I administer my company's internal Confluence server and author most of the content, and I have a few complaints but overall I love using it. What do you dislike about it?
My 2¢: Confluence's primary job is to share and manage lots of written documentation. If I wanted to make such software I'd make it fast, the curation/management job lightweight and inline, and emphasize readability and promote fast comprehension of information with layout and design.
Confluence is slow, curation/management is ponderous and the design ignores hundreds of years of research / practice in visual processing of information.
For Confluence: we've found a much better alternative is Quip - we all love it after the switch. Dropbox Paper is another new alternative that people seem to like.
I like Confluence, I hate some pre/styled things they do, but in general is not a bad wiki software and it's integrated with Jira. The worst is no one at my company reads these docs :)
... and composing email with more than one attachment is next to impossible due to lack of file system. There's (allegedly) workaround with uploading one of the attachment to iCloud first, but I'm refusing to use cloud storage for any piece of my private data.
Kiln from Fogcreek. Slow on a good day, it just mysteriously stopped noticing my commits in my activity stream some four years ago, you can't have reviews spanning multiple repos, they've blown off pull-requests as a feature for years.
Recently got a new HP laptop strictly for playing games. Almost threw it out the window because of the stupid HP Service Center. Even when you disable it in every possible way, it doesn't leave you alone.
I want to both upvote and downvote this. Upvote because it's just spectacularly bad, downvote because being reminded of its existence made me throw up in my mouth a little.
You know, I spent a lot of profitable years building apps on top of Notes/Domino during the height of its existence. And, I have to say - for all its flaws, quirks, and limitations, there was no faster way (except perhaps Delphi?) to get small, simple, and highly business-specific internal apps done in a large organization. The reason was that it was totally batteries-included. You had authentication, authorization, a decent NoSQL database (it was the inspiration for CouchDB, if you weren't aware), two (eventually three, when Java was added) languages for writing apps (one of which was kind-of functional), local and server-based event buses, full-text search, integrated email... The list keeps going.
So, yeah. People hated using it for email. More than once, I built a better email client for it, and people were suddenly a lot happier with it. There wasn't as much that I could do for the calendar app, which had serious core deficiencies.
To be honest, I never understood all the hate, though. Don't get me wrong - no one knew where it was lacking better than I. And, it's been a "dead" product for many years; it would be silly to ever recommend it now. But, executives who never had to even touch the thing would enter a company, and declare that, "We MUST move from this to Microsoft products!" And, the alternatives would always be far worse. (Think Sharepoint, for example.) I'm not even sure that google's productivity products are that big of a step better.
Notes solved a lot of hard problems for large organizations, all at once. It wasn't pretty, not was it ever really that fast. But, it enabled business - particularly non-tech business - the ability to automate things in the blink of an eye, for instant improvement.
I think that we could all learn a thing or two from looking at why it was so popular in its day, and maybe keep just the good parts in what we do.
Lately for me it's the iOS Music app. Every iOS release it gets further away from the original purpose. Off the top of my head, the "Search" screen used to show the last 10+ things I searched for (artists, playlists, songs, etc). Now it only shows the last 3 things I searched for, and fills the rest of the screen up with what's trending on the iTunes store. I didn't ask for that!
It also regularly refuses to play music which has been downloaded to my iPhone because my cell signal isn't strong enough. I have to put it in airplane mode when I'm on the subway.
I feel like they're trying to be like Spotify, but as every change they make to Music makes it worse, they're just driving me to use Spotify more. For example, the list of albums from an artist is almost unusable now. Everything looks pretty but usability is poor.
Projects list is a pain in the arse and the layout is weird. Emailing a client involves witchcraft and switching to some whole new client interface. Doesn't have time tracking, have to use yet another garbage app to do that. People keep using Campfire instead of Slack. Everyone gets a notification for everything by default. So much goddamn white space on this thing. MY BROWSER IS MASSIVE, USE IT. The timeline thing under projects feels like someone thought it was clever so they included it, in reality it's all squashed up and has no real purpose.
Can I just mention this separately. "Like this? Clap for <Name>" - is that supposed to be a sarcasm clap? Like seriously has anyone ever used that legitimately? The only time I'd use it if there was a message "oops I deleted the server" or similar.
I am going to throw a damn parade the day we find an alternative.
Edit: Oh also 3.basecamp.com is stupid. Use your domain.
Also when I log in why am I suddenly on 37signals.com. I get there's a switcher to go back to the (slightly more tolerable) Basecamp Classic but what's this domain about. Branding all over the damn place.
I can only assume (without Googling the answer) that's that Japanese thing where someone pokes another person in the backside with their two index fingers because that's what using Basecamp feels like.
Quickbooks Desktop - I've had a long history with it going back well over 10 years, the basic edition all the way to Enterprise. It is consistently a headache at wherever I was working at the time. I still to this day see businesses struggle with it when they move beyond just one computer using it especially. Performance, stability and data corruption all issues that still come up even in the latest versions.
100%- what an abomination it is moving beyond one machine. Moving to the hosted Enterprise version was a complete nightmare. Finally pulled the plug and went with Xero and a series of API-based add-ons and it's like being handed the keys to a P100D in Ludicrous Speed mode. Trouble with QB is how entrenched the CPA community is around it. Our CPA howled at the idea of Xero and was the reason we stayed with QB for as long as we did.
VMware vcenter, hey, let's make vcenter fresh and modern, let's make the management tool in freaking flash! This was even after the 'rise of' html5. It is by far the most painful tool I've ever used, it's so bad that you eventually start to miss the horrid Windows only client
- I often don't get notifications at all, on either platform.
- The Mac client crashes too often.
- The Mac client uses more resources than it should.
- Threads are useless.
- Settings are split into too many different views.
- I dislike the design. It's too spaced out (even with the "compact" setting). There's no dark mode. I don't like the icon. Everything is too cutesy.
- I hate the emoji. I don't want more emoji in my life.
Most of all, I hate the hivemind that says it's the only viable chat system, so much so that even open source projects use it over IRC. Hipchat wasn't too much better, but I've not gotten the chance to use it in the past few years because everyone defaults to Slack. I'd love to try Facebook's new work thing, but there's the same problem.
> so much so that even open source projects use it over IRC.
Remove the small amount of technical know how to "properly" use IRC and make chats (and permissions) persistent, and I imagine you'd end up with something that looks eerily like Slack.
That said, I think the Slack load-time in-browser is silly-long and I get spammed with notifications. As for threads, Zulip (https://github.com/zulip/zulip) does things "right" and I wish Slack would rip off their approach (central topic is the "room" and threads are independent, visually-separate-when-highlighted chats within a central topic).
I've used IRCCloud before, and I thought it worked well. They have an "internal" type plan as well with a private server, but as above I can't get anyone to try it because Slack owns the mindshare.
Their new electron app is better in perf and memory and generally the experience is the best I've had (and I've used professionally pretty much every chat app there is).
Compared to alternatives like HipChat or Skype it's eons ahead.
But threads are useless indeed, I'll give you that.
I really can't understand why Slack doesn't just go with a native app (to address performance issues on Electron).
They're a big enough company to work on developing platform-specific apps which would totally improve the user experience (from a performance standpoint at least).
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadConfluence is slow, curation/management is ponderous and the design ignores hundreds of years of research / practice in visual processing of information.
At least we managed to transition from FogBugz.
So, yeah. People hated using it for email. More than once, I built a better email client for it, and people were suddenly a lot happier with it. There wasn't as much that I could do for the calendar app, which had serious core deficiencies.
To be honest, I never understood all the hate, though. Don't get me wrong - no one knew where it was lacking better than I. And, it's been a "dead" product for many years; it would be silly to ever recommend it now. But, executives who never had to even touch the thing would enter a company, and declare that, "We MUST move from this to Microsoft products!" And, the alternatives would always be far worse. (Think Sharepoint, for example.) I'm not even sure that google's productivity products are that big of a step better.
Notes solved a lot of hard problems for large organizations, all at once. It wasn't pretty, not was it ever really that fast. But, it enabled business - particularly non-tech business - the ability to automate things in the blink of an eye, for instant improvement.
I think that we could all learn a thing or two from looking at why it was so popular in its day, and maybe keep just the good parts in what we do.
It also regularly refuses to play music which has been downloaded to my iPhone because my cell signal isn't strong enough. I have to put it in airplane mode when I'm on the subway.
Projects list is a pain in the arse and the layout is weird. Emailing a client involves witchcraft and switching to some whole new client interface. Doesn't have time tracking, have to use yet another garbage app to do that. People keep using Campfire instead of Slack. Everyone gets a notification for everything by default. So much goddamn white space on this thing. MY BROWSER IS MASSIVE, USE IT. The timeline thing under projects feels like someone thought it was clever so they included it, in reality it's all squashed up and has no real purpose.
Can I just mention this separately. "Like this? Clap for <Name>" - is that supposed to be a sarcasm clap? Like seriously has anyone ever used that legitimately? The only time I'd use it if there was a message "oops I deleted the server" or similar.
I am going to throw a damn parade the day we find an alternative.
Edit: Oh also 3.basecamp.com is stupid. Use your domain.
Also when I log in why am I suddenly on 37signals.com. I get there's a switcher to go back to the (slightly more tolerable) Basecamp Classic but what's this domain about. Branding all over the damn place.
I say this as someone who hasn't used Basecamp, so I don't really have an opinion there.
I also like to use my arm chromebook, which is perfect for tasks, but Asana literally kills it performance wise.
Fuck your all fancy javascript, I can make the same app using jquery and it will fly. Unfortunately people I need to use it with wouldn't use my app.
it can honestly take me upwards of a minute to load asana, locate a project and check a task as completed. It should take 10 seconds.
I now understand why the sysadmins in my life are so hardened/grumpy at times.
- It's slow on every platform I use (iOS, macOS).
- I often don't get notifications at all, on either platform.
- The Mac client crashes too often.
- The Mac client uses more resources than it should.
- Threads are useless.
- Settings are split into too many different views.
- I dislike the design. It's too spaced out (even with the "compact" setting). There's no dark mode. I don't like the icon. Everything is too cutesy.
- I hate the emoji. I don't want more emoji in my life.
Most of all, I hate the hivemind that says it's the only viable chat system, so much so that even open source projects use it over IRC. Hipchat wasn't too much better, but I've not gotten the chance to use it in the past few years because everyone defaults to Slack. I'd love to try Facebook's new work thing, but there's the same problem.
Remove the small amount of technical know how to "properly" use IRC and make chats (and permissions) persistent, and I imagine you'd end up with something that looks eerily like Slack.
That said, I think the Slack load-time in-browser is silly-long and I get spammed with notifications. As for threads, Zulip (https://github.com/zulip/zulip) does things "right" and I wish Slack would rip off their approach (central topic is the "room" and threads are independent, visually-separate-when-highlighted chats within a central topic).
- Can't edit previous message aside from an exceptionally limited s/// for your very last message
- Can't mix text formatting; you're either quoting, coding, or regular typing
- Animated GIFs for Avatars. I mean, seriously?
- Many of the same problems from Slack's use of Electron (and similar)
Their new electron app is better in perf and memory and generally the experience is the best I've had (and I've used professionally pretty much every chat app there is).
Compared to alternatives like HipChat or Skype it's eons ahead.
But threads are useless indeed, I'll give you that.
They're a big enough company to work on developing platform-specific apps which would totally improve the user experience (from a performance standpoint at least).