- I often don't get notifications at all, on either platform.
- The Mac client crashes too often.
- The Mac client uses more resources than it should.
- Threads are useless.
- Settings are split into too many different views.
- I dislike the design. It's too spaced out (even with the "compact" setting). There's no dark mode. I don't like the icon. Everything is too cutesy.
- I hate the emoji. I don't want more emoji in my life.
Most of all, I hate the hivemind that says it's the only viable chat system, so much so that even open source projects use it over IRC. Hipchat wasn't too much better, but I've not gotten the chance to use it in the past few years because everyone defaults to Slack. I'd love to try Facebook's new work thing, but there's the same problem.
> so much so that even open source projects use it over IRC.
Remove the small amount of technical know how to "properly" use IRC and make chats (and permissions) persistent, and I imagine you'd end up with something that looks eerily like Slack.
That said, I think the Slack load-time in-browser is silly-long and I get spammed with notifications. As for threads, Zulip (https://github.com/zulip/zulip) does things "right" and I wish Slack would rip off their approach (central topic is the "room" and threads are independent, visually-separate-when-highlighted chats within a central topic).
I've used IRCCloud before, and I thought it worked well. They have an "internal" type plan as well with a private server, but as above I can't get anyone to try it because Slack owns the mindshare.
I really can't understand why Slack doesn't just go with a native app (to address performance issues on Electron).
They're a big enough company to work on developing platform-specific apps which would totally improve the user experience (from a performance standpoint at least).
Their new electron app is better in perf and memory and generally the experience is the best I've had (and I've used professionally pretty much every chat app there is).
Compared to alternatives like HipChat or Skype it's eons ahead.
But threads are useless indeed, I'll give you that.
At work, it's probably JIRA. Tons of UI noise, text markup isn't what I expect it to be and nobody around here can seem to agree on what features should be used for a particular scenario.
Past work, it would have been Identity Finder by a landslide. Awful UI, awful support, super intrusive, a total pain to administer, just bleh. Glad I was able to wash my hands of that.
Personal stuff, iTunes. I genuinely like the interface (at least on macOS) but it's huge and bloated and doesn't do some of the things I want it to. If they ripped out everything that wasn't related to listening to your personal (local) music library, I'd probably like it quite a bit. I wish it would write metadata to file tags rather than its own database, but I forgo that if it got rid of all the other crap.
JIRA definitely comes down to implementation and policy. I've used it in places and it has been amazingly helpful as a developer, to the point I don't know how we did anything before it.. Then going to a place that totally misuses it and causes me to triple-handle everything.
If your company is large and you're looking at JIRA, pay a consultant to come in, set it up for your different teams and train people. It's worth the money, otherwise you won't see the benefit JIRA brings.
JIRA. OMG. It's really awful. Its UI is cluttered and inconsistent. Search is slow. It's impossible to find things. Markup syntax is horrendous. It's easy to make mistakes and extremely difficult to fix them.
Re: iTunes, I would love a separate Apple Music app for desktop. 95% of the time I open iTunes on desktop it's just to play music. It's cluttered with so much stuff I rarely or never use.
Lately for me it's the iOS Music app. Every iOS release it gets further away from the original purpose. Off the top of my head, the "Search" screen used to show the last 10+ things I searched for (artists, playlists, songs, etc). Now it only shows the last 3 things I searched for, and fills the rest of the screen up with what's trending on the iTunes store. I didn't ask for that!
It also regularly refuses to play music which has been downloaded to my iPhone because my cell signal isn't strong enough. I have to put it in airplane mode when I'm on the subway.
I feel like they're trying to be like Spotify, but as every change they make to Music makes it worse, they're just driving me to use Spotify more. For example, the list of albums from an artist is almost unusable now. Everything looks pretty but usability is poor.
My first place award goes to SAP, which I have to use for time entry.
The procedure for entering vacation time is "Put in the hours and the code for PTO. Now hit enter. Yes, it'll all turn red and it'll display an error. Hit enter again. Everything else just autofilled."
The procedure for changing an SAP password is to click New Password on the login screen[1]. No, not after logging in, if you accidentally did that you need to log out and try again. (Bonus: you can only tell it's a button after you hover over the innocuously placed text)
I'm not familiar with SAP at all so maybe this is just a failure of a specific implementation and the curse of customization, but it bothers me immensely.
Second place goes to the Jazz web interface for having page content reloads be distinct from page reloads. Oh you opened the work item again? It's still got the old version cached with the banner "The content of this page has changed, click here to refresh."
It's designed for an 14" CRT, showing only like 10 days of 31 days months - happy scrolling in both axes with non standard scrollbars.
You have to enter the hours per day in decimal minutes (1.00 = 60min, 0.25 = 15min) instead of the more human natural 60minutes.
The table UI control is completely non-standard. The Save button doesn't work like expected, it automatically closes the page, or a popup comes up there is nothing to be save - how dare you that you even thought about clicking on the button. If you open the page, all your data is locked, and no one else can access your data.
It's an 1980s nightmare program, that got reskinned in 1998 with "fancy" UI over ASCII char based UI elements.
I have to use the mySAP web-based version of CATS, which is at least as bad as the SAP GUI version, and even slower. Truly some of the worst software I've ever had the misfortune to use
I'll have to say with SAP, it's really down to how it's implemented. I've seen AWFUL implementations of it (like the one you're describing) and I've seen amazing ones, generally the ones either done by SAP themselves or by their recommended partners are the best.
Having said that, it's a gigantic beast so it's not surprising that there's a lot of broken implementations out there. Good SAP 'guys' aren't very common unfortunately.
Maybe you can clear up some confusion I have about SAP. All I know is that it is generally customized to the business. How extensive is that customization? Slapping on business logos? Checking boxes to match the logic to current business procedures? Writing custom code?
Fully agree on this. My dear old employer used to switch to SAP. I just needed it to file my working schedules. However, it took me thousands of clicks and shortcuts just to open up the window presenting the right form. Besides, I filed my hole schedules just once a monce, thus I always needed a windows VM and a tutorial all the time.
Projects list is a pain in the arse and the layout is weird. Emailing a client involves witchcraft and switching to some whole new client interface. Doesn't have time tracking, have to use yet another garbage app to do that. People keep using Campfire instead of Slack. Everyone gets a notification for everything by default. So much goddamn white space on this thing. MY BROWSER IS MASSIVE, USE IT. The timeline thing under projects feels like someone thought it was clever so they included it, in reality it's all squashed up and has no real purpose.
Can I just mention this separately. "Like this? Clap for <Name>" - is that supposed to be a sarcasm clap? Like seriously has anyone ever used that legitimately? The only time I'd use it if there was a message "oops I deleted the server" or similar.
I am going to throw a damn parade the day we find an alternative.
Edit: Oh also 3.basecamp.com is stupid. Use your domain.
Also when I log in why am I suddenly on 37signals.com. I get there's a switcher to go back to the (slightly more tolerable) Basecamp Classic but what's this domain about. Branding all over the damn place.
I can only assume (without Googling the answer) that's that Japanese thing where someone pokes another person in the backside with their two index fingers because that's what using Basecamp feels like.
It's never been ideal for me, but it's usually been "good enough" for me. But with each new release, it gets less so. My needs aren't really changing, but what and how iTunes delivers is changing, getting further and further away from my needs.
I like Confluence, I hate some pre/styled things they do, but in general is not a bad wiki software and it's integrated with Jira. The worst is no one at my company reads these docs :)
I administer my company's internal Confluence server and author most of the content, and I have a few complaints but overall I love using it. What do you dislike about it?
My 2¢: Confluence's primary job is to share and manage lots of written documentation. If I wanted to make such software I'd make it fast, the curation/management job lightweight and inline, and emphasize readability and promote fast comprehension of information with layout and design.
Confluence is slow, curation/management is ponderous and the design ignores hundreds of years of research / practice in visual processing of information.
For Confluence: we've found a much better alternative is Quip - we all love it after the switch. Dropbox Paper is another new alternative that people seem to like.
Readit News
- It's slow on every platform I use (iOS, macOS).
- I often don't get notifications at all, on either platform.
- The Mac client crashes too often.
- The Mac client uses more resources than it should.
- Threads are useless.
- Settings are split into too many different views.
- I dislike the design. It's too spaced out (even with the "compact" setting). There's no dark mode. I don't like the icon. Everything is too cutesy.
- I hate the emoji. I don't want more emoji in my life.
Most of all, I hate the hivemind that says it's the only viable chat system, so much so that even open source projects use it over IRC. Hipchat wasn't too much better, but I've not gotten the chance to use it in the past few years because everyone defaults to Slack. I'd love to try Facebook's new work thing, but there's the same problem.
- Can't edit previous message aside from an exceptionally limited s/// for your very last message
- Can't mix text formatting; you're either quoting, coding, or regular typing
- Animated GIFs for Avatars. I mean, seriously?
- Many of the same problems from Slack's use of Electron (and similar)
Remove the small amount of technical know how to "properly" use IRC and make chats (and permissions) persistent, and I imagine you'd end up with something that looks eerily like Slack.
That said, I think the Slack load-time in-browser is silly-long and I get spammed with notifications. As for threads, Zulip (https://github.com/zulip/zulip) does things "right" and I wish Slack would rip off their approach (central topic is the "room" and threads are independent, visually-separate-when-highlighted chats within a central topic).
They're a big enough company to work on developing platform-specific apps which would totally improve the user experience (from a performance standpoint at least).
Their new electron app is better in perf and memory and generally the experience is the best I've had (and I've used professionally pretty much every chat app there is).
Compared to alternatives like HipChat or Skype it's eons ahead.
But threads are useless indeed, I'll give you that.
Past work, it would have been Identity Finder by a landslide. Awful UI, awful support, super intrusive, a total pain to administer, just bleh. Glad I was able to wash my hands of that.
Personal stuff, iTunes. I genuinely like the interface (at least on macOS) but it's huge and bloated and doesn't do some of the things I want it to. If they ripped out everything that wasn't related to listening to your personal (local) music library, I'd probably like it quite a bit. I wish it would write metadata to file tags rather than its own database, but I forgo that if it got rid of all the other crap.
If your company is large and you're looking at JIRA, pay a consultant to come in, set it up for your different teams and train people. It's worth the money, otherwise you won't see the benefit JIRA brings.
It also regularly refuses to play music which has been downloaded to my iPhone because my cell signal isn't strong enough. I have to put it in airplane mode when I'm on the subway.
The procedure for entering vacation time is "Put in the hours and the code for PTO. Now hit enter. Yes, it'll all turn red and it'll display an error. Hit enter again. Everything else just autofilled."
The procedure for changing an SAP password is to click New Password on the login screen[1]. No, not after logging in, if you accidentally did that you need to log out and try again. (Bonus: you can only tell it's a button after you hover over the innocuously placed text)
I'm not familiar with SAP at all so maybe this is just a failure of a specific implementation and the curse of customization, but it bothers me immensely.
Second place goes to the Jazz web interface for having page content reloads be distinct from page reloads. Oh you opened the work item again? It's still got the old version cached with the banner "The content of this page has changed, click here to refresh."
[1]: Something like this https://technews.blog.olemiss.edu/files/2012/12/SAP-Logon.pn...
It's designed for an 14" CRT, showing only like 10 days of 31 days months - happy scrolling in both axes with non standard scrollbars.
You have to enter the hours per day in decimal minutes (1.00 = 60min, 0.25 = 15min) instead of the more human natural 60minutes.
The table UI control is completely non-standard. The Save button doesn't work like expected, it automatically closes the page, or a popup comes up there is nothing to be save - how dare you that you even thought about clicking on the button. If you open the page, all your data is locked, and no one else can access your data.
It's an 1980s nightmare program, that got reskinned in 1998 with "fancy" UI over ASCII char based UI elements.
Having said that, it's a gigantic beast so it's not surprising that there's a lot of broken implementations out there. Good SAP 'guys' aren't very common unfortunately.
Edit: Geeze, it has its own wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_implementation
Projects list is a pain in the arse and the layout is weird. Emailing a client involves witchcraft and switching to some whole new client interface. Doesn't have time tracking, have to use yet another garbage app to do that. People keep using Campfire instead of Slack. Everyone gets a notification for everything by default. So much goddamn white space on this thing. MY BROWSER IS MASSIVE, USE IT. The timeline thing under projects feels like someone thought it was clever so they included it, in reality it's all squashed up and has no real purpose.
Can I just mention this separately. "Like this? Clap for <Name>" - is that supposed to be a sarcasm clap? Like seriously has anyone ever used that legitimately? The only time I'd use it if there was a message "oops I deleted the server" or similar.
I am going to throw a damn parade the day we find an alternative.
Edit: Oh also 3.basecamp.com is stupid. Use your domain.
Also when I log in why am I suddenly on 37signals.com. I get there's a switcher to go back to the (slightly more tolerable) Basecamp Classic but what's this domain about. Branding all over the damn place.
Noticing a few trends. Poorly written software often:
- Is written for the enterprise, making it vulnerable to buyer vs. user issues.
- Is old and sprawling, yet so successful and so complex to make the much-needed rewrite very daunting.
- Is highly connected to our personal workflows, and therefore always out of sync with the way some significant population wants to work.
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Confluence is slow, curation/management is ponderous and the design ignores hundreds of years of research / practice in visual processing of information.