Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you've used in the last week? - throwaway0255
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dirktheman
Excel for Mac. For the life of me I can't understand why Microsoft takes a
beautiful piece of software and transforms it into something utterly
unworkeable.

Besides the fact that the ribbon and menu structures are completely different,
I find myself screaming at my mac on a daily basis "What the fuck do you think
the 'C' in CSV stands for? I'll give you one hint, Excel for Mac: it doesn't
stand for 'Semicolon'!"

Still better than Numbers for Mac, though.

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quickthrower2
Character Separated Variables

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chatmasta
Snapchat. If I have 10-20% battery on my iPhone 6S, it’s a risky proposition
to open Snapchat as it will kill the battery many times just by opening the
app.

It’s such an atrociously coded POS, and I say this as someone who spent a
significant amount of time reverse engineering it. The performance of basic
actions, like opening the app, is abysmal and unnecessarily resource
intensive. It’s infuriating that a public company with a massive valuation
cannot produce better engineered software than the Snapchat app.

I also have trouble understanding the thought process behind their latest UI
revamp, specifically merging stories and chats into the same screen. It’s so
user hostile and was met with such hatred, I’m surprised they haven’t rolled
it back. Fundamental UI changes to mature products are dangerous, and often
the negative effects of the changes don’t manifest themselves for 6-12 months
after introducing them, at which point it’s too late.

FWIW I hardly ever use Snapchat now (less than once a day) though I never used
it much anyway. It also seems like far fewer of my friends are posting stories
on Snapchat, and far more are posting them on Instagram.

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TwiNNatioN
I made an account just to answer this - ServiceNow.

Uuuugh.

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wglb
I'm curious. Can you share any specifics?

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quickthrower2
Sharepoint administration thingy. Don't know too much but had to follow some
setup steps. So you open a program in Windows to do admin, launches an IE and
logs you in using AD. You are not allowed to log out and log in as someone
else. And once you are inside it's pretty hard to navigate.

At one point, there was a popup with a link to a page that you cant get to via
the menu system, so had to type that URL from a screenshot someone luckily
took. There is a weird program for configuring some parts of it where you have
to paste bits of XML into boxes with no confirmation you did it right, other
than something else not working later on. Oh yuck.

This is worst from a UX perspective. I am making no remarks on the underlying
tech which is quite useful for us.

Second worst is google sites.

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agitator
Hulu's client for Apple TV. It's like a UI nightmare.

"Lets make things as unintuitive as possible, people will love the "unique"
vibe." \- Hulu probably

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himom
Whatever software Pizza Hut used in the 90’s for their antique terminals to
take orders and serve as cash registers. It was so slow, you could watch
individual characters draw and clearing the screen was a multi-second
operation. Oh and it used cryptic mnemonics.

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HiroshiSan
The software for my 'smart' tv. Restarts constantly to free up memory, apps
take forever to load, switching between apps is a pain. I've resorted to using
my ps4 if I want to watch Netflix.

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EvanKnowles
Xcode - watch it freak out over clicking 'Upload to app store'

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Torgo
WordPress, and its menagerie of terrible plugins.

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BjoernKW
While WordPress plugins certainly differ vastly in terms of quality there's a
fair number of pretty good ones for most use cases.

What don't you like about WordPress? It's not perfect but as far as content
management systems go I'd say it fares pretty well, especially when compared
with alternatives such as TYPO3 (which is very powerful but also an utter
usability nightmare).

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croo
Liferay

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Adamantcheese
IBM's Rational Team Concert. I haven't used a worse version control system in
my entire life.

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Sevii
The ancient travel booking app we started using after the acquisition. SAP
monstrosity that feels twenty years old.

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thinkingemote
Supermarket self checkout machines.

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jsnk
Trinet company expensing app

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jcalabro
Python.

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shoo
I'm curious: do you mean the language itself, one of the main implementations
(e.g. CPython), the inevitable business facing big-ball-of-mud proof-of-
concept miasma that's ended up running in production [1], or the packaging
ecosystem?

[1] this one isn't really Python's fault, it's arguably a feature of Python
having a relatively low barrier of entry for people to hack together valuable
balls of technical debt.

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snapcrackleflop
SAP

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frnkshin
IBM DataStage (Shit-age)

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schappim
Neto (neto.com.au)

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sprremix
mysql workbench

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neilsimp1
Why? I use MySQL Workbench occasionally and it's good enough to get the job
done and doesn't crash or anything on me.

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cm2012
Banking app

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bheinzelman
Roku.

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masonic
Stubhub.

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MaysonL
Apple News

