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Ask HN: What Are Your Biggest Frustrations with Software Tools and Services?

2 points by poetincode ↗ HN
What software tools or services (SaaS, self-hosted, or open source) are you using that just don’t cut it? Whether it’s UX friction, frustrating pricing models, missing features, poor developer experience, support challenges or anything else—I'd love to hear your experiences.

Your insights could inspire a better solution by someone in the community.

Regarding my inspiration to post this, I am just looking for a project idea, not necessarily commercial, with the potential of actual "users" unlike last projects/startup. I deeply appreciate your attention and comments :)

7 comments

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PaulHoule
Database administrator tools like pgadmin4. Postgres has maybe 30 kinds of artifact that are in a dropdown tree (e.g. stored procs, collations, etc.) but most of the time all I care about is tables but I have to ignore and click past so many things just to find the table I'm looking for.

I am always harassed about queries I didn't "save" but there isn't a model for saving queries that works with the way I do software development (e.g. I don't have a git repository full of SQL queries thought I might want to keep SQL queries in files in the same repo as my Java/Python/whatever and bring them in as resources)

Products like this don't respect the fact that I am thinking about how a few tables and/or a few rows fit together. I don't want to see a hairball graph of my whole database (e.g. SAP printed out their SQL tables UML style and it filled half the wall of a gymnasium) but I do want to see a piece of it I care about as a graph

All the time I want to see a few queries, rows and result sets at the same time but tools like this don't make that easy.

If I do

   select * from some_table
and get one row the columns are stacked horizontally so I can't see them all at once and have to scroll. I'd like to see one row stacked vertically so I can see it all at once and not have to scroll, scroll, scroll.

For extra credit I want a tool that works with document db's (JSON tables in postgres, arangodb, couchdb, etc.) and SPARQL databases.

poetincode
Thanks a lot for sharing! I haven't used pgadmin4 but have used DBeaver and IntelliJ's integrated query console in a lightweight sense. So, pardon my ignorance on what's built or not already, but two-way git integration in 2024 sounds like a must-have, and also something like a "Cmd + k" search for fast access to a particular table, or a particular saved query, or a sectional UML diagram, or displaying results in an adaptive layout (row-first vs column-first).

I too agree that this should be the centerpiece design element: "All the time I want to see a few queries, rows and result sets at the same time but tools like this don't make that easy."

radonek
I hate the way GUI apps are devolving back to nineties. Resizable windows, clipboard, theming, menus, keyboard shortcuts… stuff that made computers easier to use is disappearing. Apps nowadays are created by graphic designers who don't know what color contrast is and UX specialists who never heard word ergonomy, directed by people who consider wheel reinventionalism to be height of innovation.
poetincode
This is very interesting, thanks for sharing! Can you please put some products in contrast to help me visualize the trend in point... I mean, maybe two products doing similar things but where you feel that the whole product or a part of it from the older design offered superior ergonomics
radonek
I'd say find some screenshot of Windows 95 with multiple applications running and marvel at it. Google Workspace administration console is good example of UI in many ways less capable and useful then what I used twenty years ago. To name just a few:

- listviews are limited to 50 items. MSDOS apps running on 640kB memory could do better back in eighties.

- Adding a new item does not refresh listview. I had wits to do that when I was 13yo toying with qbasic.

- UI "windows" are just floating <div>s that can't be moved, with controls wherever UX monkey happened to have dropped them. Heck, even the (fake) close button can't have consistent left or right position. Compared to that mess, Windows 3 apps look like work of art.

- Many actions take long clock-to-display time. How come that rendering a few lines of text and some buttons is slower on gigahertz class multicore machine then pitiful 200Mhz celeron?

- Even the early, amateurish web apps from nineties, pushed through pathetic dialup internet had the common sense to check session timeout BEFORE displaying a form for user to fill in. Google today? Not so much.

I could continue, but this makes me sad.

billconan
I don't like youtube's ux. I have so many subscriptions, I want to organize them in folders and clicking on a folder, I should be able to see all updates in that folder.
poetincode
I can relate to that! "Subscriptions" tab's feed in their mobile app has always been useless for me, pure noise, so eventually I have reduced my subscriptions to a small count to ensure discovering stuff I'd most likely want to watch in the home feed.