Draft! Work in progress! Feedback welcome!
Revised version intended for Qworky’s blog Better Software/Better World
If you’ve got any examples of or stories about software you hate, please leave them in the comments!
Maybe it’s just me, but things haven’t gotten any better since when I posted Rant: I hate software on Liminal States fifteen months ago. I’m constantly dealing with software that fails in mysterious ways with inscrutable messages and makes me feel like it’s my fault, that I must be stupid because I don’t understand what’s happening.
Last week, I wanted to change my photo here on the blog and couldn’t figure out how. I found the admin panel, found my user account … nope, no way to change the photo. Eventually I sheepishly asked Mikal and fortunately he knew — I had to go to gravatar.com.  Duh.
Wait a second, though.  Maybe it’s not just me. Here’s a conversation I just had about Google Wave with my brother Greg, who’s a blogger, a social media consultant, and not stupid:
@gregpincus: well fooey. how would I have done it differently
@jdp23: if you had gone to after my quesion and hit control-return if in edit mode (or double-clicked, hovered, and then clicked reply on the mini-popup if not in edit mode on that blip) you it would have been an inline reply
@gregpincus: ah. so intuitive
Indeed.
And y’know, a lot of other smart friends of mine tell me stories about how software makes them feel stupid too.
Hmm. Maybe it’s not us. Maybe it’s the software.
Andrea Mignolo (aka @pnts) told me that when she sees grumpy people, she wonders how much their hassles with software contributed to their bad mood. At least for me, these software annoyances truly infuriating … I can feel my blood pressure rise and it often takes me quite a while to recover unless I vent about it.
Which is what this thread is for. As you run into examples of software you hate — or software you kind of like that has some annoyances that you hate — please feel free to vent.
jon
jon | 29-Jan-10 at 1:17 am | Permalink
Oh for heavens’ sakes. I went to share this draft on Facebook so I could get some feedback. Usually when you share a link Facebook does a pretty good job of extracting a decent headline, graphic, and short extract of the article. In fact in the past it’s often worked quite well when I’ve shared stuff from Liminal States. Tonight, here’s what I got:
No headline. No graphic. No extract. Nuthin’ 🙁
I hate software.
PS: I wound up posting this as a note on Facebook, which worked okay except for some weird HTML incompatibilities. Grr. I’m going to sleep.
jon | 29-Jan-10 at 11:32 am | Permalink
Deborah called me up this monring and said, “well, almost everything is working. except for one of my mail accounts.” Thunderbird (the open-source email client from Mozilla.org) was giving her the following delightful error message:
This has been a tough email week for Deborah. On Wednesday, her iPhone was mysteriously unable to get to privacyactivism.org. It took us about an hour over the phone to delete the account and recreate it from scratch. So this was not the kind of message she wanted to be seeing to start her day out …
Some quick Googling revealed that “The LastResort font is used by the operating system to display Unicode data when no other font can be found.” Great. Nothing obvious about what to do if Thurnderbird can’t find it. So Deborah still can’t read her mail.
Hmm. So let me get this straight. Just because it can’t display an admittedly-cool glyph of Saturn, Thunderbird’s not going to show Deborah her mail?
I hate software.
jon | 29-Jan-10 at 8:17 pm | Permalink
a response on Twitter:
I have no clue what techtool is but it sounds unpleasant. Sigh.
jon | 29-Jan-10 at 8:28 pm | Permalink
Meanwhile on Facebook … rather than “share” this page with no headline, no graphic, no nuthin, I decided to cut-and-paste the HTML from WordPress to Facebook as a note. I fought my way through HTML incompatibilities (grr) and then some good discussion ensued … for example:
There’s more from Cheryl as well as Denise Eve, and me near the bottom of the Facebook note.
jon | 01-Feb-10 at 9:16 am | Permalink
And more from Facebook:
Lie | 03-Feb-10 at 7:20 am | Permalink
I have been thinking a lot about this recently. As a long time M$ Windows user (and a really, really frustrated one at that), I’ve switched to my first Mac and it just works. When windows crashed, I was always angry. I reinstalled my OS at least once a year, lots more when I was in virus-infested developing countries.
But the few times my Mac has crashed this past year, I find myself not angry, but instead something like sad, like it was my dear friend who is trying so hard, and i know they are, and I’m cheering them on the sidelines. I don’t know why this is and it’s definitely not a conscious decision, but it’s my instinctive response.
I think it comes around to the fact that for decades so much of my work time has been heavily focused on sysadmin’ing computers to get them to work as they should. Now I want my work to be using computers to do what I want to do. I shouldn’t have to drop to a command line to use my phone, which is why I have an iPhone, not an Android device. I like having the terminal on my Mac, but I so rarely use it that it’s really more of a curiosity when I do. I never think about viruses when I install programs, but when I’m on windows, before even downloading a program I make sure I’ve got my firewall set up and secure, my virus software updated, my registry watching program updated, my web browser or ftp program updated, etc, etc, etc. I don’t know how to install virus software on my Mac or iPhone, and I *love* it that way. Shit should just work, I’m tired of geeking out for hours to make it so.
I’m not alone in this shift in thinking, check out these two excellent articles about the iPad that discusses exactly these issues:
http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/359224392/i-need-to-talk-to-you-about-computers-ive-been
http://www.macworld.com/article/146038/2010/01/ipad_future_shock.html?lsrc=twt_macworld
jon | 08-Sep-10 at 8:57 pm | Permalink
Here’s the scary message I got when I installed the new version of Firefox:
Here’s what happened when I clicked on the link:
Fortunately it was an intermittent error, and I eventually got through to the Adobe download page. Here’s an excerpt:
The software licensing agreement is 210 pages long. The last 6 are in English and have terms that essentially tells me Adobe can connect my computer to an advertiser’s web site whenever I open a PDF file and these third parties will use my IP address and whatever information they get from Javascript, web beacons, “and other technologies” (which presumably means flash cookies) and that
And I can’t opt out of having this information shared.
Sometimes I really, really, really hate software.
jon | 16-Feb-11 at 1:18 pm | Permalink
Facebook’s latest functionality has all kinds of fails. Here’s one caused by integration btween messages and groups.
No, that’s not actually what I typed. Instead I replied to a group message via email (using Thunderbird on a Mac) and a whole bunch of unreadable stuff got put into the group — and emailed on to everybody using it. Sigh.
jon | 16-Feb-11 at 1:22 pm | Permalink
Meanwhile in the progressive-blogopshere Daily Kos rolled out their long-dreaded update this weekend. It took me a while to figure out how to publish a story. Here’s what I saw after I clicked ‘preview’.
Alas, there is no ‘Publish’ button. Eventually I thought of clicking ‘Publication manager’ which is where I found it. How intuitive!
Once I had the post up, several people said that they couldn’t figure out how to recommend. Then I tried to edit it and started getting an error message about tags already being defined. There aren’t any groups around basics like ‘civil liberties’ and I had no idea how to create one — it turns out you have to be a ‘trusted user’, which I am not even though I’ve posted their off-and-on since 2008. WTF?
jon | 17-Feb-11 at 9:56 am | Permalink
I tried to connect my DK4 account to my Twitter account and now can’t log in. It could be user error on my part — I may just have forgotten my password. Unfortunately the ‘reset my password’ option doesn’t work for me, because the email’s not showing up … I can’t remember which of my many spam-catching accounts I sent it too. Sigh.
Here’s the error message I get:
I hate software.
jon | 15-Mar-11 at 11:03 am | Permalink
w00t! Kim Cameron just blogged about the Social Network User’s Bill of Rights on the Identity Blog. So I went to leave a comment, and tried to log in with “Open Id”. Here’s what I got:
I hate software