Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
Subversion was created because the authors were frustrated with problems in CVS[0].
What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?
[0]: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.intro.whatis.html#svn...
1,535 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 526 ms ] threadI wish I knew how to get design feedback to the GIMP team in a way that would be appreciated & that people might take action on. I also wish they’d rename it something like “Image Lab” so it would be easier to promote at work.
I would certainly do this if I was adobe.
If you like the web, then maybe this does not compute for you.
http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/
The network connection quality on Slack calls seems to be very lacking compared to other call apps.
It’s close though.
Thats why i started building my own open source system.
https://godbledger.com/
The SAP UI and UX are utterly ghastly - tiny buttons everywhere, hundreds of options, menus and pathways at every screen, and slow on top. It's just horrible to use. Even stuff like printing is ridiculously complex, way more than in a standard Windows app.
It gets a bit more bearable once you're familiar with whatever your area is - for example, you can type in a cryptic code to jump straight to the screen you want, and you eventually learn to somehow ignore the dozens of UI elements you don't need and focus on those you do.
On the dev side, you need to use ABAP, which is absolutely horrible - consultants can make a lot of money tho.
I should add as well, I've never used SAP HANA, so that might be more bearable.
It's appalling how such a powerful company can keep so many things so bad for so long.
"Based on my location" they gave me a French dubbed version of it. No alternative sound track, heck not even subtitles.
I live in Switzerland, we have 4 official languages. I speak one of them: German. Not a word French. The proposed solution: go to apple and ask for your money back. Very poor experience.
Do not even get me going on the "want to use Premium for a month"? I've declined that offer at least 48 times. Did not want it then, do not want it today. Really a pity since there is a lot of cool (not sponsored or monitized) content.
Personally I'm very content with my Google Play Music subscription that also includes YouTube Premium. The music service is no different than Spotify (for me, at least) and I also get ad-free YouTube on all platforms.
It's funny because I have a client right now asking for some advice on how to design a localizable website that can guess default language and I'm realizing that no one has really solved this very well.
The first and most important step is to offer a very very big option up front and center for reverting to English.
This is an extremely annoying thing when traveling.
Either way, it must like rule 1 of UI design; even if you think you know better than your user does, let them override that choice when you get it wrong.
Or rather the solution I would like is rarely used, I have only found it on some Amazon sites, where you can freely choose the country-level localization (via the domain) and the language-level localization (via a menu) independently.
It was an happy day when I was able to browse the German Amazon in English.
Really? How about “guessing” that the client’s language preferences are those expressed in the Accept-Language request header?
Getting my money back from google is impossible, according to google. Since they could not offer a solution to the language issue, they told me 4 times to complain at apple and try to get my money back from them.
Again: that was not my issue at al. The time it took to dialog with google support was 10 times as expensive as the rent for the movie anyway. I wanted my expectations to be met, was told that it's impossible, so I adjusted my exceptions when being offered to buy / rent from YT to zero.
What about English? Your post seems to be perfectly idiomatic (for this kind of forum) English.
Edit: This is very embarrassing. I had thought English was one of the four official languages.
It feels like YouTube actively doesn't want creators to grow a community on their platform.
Until they stop siding against the creators they will never escape from it.
I have a computer in my pocket but I am not allowed to do even the most basic stuff I would like to do with it. Like using a shell to work on my files, use git for version control and to sync to other machines, use vim to edit text ... the list goes on forever. Heck, I cannot even easily backup all of my data. Like the contacts for example. No way to read the files in which they are stored.
Also, rooting your phone gives you access to all files, but I understand it's not everyone's cup of tea.
With rooting it is similar. You usually give full control over your machine to "someone from the internet" who provides you with the root mechanism.
Termux is open source. I fully agree with you on the one that provides the rooting mechanism, as I believe that's normally closed source.
Good luck on reading and vetting all that code.
And then installing Android Studio (It is a beast!) to compile the code into an APK.
And don't forget to repeat the two steps every time there is an update.
https://termux.com
As others have mentioned, Termux is Free and Open-Source. You mentioned trust, but considering Termux is already open source, I'm not sure how the author could gain your trust.
> use git for version control and to sync to other machines
You got me with git, but Syncthing might solve the same problem for #2 - there's a FLOSS client available on F-Droid as well :)
> use vim to edit text
I'd assume Termux has a vim package, meaning you can stay open source for the entire stack. If it doesn't, then my mistake.
> I cannot even easily backup all my data. Like the contacts
Ignoring using a carddav server for to have them backed up all the time, you can easily back them all up in vcard format via Simple Contacts - an open source app availble on F-Droid.
Hell, for the most part you can completely disable whatever you want, root or no. ADB can disable everything you don't want to run, including all the way down to Google Play Services. I can verify that, as I've done it myself on my BlackBerry KeyOne.
It (mostly) can all be done, it just takes a little bit of looking. Like anything else with modern computing, the fun stuff is hidden away, and all we're presented with is the glossiest interface the OEM can shove in front of us.
If there's anything that actually cannot be done via FLOSS software, I'd honestly love to hear it, because I'm drawing a blank at the moment.
I bet the software would improve pretty quick.
I'm not knowledgeable enough, but are there alternatives to workday and are they actually worse?
I asked a couple friends who work there what they use, and sure enough, the answer was Workday.
While there are definitely better alternatives at smaller scale (i.e. Zenefits), at that scale, the only ones I know of are Oracle, SAP, and TriNet, which all sound even worse.
Was able to fill addresses and contact information in the UK and Western Europe and it accepted the local formats and documents. I wouldn't be surprised if most competing tools are plain broken, for example requiring an address with a state which is nonsense outside of the US.
We've been moved onto Workday and I hate it and I suspect I'm going to hate it even more as I've just picked up a people management role so I will be spending more of my life dealing with it.
Reminds me of K2 process automation which while it has a lot of value[1] forces the UI down particular routes which can be very sub-optimal for the end user.
[1] Whenever I used it I felt like I could have written the small bit I was interested in less time using lots of alternative technologies, but the amount of time to add all the other bits and pieces like reporting and retrying of process steps would kill you longer term.
- I have to be a good user of it. I can get away with knowing a couple flags for these tools
- Git is inherently stateful. I can iterate on my grep-ing/sed-ing/curl-ing and try random stuff, but git operation can be destructive or leave me in a state I don't understand and do not konw how to get out of
I'd also like to point out that the concept of not having the history local (as in CVS, SVN and some of the still-used commercial SCMs), but only on the special sanctified server, feels seriously weird and extremely limiting to me.
¹ The by far weirdest one is --set-upstream specifically (intentionally?) not working if local and remote branch names don't match, so "git push repository branchLocal:branchRemote -u" doesn't make "git push" work if you are on branchLocal. It feels like that's half the point to have that option in the first place. But nah.
If we're talking about inconsistencies in git, the only one that comes to mind is how diff's `...` behaves like log's `..` and diff's `..` behaves like log's `...`. I.e. if you want to see the changes of `git log a..b` as a single diff, you'd use `git diff a...b`. If you want to see the changes of `git log a...b` as a single diff, you'd use `git diff a..b`.
Note I think git could definitely be easier to use, and the reuse of eg checkout to switch branches and revert a dirty file to either staging or the most recent commit is a bit strange. But calling it uniquely bad is silly, imo obviously.
For working software engineers, I both think -- and recommend to juniors -- they must invest the effort to learn an editor, git, and at least one language + toolkit deeply.
As an example: when I buy a back-up hard drive from a typical brick store like Costco, the "back up hard drive" is abstracted away: I don't need to study the USB timing diagrams, or worry about the details of how the magnetic domains are imprinted on the spinning disks, or really any of the chemical details of the surface coating.
This abstracting away of details is AWESOME. I can buy a $150 disk drive after spending less than a minute considering the purchase.
Git, on the other hand...
Let me give a real-life example of where real-life git and real-life published work flows don't work: you can go into GitHub.com, and make a project. And you can write code in Visual Studio, and save it up to your new git project.
Unless, of course, when GitHub.com recommended that you add a license. The instant you add a license, the project isn't "empty", and once the project isn't "empty", you can't trivially push your new Visual Studio project up.
The fix for this is to delete your GitHub.com repo.
I bet you'll reply and say, "that's just real-world problem! I only want to hear about theoretical problems!" -- which, IMHO, is one of the problems my profession faces. Real-world problems are ignored in favor of theoretical ones.
Maybe don't imagineer what I would say based on poor evidence.
Because (1) github doing that is kind of dumb (though (1a) how often do we make new projects?), and (2) we're discussing git as used for source control, particularly the commands. That's distinct from using github as a remote.
Novice developers that just haven't taken the time to learn more than three basic git commands. Their lack of knowledge is the problem 99.9% of the time, but they don't know enough to know they are the limitation, and they blame the tool instead
Old developers that come with a mental model of another VCS and either cannot or will not change their mental model and continue to be frustrated that they weren't consulted when git was designed
A third category may exist, but I have not met these people IRL
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-do-i-undo-the...
Most notoriously, 'checkout' and 'reset' have a number of very different behaviours depending on the shape of the parameters you give them (which is why they've very recently added 'switch' and restore').
And some things that ought to be primitive operations don't seem to have any simple command at all. For example, if I have branch 'wip' checked out, and I'd like to advance branch 'dev' to point to the same thing as 'wip' without changing the currently checked-out files (even temporarily, because I don't want their timestamps to update).
And the preferred commands for managing the per-branch and per-remote push and fetch and merge settings have changed so often that I gave up years ago and just edit .git/config directly.
https://steve-parker.org/articles/others/stephenson/holehawg...
But look at pictures from the maker. It's not a cube, and the handle is in fact ergonomic. Indeed, I would hope that a drill used by expert for hours every day would be 100% designed to make their jobs easier, and that includes not given them crippling injuries. And it's 100% purchasable from Home Depot. And, looking on Amazon, it's half the price of a truly expensive drill.
But there's another level at which the story is bad. The story feels like a story about gatekeeping: either you're one of the special people, or you're a useless homeowner. Either you have big problems, or you shouldn't be here. Either you've dedicated your life to drilling holes, or you're not welcome.
So, I read the story, and it sounds like both an exciting story of a newbie learning that some profession has unexpected depth. At the same time, it's also a story of a person who wants to be part of the special exclusive club.
It's only very occasionally that I have to drop down to a command line to fix some kind of merging snafu - if that happens, I'm guaranteed to have to Google it, but at least I'm also guaranteed to easily find a solution on StackOverflow.
If you want a coherent mental model of git, just do https://learngitbranching.js.org/ and never look back.
For me it's the other way round, git clicked way faster than other systems.
For example, say you’ve just made a commit, and then realized that wasn’t what you wanted to do so now you want to undo it. This can be described under git’s data model as “set the current branch to HEAD^ and discard the orphaned commit, leaving the working tree alone.” For some reason this is a “reset” operation (the same command you’d use to unstage a file, an otherwise unrelated operation) and you have to decide if you want to do a “hard,” “soft,” or “mixed” reset. If you get it wrong you’ll have to go grovelling in the reflog to get your files back.
To be fair, this situation is improving; the recent introduction of the switch and restore subcommands has helped to disentangle the especially overloaded checkout and reset subcommands, for example. But it’s still harder than it should be to convert a mental image of what you want done into the appropriate (series of) git commands, and vice versa.
1. There are great cheatsheets online that you can just print out and keep on your desk.
2. Write a user friendly cli wrapper on top of git (i think there might already some projects out there)
Unfortunately whenever somebody asks what could a better option there are generally no answers except keep at it and you'll get used to it.
While I myself think I am pretty familiar with git cli, I don't really use the cli anymore, since intellij covers all the features in a much more intuitive way. e.g staged edits, rebase.
- Those who have never used Clearcase, Perforce, or any other enterprise monstrosity.
- Those who have and suffer from Stockholm syndrome.
Git offers the flexibility to let each person work the way they prefer, even (to a large extent) on large shared projects.
With some wrappers and hooks, you could quite easily cripple git so as to emulate most any simple VCS. The aforementioned enterprise products barely work at all, so replicating their non-functionality might require more effort.
Clearcase I agree was a POS.
I don't really find that to be the case in normal use at all.
The git commands do not abstract over the internals, they pretty much just provide a direct interface to them.
I have no idea if this is still possible with modern WS.
Xcode is one of the most obvious evidences of Apple's despise and contempt for programmers (others being crappy documentation, frequently deprecated APIs, appstore with authoritarian rules, etc).
xcode is a total pain, but i would have to say eclipse takes the cake imo...
What's worse, there is no viable alternative to it, though some tries have been made.
The default Android phone comes with loads of bloated and useless apps that spy on you. Unlocking bootloader, installing a custom ROM, installing all your favorite apps is a long and painful process (some vendors take weeks to approve your unlock request).
All of these, in the name of a platform which is'open-source'.
You have to make an effort to get ROMs without GAPPS and even then, Google is making changes to the OS prevent things like MicroG from succeeding.
Back in the day Skype used to have a beautiful, native Mac client.
It's always a hard struggle, effort and suffering to make a call to a phone number, even if this phone number is in the contacts of the phone, or has been called before.
Adding to that, when Microsoft acquired Skype, they were offering to merge the Skype and Live accounts, which I agreed to, which rendered my Skype account unusable (with credit on it and lot of contacts registered).
The. Worst.
I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-window (even with the recent "pop-out" functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern trends. You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc).
Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my computer sleeps/wakes it sits in offline until you open the main window from the system tray. Those are year+ old bugs.
While it is often updated[0], the Team's priorities leave a lot to be desired. Adding new gimmicks and tie-ins while ignoring the dilapidated state of the core software itself for two+ years now.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-mic...
As you said too, the whole thing is buggy. Sometimes screen sharing doesn't work unless you reopen the app, for example.
The wiki feature is crap (at least the web version, I haven't tried the desktop version of the wiki) - formatting is a mess, markdown support is practically non-existent, it's buggy as hell, and so unbelievably slow.
If they had a feature freeze and concentrated on overhauling the UI and fixing the bugs, it could actually be a great product... but as it is, it's loathsome.
That said, apart from the shitty embedding support and their channel management, I REALLY like Stream and using it for a video lesson platform. The captioning is quite good even for my fast talking, Aussie accent and jargon.
That said, beyond novelty I'm not sure how useful a CC feature is.
Terrible audio focus on a single speaker, it really forces you to speak like on these old CB radios where you had to say "over" every time you were done talking.
The single window UI follows the mobile-first trend but is awfully inefficient on my three monitor setup, even more so with screen sharing.
Plus, our admins lock the whole MS Office 365 down so that there are no APIs or third-party plugins allowed. Data in it is just trapped.
Such a waste of human potential.
To be fair, that's a feature from team's perspective. If your admins are worried about sensitive data leaking out at all, and refuse to have a whitelist of approved 3rd party integrations, then that's on them. Imo it's a good thing to allow admins to do.
It's horrible.
I use the Linux one and it actually works surprisingly well. Video calls, screen sharing, etc.
However, for some reason, if when you start Teams the mic is unplugged, it will never detect it if plugged in afterwards. I often use it on a desktop pc without a built-in mic, and I only plug my headphones in case of a call. 100% of the time I have to restart Teams.
Oh, and as others have said elsewhere, it's painfully slow. There's a constant sort of lag about it. For example the highlights changing in the chats list when moving the mouse on top of them...
A UX that encourages replying out of thread because it's too darn confusing.
Unable to quote messages on desktop, but you can on mobile.
Unable to be signed into more than one Team. Have they never heard of consultants? At one point last year I had 4 separate Teams I needed to be signed into. Microsoft's solution have different Chrome profiles (Yep, Chrome, not Edge) for each one. My laptop only has 16GB of ram, so that didn't last long...
Super unclear UX around document viewing. I open a file in Teams and if I have write access I am instantly saving all changes. So many times I've shared a document for feedback and then had to recover the original version from Sharepoint because people changed a lot of things without Track changes on.
Based on Sharepoint. 'nuff said.
Wait, what? Do threads move when they get replies or something?
If you are trying to get students to do work, maybe use something like planner, sharepoint or any of the other myriad of tools actually designed for collaborative working rather than chat.
If you do it like teams does then you don’t need an activity view and a dedicated threads channel.
My favourite file access "feature" of Teams (I verified it was in fact working as intended, at least until the pandemic and the warts started getting more obvious) was that class teams had read/write access by default for all files in a team. This meant every student in a class team could modify what you uploaded by default. Of course fixing this required opening up the team in Sharepoint and fiddling with permissions, totally something every teacher is expected to figure out right?
Not really a software feature, but their update rollout style is awful as well. Announce features 4-8 weeks in advance of rolling out patches. Inconsistent rollouts, so my home desktop might have the latest feature patch, but my work laptop won't (I was around 4 weeks out of sync at one point). Manual checking for updates won't apply the latest patches. Meanwhile their consultants in education are crowing about all the new features or bug fixes.
I actually like some of the feature set, and it's very useful in an educational setting now they've brought some of the new features online (3 months later than would have been useful for the pandemic lockdown in my part of the world, but oh well), but enough frustrating elements that I'm constantly supporting workmates in its use.
I would turn these banners off, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to get badges to show up on the icon (only other cue to remind me people want to talk to me) without these banners.
I really wish there was a 3rd party client that was all native that I could use. Teams is definitely the worst part of my software stack.
But yeah, notification management is basically a pain in Teams. Not sure if it's still the case, but even on Windows 10 it would use its own notification window instead of the system one...
Oh and the most insulting part is how they treat its users like children. You can use giphy to embed a gif but if you search for any “bad” words it says no results. Search for fuck, and it hides them. Everyone using it is an adult, why apply this conservative boomer “nO sWeARIng alLOweD”?
To top it off if you instead copy paste a giphy url it doesn’t embed that properly either!
It's the primary platform for entire schools, now. Whoopee. So you're going to get lots of new child protection features (that fail at their intended purpose) added.
Infuriating.
Generally I don't have much time to mutter about Teams because some Atlassian monstrosity is busting my balls.
Everything from WhatsApp to SMS to Slack has a unified list of chats. Teams does not.
Teams is wrong.
Search is broken in it and if you scroll back a few days on a conversation it just stops loading messages...
It's just awful.
The plugin will try to hide this behind a "Join Teams Meeting" hyperlink, but on more than one occasion I've had the link converted to plaintext, leaving the recipient with no idea what they're supposed to do. So every time before sending a teams meeting from Outlook I have to extract the mess of a URL and manually paste into the location field.
Microsoft is pretty cool with training though. During the training they said this wasn’t an issue because the url gets converted to the file name on display. And we’d only ever want to paste urls into outlook or teams, nowhere else.
Apps are not allowed in my corporate deployment.
I’d settle for “save to PDF”.
Leaves a LOT to be desired.
1. The UI took the fun out of well, whatever, Slack was/is. For some of the common interest channels at work, I see less people going to them.
2. I'm in a group where we frequently need to share images (mostly plots) among the members. Sometimes they just disappear. Yes. You upload an image during a conversation, come back to it a few min later, its not there, and the person at the either end of the chat hasn't seen it either. Guess what OS I'm on: Windows 10 Pro.
Because of this I've resorted to using the web version of teams occasionally, which doesn't seem to suffer from this issue.
3. This one is actually baffling: when I try to upload an image in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second one complains the file already exists. This is during upload.
4. Inconsistent UI: did you know you could reply to individual messages from the Android app for Teams? Doesn't work on web or the windows desktop client. So when I am catching up on a conversation, I occasionally switch to the mobile app to reply to specific messages.
So that's my workflow: the Teams website opened on my laptop browser for most of the messaging, Teams running on mobile, in case I need to reply to specific messages, and Teams running as an application on my laptop for video/screen sharing calls.
5. You cannot specify a Download folder. Yes that's a thing in 2020. [1]
But, yeah, "costs". I miss Slack.
[1] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
That's because, bafflingly, it uses a local directory-cache for files. Think of it as the "Downloads" folder for a browser. Any time you upload, Teams will try to save it to your local cache first; if it finds the old file, it will whine like that.
Any time you want to upload a file, you should really not do in Chats but in Channels, which have a separate area for each Channel (backed by Sharepoint). Except in some companies (like where I'm now) people for some reason use Chats almost exclusively instead of Channels, so the whole thing becomes awkward: go to the channel, upload, get the link, paste the link in chat.
I guess it could be worse, it could be AOL.
people for some reason use Chats almost exclusively instead of Channels
The fact that there even needs to be such a distinction is itself a problem. They're both conversations, except with some slight differences? That's just asking for confusion.
If anything, this points to poor use-case study and/or execution. There is a case for channels and for individual chats: details of how files upload happen should be dealt with under the hood.
Frankly, it feels odd even talking about this issue; we are discussing file uploads, worth a few kBs, in a messenger. This really, really, shouldn't be a problem :-)
Considering that browsers have also adopted this "modern stupidity" for a while, I'm not so surprised, but the lack of a "Save As" option definitely perplexed me the first few times I've tried to download something --- clicking Download and expecting at least a choice, but seeing "download complete" makes me think where did it go!?!?
The response to that feedback item is baffling, but it's definitely not an uncommon thing for a big bureaucracy like MS. The actual code change probably takes minutes, but the mound of process associated with it causes these sorts of anti-decisions to occur.
It's so infuriating.
Mind boggling that continues to make it past UAT.
I have an issue where if there's any sound in my room in a meeting, it reduces the volume of someone else talking to me even if my mic is muted. My workaround is to only keep one earbud in and constantly listen for cars driving past outside so I can crank up the volume in advance. So Teams is literally painful to my ears.
The killer feature really is that it is a dream to deploy for admins who already had AD. I pushed it by group policy and sent an email telling people to log in with their existing Office credentials. I can't remember what I did with macs, I think I may have just told users to grab it from the appstore.
Think of all the admins faced with having to move their whole company to home working with no notice for Covid-19, you can see why Teams is an app that has found it's moment. Teams has been the saviour of many companies during the crisis. I'm sorry but minor UI niggles (which I personally don't find problematic) just pale into insignificance.
>The killer feature really is that it is a dream to deploy for admins who already had AD.
https://td.unh.edu/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=2197
Tries to be a central repo for all of your business docs.
Chews RAM like it’s its prime directive.
Can’t actually find the centralized doc unless you magically remember the channel or team where it was originally shared.
UX is actively hostile and so inefficient.
It's probably possible to mod it, given that it's Electron, and definitely easier than doing same to a native application, but the relative lack of configurability is certainly irritating.
The amount of RAM and CPU it uses is also ridiculous even in comparison to Slack, which was already pretty bloated.
(I wonder if any thirdparty clients have been created --- at least two exist for Slack, but I haven't looked for Teams.)
I've also been forced to use it, and have considered doing some RE and writing a Win32 native one to show MS what it should've done --- if anything I expect they should have plenty of Win32 programmers who know how to do it --- but like many others, have too many things to fix and not enough time for them...
This is on Windows computer too, like, how do you guys not know how to detect an Internet connection on your own operating system?
At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, these Microsoft Teams meetings never seem to have a dial-in number (my laptop microphone is horrible). If I try to use my computer's microphone to speak, it asks for camera permission at the same time. I don't want everyone to see me in briefs, just listen to my voice. So it's apparently either share my video and audio, or just be silent. I've been choosing to be silent.
I've spent the majority of my only two Teams meetings trying to figure out these issues. I never had a problem with other apps like GotoMeeting, Zoom, or Discord, or even Skype (also owned by Microsoft)
Maybe in the past, or on some clients only. On the Windows client you can currently operate camera and mic independently and choose how to respond to each calls (with video or audio only).
For instance, on the Windows desktop app, the word "I've" gets marked as incorrectly spelled. When you click on it to see the spelling suggestions, it suggests "I've". Clicking on the suggestion does nothing and it continues to flag it. This has been an issue in the app for over a year and I refuse to believe that the developers are unaware of it. It's a very common word to be typing.
Another problem is sending files or images. You have to wait for it to finish uploading before it will let you send the message. Not only is it pretty slow (I would estimate 1MB/s, whereas Discord uploads at my full 12MB/s), but sometimes it won't let you send for a couple seconds even after it finishes uploading.
A couple months ago Teams added read receipts, which is really nice, but they don't always work. My work has them globally enabled and everyone is on the latest client, yet each person only sees them for certain other people. I don't see them for anyone, but my coworker sees them for about 50% of our staff.
Notifications are also buggy. Teams will just randomly decide to not give you notifications for messages or calls. I've missed multiple messages in Teams for days because it never alerted me. I had to actually open the specific chat with that person before I saw the message. I've gotten into the habit of checking Teams every 15 minutes because of this. Teams for Android also seems to send notifications a good 30 seconds before the desktop app does, so I usually keep my phone on my desk solely for Teams notifications.
I would also like to point out that Microsoft built a general-purpose notification system into Windows, yet Teams uses a completely custom notification system. This completely baffles me as they aren't even following their own company's best practices.
The spelling situation gets better than this. You're actually forced to use the Teams one. For example, on MacOS, text fields get "free" spelling and grammar by the OS, which honour whatever settings you've configured. Of course, Teams doesn't use MacOS text fields, so they're on their own.
I live in France and so use French in Teams, but I absolutely hate having programs in several languages so all my programs are in US English. If I set Teams to use English for the interface, guess what language it uses for spelling? I'm still looking for a way to tell it in which language to check spelling, but we'll have probably switched to the next shiny thing until this happens...
It'll have a little text prompt at the top with a Sign In link.
But if I join a meeting, and I'm signed out, I just get a generic error message. It's like they didn't even code to check that I'm signed in when trying to join a meeting and advise me. Sometimes I have to restart the app after signing in to make the meeting link work again. Just feels janky.
I also had to mute it because on my budget work-provided laptop the Windows 10 notifications for every one line message take up a few inches of my screen which is pretty annoying when I'm working.
Audio is frequently bad too when people speak alternatingly. The new speaker has 2-3 seconds of muffled audio until they're clear again. Especially annoying when speakers rapidly change and all you get is semi muffled audio all the way.
Also the inability to respond to a specific message on desktop has baffled me. It seems like a basic functionality in chat software these days but teams only decided to give it to mobile? Just... Why?
And many emoticons have been renamed or simply removed. Why reinvent the wheel ?
They also adopted the seeming good policy to ask users to vote for future bug fix/feature requirement, which of course leads to more feature release than bug fixing. But then this is the norm of software development nowadays so I really don't think anyone can change it.