Reply to: IT Bugbears

[Ignis Fatuus]

Web sites that make assumptions about your situation. Those that choose a language based on your IP address or time zone are examples. Others include flight booking sites that bill you in the currency of your departure point, even if it is a British airline and your card is British and in pounds.

Some get it wrong even when they offer you a choice. "Enter country", it asks: I live in the UK but I'm currently in Germany trying to book a train in France with a Dutch bank card. Which country would you like?

[Sysman]

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

Grr.

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

Ayup. Especially when you are trying to save a series of related files in their own directory.

This is an area that OS X gets right, at least once you'd saved a file elsewhere, and it will remember the last directory you used the next time you start the app. Full marks to Apple here. But:

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.

OS X can be worse here. Instead of modal windows (which at least you can shift out of the way) it has what are known as dialogue "sheets". These drop down from bottom of the top bar in an app, obscuring the document itself, and there's no way to shift 'em. If you do a Save As, and need to refer back to the document to think up a file name which reflects the contents accurately, then you have to cancel the dialogue.

The Print dialogue can be worse still, since it's so wide.

[Spacecadet]

The undo functionality in Visio - in fact, Visio in general.

As with SSIS there is a dark art to Visio.

The way the SQL Server 2008 Management Studio intellisense operates differently to Visual Studio's.

It is irritating, the number of times I've typed out "case when col is null" only to have it changed to "case when col ISDATE null"

[Jaws]

The undo functionality in Visio - in fact, Visio in general.

The way the SQL Server 2008 Management Studio intellisense operates differently to Visual Studio's.

[d000hg]

Women in IT who try too hard to be one of the boys.

You know who you are and it's embarrassing.

Not to mention the men who try too hard to be one of the boys. You know who you are, and it doesn't suit you.

[amcdonald]

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?

Bring back the Guru Meditation messages

[darrenb]

[*]American Dates: They always bite my ass at some point in a project no matter how culture neutral I make my code.

I assume you've never dated an American, let alone been bitten in the ass by one. If you did, you'd have bigger and more interesting problems to rant about than "whether to put the 16 before the 05 or vice-versa".

[vetran]

specifications that gallop away to the horizons
data profiling that gives you a pass but fails when you go to dev.

users 'just change this'.

[Wodewick]

I shall start calling this behaviour "Suity software".

Fixed the obvious.

[Churchill]

Women in IT who try too hard to be one of the boys.

You know who you are and it's embarrassing.

[2BIT]

"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"

the fact that most apps force you to use the numpty folder view meaning you always always always have to set to detailed view and then sort by data or name whatever - if it remembered the view you use for windows all you'd have to do is click the column you want to order by but NO they force you to use the thumbnail view (which is useless when not looking for pics)

[Spacecadet]

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.

Heh - I've never tried that, I just drag the file onto an open email.

Looks like outlook 2007 does the same thing, how bizarre. Probably a bug which keeps being passed between the outlook and windows development teams

[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...

[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.

[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