While we are complaining about Microsoft and Emoji's -- they need to grow a spine and bring back Emoji Flags. If you weren't aware Microsoft removed all flags to avoid geopolitical backlash over Taiwain, etc.
It's so much worse on Windows 11 too. There is a noticeable lag in opening the picker, and—unlike 10 where you could immediately start typing to search—on Windows 11 if you start typing before it's fully open, it just types your search text in the focused window and never opens the emoji picker. It just totally cancels it if you type too fast.
Since Server 2012, some parts of server manager crash if you don't have your keyboard set to a qwerty layout. The bug is still there in later Server versions too.
I have yet to find a suitable alternative for the W10 emoji picker that works on linux. I like to use emojis as color codes for errors etc in some of my scripts and I find them very useful as location markers since a visual element is always faster to be recognized by the eye than pure plain text. This tool is also useful when you use multiple messaging applications because you share the same "most used" emojis panel. It also frustrates me that the W11 emoji picker got downgraded, it's much more limited and has less of a minimalist design (╯‵□′)╯︵┻━┻
> I think software engineers often get annoyed by percieved imperfections and inefficiencies in the world. There’s nothing wrong with questioning things, but choosing to believe others are incompetent or malicious is unhealthy.
> I find that when I’m annoyed by things like this and actually dig down into it, the feeling evaporates as I come to appreciate all the complexities and challenges. It’s humbling, and next time I get unreasonably annoyed at something I can remember that feeling, and accept that a lot of things are harder than they seem on the surface.
This was a nice little coda to the article. I agree with the sentiment that it's not worth running your mood over, but in contrast to the author's experience I often find after digging down that imho malice/indifference/negligence is responsible for bad time I end up having.
> My feeling is that Microsoft, and other companies too, have relied far too heavily on their beta testers to identify bugs. They expected problems to be surfaced by telemetry and user reports, which are less effort than actual testing.
Microsoft used to be better at this (although bugs still escaped regularly), but in 2014, they eliminated the software developer in test role, and software developers roles were supposed to make up the difference. IMHO, there has been an obvious slump in quality since then.
Also, the problem with relying on user bug reports, is when it's clear you're not listening to users, users stop providing bug reports. I've been to microsoft user forums and seen long discussion threads where many people have an issue and there's no follow up from Microsoft. When you direct issues to that kind of forum and don't respond there, that's a sign that says you don't care, don't bother to report things.
I would really ask HN about how you manage "feature bits" (like the BugFix_123456::IsEnabled()in TFX ) .
I have worked in huge code bases (think Windows-like huge) with policies like that and thus know the pain very well, but cannot think of solutions around it. Most of the time the complexity grows as the code and related modules have to support both codepaths: you cannot really simplify the architecture even if the "bugfix" branch is really conceptually simpler (as it tends to happen).
There's also no cleanup policy (not to mention that the developers who do the cleanup ,if ever, will just remove the if and not simplify the surrounding code).
Moving to windows from ChromeOS or MacOS really makes you notice how many basic UX quality of life improvements Windows simply lacks. From inability to paste tables from PPTs into text input fields but ability to do the same from xlx to having multiple desktops show different active app icons and window where you can’t share a window in a different desktop from a MSTeams call running on a different desktop pane. It’s really impressive how much the business world tolerates their crappy UX in the pretense of trying to work with a serious platform. And don’t get me started on the forced updates and the need to run some crazy VPN UX for security. This is not a serious OS.
The thing has practically never worked for me in the fiest place. Only very few inputs actually receive emojis from it. I have not once been able to use it when I tried. I usually google emojis and just copy them…
> because this policy only applies for non-security bugfixes, and almost all patches these days claim to just be security fixes, including the one which introduced this bug
There's numerous feature flags that seem to just be 'MSRC_[id]' (for the Microsoft Security Response Center), and anecdotally looking through Windows 11 a lot of actual bugfixes (various ReFS driver crashes, for example, have feature flag checks around their fixes) are feature-flagged as per usual with both global (for the whole batch of fixes) and per-feature flags, so this is a bit of an incorrect assumption.
Things breaking downlevel is pretty common anyway, and the emoji picker has been in a pretty bad state since the original picker IME (introduced I believe in RS3, ~2017) was replaced with 'Expressive Input' which also allowed adding GIFs and a few other things but relied on a new UI framework that I suspect was tied to an unrelated internal effort culminating in the '10X' product which only got canceled.. right before Windows 11 development started, and therefore pretty much bitrotted.
Windows 10 was left on a fairly 'bad' release, the 'Iron' semester which was used as a baseline for Server 2022 was still like 10 from a UX perspective (10X was only canceled between that and 'Cobalt', where the Sun Valley work which led to the Windows 11 product happened) but had a fair few bugfixes that didn't get backported to 10 'version 2004' ('Vibranium', I believe, as otherwise the codename would've been 'Chromium' which is bad).
Microsoft account service logins for 365 are also currently, actively broken for any accounts receiving "Let's keep your account secure. We'll help you set up another way to verify it's you."
I had to tell clients, "Sorry, I can't help you with this Microsoft service because Microsoft's software literally doesn't work."
--
Azure Speech services powering Windows 11 dictation are broken, and have been broken for months.
--
I'm pretty sure the people responsible for Windows leadership are asleep at the wheel, or management specifically for the Windows product doesn't explicitly exist anymore, and some service-oriented management is leading Windows development.
The people behind Microsoft authentication are clearly incompetent, too.
Is this a safe place to complain about the emoji picker on macOS? The one on Sonoma was... Fine, if not very laggy. But macOS 26 Beta replaced it with the CHARACTER VIEWER. A separate application that does auto focus into the search box and does not auto quit after selection. Those are table stakes for a picker.
17 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 34.8 ms ] threadI'm one of them! I didn't know it existed until this moment.
> I find that when I’m annoyed by things like this and actually dig down into it, the feeling evaporates as I come to appreciate all the complexities and challenges. It’s humbling, and next time I get unreasonably annoyed at something I can remember that feeling, and accept that a lot of things are harder than they seem on the surface.
This was a nice little coda to the article. I agree with the sentiment that it's not worth running your mood over, but in contrast to the author's experience I often find after digging down that imho malice/indifference/negligence is responsible for bad time I end up having.
> My feeling is that Microsoft, and other companies too, have relied far too heavily on their beta testers to identify bugs. They expected problems to be surfaced by telemetry and user reports, which are less effort than actual testing.
Microsoft used to be better at this (although bugs still escaped regularly), but in 2014, they eliminated the software developer in test role, and software developers roles were supposed to make up the difference. IMHO, there has been an obvious slump in quality since then.
Also, the problem with relying on user bug reports, is when it's clear you're not listening to users, users stop providing bug reports. I've been to microsoft user forums and seen long discussion threads where many people have an issue and there's no follow up from Microsoft. When you direct issues to that kind of forum and don't respond there, that's a sign that says you don't care, don't bother to report things.
I have worked in huge code bases (think Windows-like huge) with policies like that and thus know the pain very well, but cannot think of solutions around it. Most of the time the complexity grows as the code and related modules have to support both codepaths: you cannot really simplify the architecture even if the "bugfix" branch is really conceptually simpler (as it tends to happen).
There's also no cleanup policy (not to mention that the developers who do the cleanup ,if ever, will just remove the if and not simplify the surrounding code).
There's numerous feature flags that seem to just be 'MSRC_[id]' (for the Microsoft Security Response Center), and anecdotally looking through Windows 11 a lot of actual bugfixes (various ReFS driver crashes, for example, have feature flag checks around their fixes) are feature-flagged as per usual with both global (for the whole batch of fixes) and per-feature flags, so this is a bit of an incorrect assumption.
Things breaking downlevel is pretty common anyway, and the emoji picker has been in a pretty bad state since the original picker IME (introduced I believe in RS3, ~2017) was replaced with 'Expressive Input' which also allowed adding GIFs and a few other things but relied on a new UI framework that I suspect was tied to an unrelated internal effort culminating in the '10X' product which only got canceled.. right before Windows 11 development started, and therefore pretty much bitrotted.
Windows 10 was left on a fairly 'bad' release, the 'Iron' semester which was used as a baseline for Server 2022 was still like 10 from a UX perspective (10X was only canceled between that and 'Cobalt', where the Sun Valley work which led to the Windows 11 product happened) but had a fair few bugfixes that didn't get backported to 10 'version 2004' ('Vibranium', I believe, as otherwise the codename would've been 'Chromium' which is bad).
You will get stuck in a loop on https://mysignins.microsoft.com/register and never be able to sign in.
It's been months.
I had to tell clients, "Sorry, I can't help you with this Microsoft service because Microsoft's software literally doesn't work."
--
Azure Speech services powering Windows 11 dictation are broken, and have been broken for months.
--
I'm pretty sure the people responsible for Windows leadership are asleep at the wheel, or management specifically for the Windows product doesn't explicitly exist anymore, and some service-oriented management is leading Windows development.
The people behind Microsoft authentication are clearly incompetent, too.