no network issues to slow things down or otherwise skew results then IE takes between 3 and 5 times longer to load than Firefox, Opera or Chrome. Safari is also pretty slow.

ALC

In reply to Bob kate bob:
Reminds me of something I once saw in the amendment history of some code at work: "gibberish replaced with english in comments for last five amendments". This from a relatively senior bod who'd been trying to rectify the problems introduced as a result of various people's attempts to fix the thing.

(The module in question eventually got so long that the complier couldn't handle it, so every time you wanted to do yet another amendment you found yourself hunting through it for redundant sections you could delete just to get the thing to compile. The scary bit was that deleting huge chunks of it appeared to have no effect whatsoever. When the system was finally decomissioned we had a party to celebrate (among other things) the fact that we would never see that poxy excuse for code ever again.)

In reply to Anonymous:


well yes if you throw enough hardware at something you can get past most issues, not elegant mind.


ermm, its the slowest by a considerable margin by any normal test.
it loads faster when opening buts that cos microsoft preloads half the damn thing.


quite a lot hence why i use firefox

In reply to a lakeland climber:

Sorry,but I have not had the same experience.

I can't really comment on the local-pages issue,as I always clean everything off after every session.

In reply to Anonymous:

What I mean is that if you have a local html file, i.e. not one saved off the web but generated and residing on your machine, then IE is much, much slower than any other browser at rendering it.

I only run IE to test that web pages I write will view in it - basically to check that I am not using some standard feature of html or CSS that IE cannot after nearly a decade get right.

ALC

In reply to a lakeland climber:

Fair enough !

It's years since I wrote anything in html !

In reply to a lakeland climber:

Do you know of any test by industry groups that settles the issue of fastest browser once and for all? There are various anecdotal test like yours on the net but are there any done by a Gartner type group?

In reply to Bob kate bob:
Ah, so you've seen my software then!

Luckily for everyone else, my software tends to remain as in-house stuff that's mainly used by me! Although the in-house label printing software I wrote has been used daily for the last 6 years and is 1000% more stable than the software we used to use (also in-house, written by the bosses son!).

In reply to David Peters:


The most miserable piece of software chite i have ever had the dubious pleasure of touching would be ;


microsoft axapta. Absolutely horrible, beyond measure.

In reply to tobyfk:

(re Lotus Notes) - what other program requires a *separate* program to close it when it hangs otherwise it pollutes the entire system!

In reply to Anonymous:

Oi! I decry IE. I love Office and so far have no real issue with Vista!

In reply to Tyler:

Don't know of any "official" independent tests, every browser maker seems to prefer a test suite that shows their product off well for some reason. There are a couple of comparison test sites:

Slightly out of date - http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html - FF2 & IE7beta are the latest browsers.

An Opera user's test - http://www.evilscience.org/internet-explorer-vs-firefox-vs-opera-vs-chrome-... - he reckons Chrome is the fastest. His tests are on fresh installs, no extensions, service packs etc. basically what a non-technical user would use.

Another anecdote: if I run Firefox I can see a certain speed in rendering pages. This doesn't change dramatically if I then fire up either IE, Opera or Safari to also see how things render. If, however, I start Chrome (only other browser open is Firefox) then Firefox slows dramatically! I've no explanation for this that I can back up with "this dll is doing this" or whatever. Shut Chrome down and Firefox is back to its previous speed.

ALC

In reply to dissonance:


Thanks. Yes, I believe if you have MS Office on a Windows machine you can install an add-in bundled with Acrobat that creates PDF as a one-click process. It also seems to be possible to print to an Acrobat widget of some kind, from any app that prints, to create a PDF. However the latter is far clunkier than what I already have in Neo Office (freeware ) on the Mac, which has an export to PDF option with many control parameters. I'd assumed that Acrobat Pro would actually load a .doc file itself then create a PDF from it. But it doesn't. So what the f*ck does it do?

In reply to Lord of Starkness:

Nope. I bought a legit copy for a king's ransom. I have been working with trial copies of PS for a long time but Adobe seem to have finally rumbled me. I'd happily use Gimp (freeware ...) instead but the current plan for the guidebook involves employing proper designers who use Photoshop and InDesign.