IT Bugbears

[doodab]

Java - ditto, a two hundred-line stack dump each time (which at least gives a hint of where something went wrong but little else)

Why can't anal language and interface designers realise that informative, categoric error messages for humans are far more important in time saving and reliability than their obsessive desire for technical purity, consistency and other such abstract nonsense?

This is generally the fault of lazy app programmers who either do nothing or write a stack dump when they get an exception rather than handling it sensibly. That's fine for debugging but application level error messages that make it into production ought to be a bit more useful IMO.

Says the man just retrofitting these to some code that has been live for 18 months!

 

[Sysman]

That's actually a speeling mistoke originally perpetrated by that fine Englishman Sir Tim Berners-Lee during his time at CERN in Switzerland, when he defined the HTTP protocol; it's been retained ever since (although with a self-deprecating "[sic]" in HTTP 1.1) for the sake of backwards compatibility. No American English involved, and no, it won't get fixed

You learn something every day.

 

[Sysman]

That becomes particularly idiotic in such cases as the friend of mine who works in Milton Keynes, but whose employer routes their web access through a proxy in Madrid, meaning he often gets sites trying to force him to accept their Spanish version. I've had German foisted on me when in Cambridge, due to using an O2 dongle which was for some unexplained reason proxying via the Fatherland.

Yes, it's nuts. To date, most products that I've come across demonstrating this behaviour allow you to change the language in preferences.

Some products however have just one module that ignores your app language preferences and uses your time zone. It's quite amusing to see this happen in the same place in two competing and supposedly independent products

It isn't restricted to Windows either; I've seen the same on Linux.

This is an area that Apple gets right BTW, and you can even fire up a given app in more than one language simultaneously (either by dragging the appropriate language to the top in System Preferences -> International or from the command line).

 

[Sysman]

Horizontal scrolling

Horizontal scrolling

I frigging hate horizontal scrolling to read either code or text.

First experienced in VB 3, which didn't have a line continuation character.

With code it's especially bad, since if you want to see the end of a current long line you can't see the lines above or below.

Hate it. Hate it. Hate it.

With a passion.

 

[thunderlizard]

Modal dialog boxes requiring input. Meaning you can't go to another window to copy stuff to clipboard, or even move other windows around in order to see stuff on them, without closing it first.

 

[OwlHoot]

"Keyhole surgery" file selection windows no larger than a postage stamp. Why are they always so damned small?!

File selection windows that "forget" a previously chosen path, painstakingly selected only a minute earlier, and always start in "My Documents"

 

[Spacecadet]

I edit a e-mail in outlook and I want to refer to an older e-mail as I type but the outlook screen is frozen until I send the e-mail I'm working on!!! What backward thinking.

Have you tried upgrading from Outlook V1?

In the 12 or more years I've been using Outlook I have never experienced that problem!

 

[2BIT]

Having keyboard focus stolen while I am typing, usually by something I started 5 mins ago that has taken that long to get going.

.

the one thing likely to send me into a rage! joined a new clientco which used an instant messenger - what an obnoxious app that was, popped up and stole your screen focus as default, very quickly set it so it never stole my focus....

anything that interrupts what you are doing is just obnoxious programming IMO.


other gripes:

splash screens that cant be moved or minimized and so take up screen space whilst the app is loading (app makers i'm able to do other things whilst your app slowly loads so get rid of that screen!)

Formatting in word

the copy and paste in a certain program which forces you to actually hold down ctrl+v, simply pressing ctrl+v doesn't work but gets me everytime

MS Project
Lotus Notes

oh so many now I think of it

 

[eek]

Have you tried upgrading from Outlook V1?

In the 12 or more years I've been using Outlook I have never experienced that problem!

Its a problem in the latest version. Right click a file and select send via email. Then try and look for something in another previous email. I'm not sure what the cause is but its tuliply annoying.

 

[stek]

Talking about mouse focus, that's one good thing about traditional Unix X-Windows, focus follows mouse irrespective of window layer, I love that...

I fact, on every contract I insist on a proper Unix workstation, and I never get one, Windows with Putty is all I get...