Ask HN: What is your fav “I can't believe in 2022 this still doesn't work right”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33331058

by netfortius • 4 years ago

60 289 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Mine is iPhone as hotspot/'net sharing feature, for other mac products (macbook pro, macbook air, etc.), be it bluetooth or wifi, let alone non-mac clients == ongoing failures/stoppages, regardless of iPhone or macbook models.

marginalia_nu5• 4 years ago

Dunno, I'm mostly missing the day when we had the technology to create responsive user interfaces. Like imagine we used to have progress bars that actually reported progress, not just some bogus animation.

Good times.

machinevision• 4 years ago

I just miss responsive desktop applications. I see USD10000+ tools running in the browser and I just wish we went back to how solid applications were built in 1990s or 2000s.

marginalia_nu5• 4 years ago

I've said it before, but I genuinely think Windows 95 is the pinnacle of UX. It is amazingly intuitive.

The use of depth and colors is streets ahead of the contemporary flat GUIs. You never have to guess the type or state of a widget, or where it begins or ends. Buttons typically have both icons and text. Icons to make it quicker to navigate, text makes it accessible without being fluent in Linear B ideograms.

drstewart• 4 years ago

It's amazing how often things break with absolutely no indication of why or what caused it. Load a page, get a completely blank screen or component. Why? No clue. Everything just silently fails and redirects you to a happy path, e.g. back to a home page or a starting screen. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get an "Oops, try again later or contact support for more help!"

jabroni_salad4• 4 years ago

The fashion industry is so rife with this. It seems like any URL that is more than a day old is going to 404 or silently redirect to the front page of the store.

onion2k• 4 years ago

Browsers have had progress bars since ... well, a long time ago. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/pr...

Implementing a progress bar that works for things like "bytes uploaded" or "number of tasks in the queue" on the frontend is fairly trivial. The hard bit is how to transmit a progress value from the backend to the frontend. Typically that requires setting up either a socket or a keepalive connection, or polling an endpoint from the frontend, which is enough of a pain that very few web apps bother.

Ultimately everything required for this sort of feature is right there in every browser. It's the backend that's usually lacking.

marricks2• 4 years ago

You're missing the point. Of course we have "the technology" for them, but most companies/people decided it was a good idea to have progress bars lie.

marginalia_nu5• 4 years ago

Sure you can render them, that isn't the hard part, but can you make them work as well as in an immediate mode GUI?

andybak6• 4 years ago

Progress bars have always either lied or been useless predictors. It's a tough problem in the general case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZnLZFRylbs

marginalia_nu5• 4 years ago

Why do they need to be smooth? What they offer is an indicator of progress. We can tell that the computer is doing something. Maybe not when it's done, but if the bar inches forward, it's not stuck at least. spinner.gif does not tell you any of those things.

Just check it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPv1gQ5Rs8A

antisthenes2• 4 years ago

Yep, now you just get a spinning disk, a frowny face and some inane message that "our elves broke something uwuuu" and asking you to contact their (nonexistent) support channels.

The hate for power users is real.

marginalia_nu5• 4 years ago

I think there's a significant shift from empowering users to controlling users.

Users have become an instrument, rather than ends in themselves. You're attempting corral them so they do something you want instead of empowering them and offering them tools they may need to do what they want to do.

The very notion of power users is deeply incompatible with this.

arprocter• 4 years ago

+1 on progress bars

Biggest offender is a large OS upgrade on Mac and it sits on that black screen. It often doesn't even say how long is left, but when it does the 'remaining time' is laughably wrong. Not really excusable when Apple have such a small range of hardware configs.

I've seen some Windows installers 'x remaining' consistently count upwards instead of downwards...or the other classic, it sits at 10% for a while and then suddenly jumps to 100

belfalas• 4 years ago

Centering text in any technology. :)

forgotmypw17• 4 years ago

HTML tables still work great, just like they did 20+ years ago.

andybak6• 4 years ago

Plus Grid and Flexbox work reliably now and are pretty simple to use.

rado4• 4 years ago

display: grid place-items: center

sergiotapia2• 4 years ago

Bluetooth. It sucks in every kind of way possible. It never connects when you want it to. It autoconnects when you DONT want it to. Pairing is a crapshoot and praying.

It's basically printers all over again. It sucks!

dangrie158• 4 years ago

Wait, is the printers story over?

sigspec2• 4 years ago

No and that makes it worse

sergiotapia2• 4 years ago

Bought my brother laser printer in 2019. Zero maintenance zero worrying about the INK DRYING OUT (wtf) and my wife can print from the LAN or her phone. I've done zero tech support so that makes it worth every penny. To me it's a solved issue try it!

wutbrodo• 4 years ago

Primarily because it's become infinitely easier to avoid. I don't think I've printed much beyond sheet music in the last decade, and even that was trivially replaceable by a small tablet in situations where I didn't have a Kinko's nearby.

rdtwo• 4 years ago

Yeah fucking Bluetooth is the real player of 2022. Even when it works it works poorly

brutusborn• 4 years ago

My best/worst UX: my android phone sometimes temporarily increases the volume to 100% when i connect to headphones via bluetooth, then has the audacity to give me a warning that listening at high volume can be dangerous.

_chu14• 4 years ago

Linux on the desktop

Mikeb858• 4 years ago

Has been working just fine for at least a decade...

fsflover3• 4 years ago

Then (GNU/)Linux on the phone.

neoberg9• 4 years ago

No. There are still missing -important- stuff and "works but you have to stand on your hands while singing" kind of things. It's nowhere near being friendly to an end user unless someone picks and sets up the hardware and the software for them.

loufe• 4 years ago

I second the "no". I have given Linux 3 tries (several months, and a lot of patience) over the last 10 years and each time I've had to ship back to windows at some point. It's not there.

_chu14• 4 years ago

Except for some reason nobody uses it still, wonder why...

peter-m802• 4 years ago

no issues here

Mizza• 4 years ago

Scroll a page. Click a link. Go back. You're back at the top of the thing you were scrolling.

andybak6• 4 years ago

This usually works for me unless someone has decided to make some SPA monstrosity that breaks things that usually work out of the box.

solarkraft• 4 years ago

And that's what everyone does.

jasondigitized• 4 years ago

Printing something from my computer. I can connect to servers all around the world and for whatever reason, I cannot predictably and reliably connect to printers in my home or office.

mynameisvlad2• 4 years ago

Have you tried your phone?

It might sound like a joke, but AirPrint on my iPhone has been the most reliable way to connect to my printer by far.

1123581321• 4 years ago

We have trouble keeping Jira and Bitbucket synced. Both cloud products. How can they struggle with integrating themselves?! (Our GitHub repos sync just fine.)

hanoz2• 4 years ago

Copy and paste in Windows.

SV_BubbleTime3• 4 years ago

Not only does that actually work very well, the windows button + V to bring up clipboard history has been a huge time saver function a few times.

hanoz2• 4 years ago

That feature is nice, when it works, but like its ctrl+v counterpart, 20% of the time it just doesn't. Same problem with with ctrl-shift+p, which is supposed to paste just the plain text - a lot of the time, seemingly at random, it just gets into a state where it pastes the formatted version regardless, and I'm forced to paste into notepad and recopy to lose the formatting.

ccleve2• 4 years ago

My inability to connect to a printer over the network reliably. Can't tell you how many times I have to "fix the printer" in my house.

mattw2121• 4 years ago

I'm at the point that I am about to install a dedicated service that people in my house can just forward a document to via email and it will be printed. Then I have one place to troubleshoot instead of multiple PCs and phones.

peter-m802• 4 years ago

Change the printer brand. I have a Brother laser printer and once configured the wifi on it, it is zero config. All my computers (linux, mac, windows) detect it over the network. I can also print from my android device.

pwinnski• 4 years ago

Brother laser printers are life-changing. Set it and forget it, it just works, apparently forever.

pronik2• 4 years ago

I've bought an OKI color laser print/scan/copy combo after we last moved some four years ago. Best thing ever in general and I never had any connection problems. But yeah, the mere fact that you have to be choosing your hardware wisely is precisely the problem here.

sigspec2• 4 years ago

Mine is automated message handling in iOS.

Specifically I volunteer for a group that uses SMS with embedded links for the volunteers to tap to check in and out of a job. Frequently these links are truncated or divided in a way that makes their URL structure invalid. This happens all the time due to the difference in message length and how iOS handles longer messages.

I know this boils down to an SMS character limit kludge, but our Android users do not experience this. The message comes as one block or "bubble" but the iOS users see multiple bubbles that are frequently out of order.

tenebrisalietum• 4 years ago

Would QR codes work?

freedomben• 4 years ago

I think Tim Cook would tell you to use an iPhone for sending your automated messages, then it won't be a problem.

boring_twenties4• 4 years ago

Wouldn't short URLs work around your problem? (Yes, it's the iPhone's fault, but you don't have any chance of getting that fixed.)

webfork2• 4 years ago

MS Office issues. The whole project back in the 90s as I understand it was that all of these productivity tools would work together. You write something up in Word, move that over into a PowerPoint slide and add in a cool data visual from Excel. I don't know what happened but they do NOT play nice together anymore. Tables don't copy right, I use a totally external program to screenshot the table or pie chart, and maintaining formatting between programs?

Fahgettabouttit.

Word is also remarkably bad with long (100+ page) documents and lots of different content sources. If you're not pasting as pure text into Microsoft Word, you're playing with fire.

Also, I suspect it's cruft inside the program that has made this problem actually worse over time, not just "still a problem". Thank god Markdown is now more widely supported, including on Microsoft-owned Github.

johnnyballgame5• 4 years ago

Where to even start with this... Ok, how about with Microsoft Outlook? The "undo" after deleting or moving an email works about 10% of the time. Sometimes it recovers the message, but most of the time it either does nothing or even better, brings back a totally different message!! smh

jonas-w• 4 years ago

Peace

greenie_beans• 4 years ago

the difficulty an ambulance sometimes has finding you after a wreck

jacquesc• 4 years ago

Tried for hours this weekend trying to share files from my Mac Laptop to a Windows 11 PC over the network. Both had latest versions of operating systems.

Could not for the life of me get it working. Had to dig up a usb thumbdrive.

I used to have this working fine in 2002.

manaX• 4 years ago

I find it handy to use python's http.server module in command line for this.

MonkeyMalarky• 4 years ago

Bluetooth. Especially when paired with the infotainment systems in cars.

mauvehaus2• 4 years ago

Shit, I'd be happy if the Mobil stations near me would correctly implement chip cards on their gas pumps. Every friggin' time, they ask for a PIN and refuse to take "no" for an answer. Every. Time.

It's a credit card. It doesn't have a damn PIN in the US, and I have to go inside to pay for gas every time. I've quit buying gas at the area Mobil stations because of the hassle. Most of the other chains seem to get it right.

How is it that Europe has been doing chip cards (with PIN) for decades, and we can't get this right?

jabroni_salad4• 4 years ago

I have CCs from barclays and capital1 and both of them let you set a PIN. It just isn't a forced workflow like with debit cards.

mauvehaus2• 4 years ago

I inquired with the issuer. I can set a PIN for a cash advance, but not a regular sale. Which is fair, I guess. They are fundamentally different transactions with different interest rules, etc. Nonetheless, it's a very frustrating situation that the solution almost exists, but can't be used.

fabiomargarido• 4 years ago

Painlessly hibernating to disk on Linux

janvdberg• 4 years ago

That my phone can't decide if I'm typing English or Dutch (and set the spellchecking accordingly)

mynameisvlad2• 4 years ago

SwiftKey offers dual language keyboards. It’ll suggest and autocorrect based on which language it thinks you’re using.

It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

vanderZwan3• 4 years ago

This is the first thing I've seen so far that's genuinely surprising to me given all the machine learning breakthroughs of recent years.

Lots of other things mentioned piss me off too, but I can usually see (to my dismay) where the perverse incentives lie, or the lack of a market drive, or whatever.

This seems like a problem people would like to see solved, where nobody has reason to get in the way of solving it, and that should be solvable by now.

Mikeb858• 4 years ago

What phone?

Google's keyboard is great for exactly this (I type in 4 different languages regularly).

ccleve2• 4 years ago

Database versioning. Why can't I have version control on a database record just like we do for documents? Why do we have to implement audit trails over and over again?

forgingahead• 4 years ago

Printers and bluetooth (separately), easily the two weakest links of any computing chain.

joezydeco• 4 years ago

Software (including web frontends) that can't properly pluralize quantities in English.

It goes "0 Days, 1 Day, 2 Days".

Not "0 Days, 1 Days, 2 Days". Or, worse, "0 Day(s), 1 Day(s), 2 Day(s)".

wizzwizz47• 4 years ago

To be fair, pluralisation is hard. If you want it to work in English, but you want your software to support translations, you have to call a function and give it all the information necessary for all languages you support. That includes:

• are there 3 or 4? (Plural isn't just zero/one/many in every language.)

• is the quantity small-ish, or large-ish, compared to normal?

• what's the grammatical position of the noun you want to pluralise?

You'd have to have something a lot more sophisticated than string substitution. And there isn't really a pressing need for it. Day(s) works fine.

songshu• 4 years ago

Cancel next iteration of alarm on iPhone.

capableweb10• 4 years ago

Transferring files between two computers/phones/devices right next to each other, regardless of operating system.

Most solutions rely on sending a file to some server in probably a different country, and then downloading said file on the other computer. Or, using a USB stick to pass the file from one to the other.

alternatetwo• 4 years ago

Or even just a small piece of text, i.e. a link. I have a samba share on one system for files, but that is certainly not "regardless of operating system", as it's a pain to do that with a phone.

So a discord server with just me in it is ... also gives you handy direct links for files up to 8mb.

jeffbee3• 4 years ago

AirDrop? Always works flawlessly in my experience.

marricks2• 4 years ago

It sure does, but they said "regardless of operating system." Outside of the apple-verse it still sucks.

dalyons• 4 years ago

i know you probably know this & you said OS agnostic - but apple really nailed this between macs and iphones. The shared clipboard feels like magic, and airdrop works great too.

JCWasmx863• 4 years ago

`python -m http.server` if they are in the same network? Sure, you have no authentication/security, but for quick+dirty it works fine

capableweb10• 4 years ago

AFAIK, python doesn't ship by default on any operating system anymore (used to on macOS). Otherwise yeah, it's a good contender. You'd still need to pass the URL somehow to the other machine :)

prego_xo3• 4 years ago

Perhaps the 3DS was on to something with those tiny IR sensors on the front.

thesuperbigfrog• 4 years ago

IR transfers worked great on Palm Pilots (and their successors) and many models of graphing calculators.

vanderZwan3• 4 years ago

KDE Connect works for me. Granted, I've only tried it between an android phone and a Linux laptop, but I've heard from others it works well on other OSes and phones too:

https://kdeconnect.kde.org/download.html

(It's also great as a remote control for your laptop when watching a movie or series on a projector)

JCWasmx863• 4 years ago

For me transmitting any file over the network between my android(Termux) and my laptop(Fedora) is awful. It starts with a quite fast transmission (Like 60 Mbps), but always drops to just a few kbps after a few hundred megabytes. Netcat does this, python HTTP-Server, FTP, scp, everything fails.

Eudai• 4 years ago

$ cd /directory/with/files/you/want/to/share

$ python3 -m http.server 1337

Then just connect to the IP and Port of the machine hosting the python http server and transfer away.

Aside from Bluetooth I'm not sure how you'd do this without using a LAN or WAN.

hellisothers• 4 years ago

Love this reply, giving me “Why Dropbox just rsync vibes” :)

jrootabega4• 4 years ago

I do this but I always get a little nervous about it being accessible to any process anywhere on that network. If the system firewall supports it, I think it would be interesting to make the http connection, and then restrict that port to existing connections only. Once you are confident only your intended client has connected, put the files in the directory.

anotherhue3• 4 years ago

I think croc is a superior solution here. Encrypted transfer. Automatic local peer detection. Human speakable commands. Turns off when you’re done. No firewall fiddling (and unfiddling)

Pythons web server is single threaded I believe so any simultaneously connections break.

https://github.com/schollz/croc

voxic11• 4 years ago

I just use https://file.pizza/ works on any OS with a web browser and the file is transferred p2p so its very fast over local networks. And the Url is easy to remember.

capableweb10• 4 years ago

Looks great and P2P is of course required for this, but sadly it'd only work when online :/

Would be great with local network discovery of p2p peers but seemingly browsers are not really interested in enabling that...

gmemstr• 4 years ago

Taildrop (https://tailscale.com/kb/1106/taildrop/) mostly filled this for me, although this is just for the same Tailnet. AirDrop is also pretty slick. Otherwise I chuck it onto my NAS.

Of course all of these solutions have some serious pre-requisites...

wizzwizz47• 4 years ago

This is the only thing that Bluetooth consistently works for. I can send files between my laptop and my feature phone, and other people's laptops, and other people's phones… It's more reliable than email.

Bluetooth doesn't consistently work for connecting I/O devices to my computer, though. Only peer-to-peer file transfer.

capableweb10• 4 years ago

Bluetooth almost got me 100% there as well! Until I discovered that Apple devices don't support sending/receiving files via Bluetooth. But at least it covers about 80% of the devices I own and doesn't rely on external services like most other options people wrote about as a reply.

domador2• 4 years ago

Yes! One should be able to take advantage of the speed of a local transfer. One doesn't always have access to a blazingly fast Internet connection and file-transfer service through which to transfer data. One should be able to transfer data between neighboring devices even when no Internet connections are available.

Eavolution• 4 years ago

KDE Connect is a godsend for this. Surprisingly its on windows too

deweller• 4 years ago

For PC-to-PC syncing of folders, I have found https://syncthing.net/ to work well.

tpoacher• 4 years ago

I'm pretty pissed off that infrared got phased out as a technology. Doubly so that this was replaced by bluetooth.

Yes it was slow, but it worked straightforwardly and reliably, every, single, time.

MrWiffles• 4 years ago

Linux desktop. Equivalent in quality to MacOS.

cranium• 4 years ago

I've not experienced it but I still find it quite scary: automated account termination with no tangible recourse.

Get your account flagged by a black box and you could loose decades of emails, contacts, bookmarks and favorites,... Then it's a Don Quixote fight to get anything back.

alexb_4• 4 years ago

Why the hell is it so hard to just send a file to someone? Why must I go through a central service to host my content before I let someone else view it? Why do I have to tell someone else that they must download third party software in order to just... send files? Without having some corporation store it on their servers.

andybak6• 4 years ago

I assume WebRTC or similar could handle this. I just googled it and this showed up: https://www.sharedrop.io/

But - in many cases people need to transfer files asynchonously - either because they can't guarantee both machines will be online for the duration of the transfer, or the other person wants to receive the file at some other time other than "now".

alexb_4• 4 years ago

Email works fine for that case - that's already been solved. It's "transfer the file now" that's annoying. I would love for third party software like Croc to just be included in Windows (like Curl is now) so this isn't made hard. If you can convince someone to download extra software to get your file, you can just use BitTorrent.

Ptchd2• 4 years ago

https://file.pizza/

ClassyJacket• 4 years ago

Selecting and pasting text on Android. It works completely differently in different apps, or different text boxes in the same app, despite being a service provided by the OS and not the app. And even at it's best it's a nightmare.

Sometimes double tap will select a word. Sometimes double tap will show the clipboard menu. Sometimes double tap will show the clipboard menu, then quickly dismiss it again. Sometimes to show the menu I have to single tap, but sometimes I have to long press.

If it's a single-line text box, I can't tap anywhere within it to get the clipboard menu, I have to tap (or hold, whatever it is today) on the tiny part at the beginning where the cursor is.

Then there's the whole nightmare of actually selecting the text you want correctly.

Pasted the wrong thing? There's no undo. Just suffer.

Horrible.

kerblang• 4 years ago

Programming language design as a discipline improves more slowly than anyone admits, and truth be told, we're trading off more than improving.

1. Your new language will die, but not because of the language, but because it's so hard to build out a standard library for it.

2. We still don't agree on the basics and fundamentals.

3. We are arguing from elitism (and its sibling, anti-elitism) more often than "make it easier".

markles• 4 years ago

- Why is bluetooth so consistently buggy? Unless you're using the exact bluetooth headphones made for that device, I find myself needing to connect/reconnect or debug so often.

- Why don't TVs still have physical buttons? Sometimes the remote batteries die or I can't find it. Just let me turn things off or adjust volume.

- Why isn't there a sliding toggle "checkbox" in HTML? Why do I have to abuse a checkbox to get one?

neoberg9• 4 years ago

To your last point; because it should be a touch specific interface but it's abused as a checkbox on desktop by designers. Mobile app platforms have this natively but HTML is supposed to be platform independent.

SV_BubbleTime3• 4 years ago

The more you know about the Bluetooth Classic spec and the Bluetooth “Special Interest Group”… the more it all makes sense.

anotherhue3• 4 years ago

I read the v4 spec many moons ago. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that it tries to define everything rather than stop at a sensible place and let others quibble over the standards.

The price of embedded systems really.

cik• 4 years ago

Humans. It doesn't matter what country or culture. We're mostly busy arguing over the colour of a political party, as opposed to working on the root cause of important issues.

ElevenLathe3• 4 years ago

I should be able to programmatically check my bank/brokerage balances, check when bills are due, and in general automate my finances. My judgment on when to pay what bills is entirely automatable and yet every payday I spend 45 boring minutes doing it myself anyway. Basically, I want to pay all bills that are due before the next payday. If I have money left over, I want to reserve $X in my checking account for spending, put some in my savings account if it is below $Y, and transfer the rest to my brokerage account to invest.

barbazoo2• 4 years ago

Why would you say this? Now I have this idea in my mind of a python script moving my money around for me twice a month and I know damn well that I'll never get to have that.

wizzwizz47• 4 years ago

Depending on where you live, you might. It's a thing in lots of places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking

jabroni_salad4• 4 years ago

Fidelity's cash management accounts let you set rules. I have one CMA for general funds where my paycheck is deposited and a second CMA that is configured to keep itself at the value of my next few months of fixed expenses. It will grab money from the general to top itself off after something is paid, and the general in turn automatically sends excess to an investment account if its value gets too high.

Basically the only thing I do is check the autobill payees to make sure none of them are doing anything stupid. I have some trouble with executive function but I have not missed a bill in years because of this system. That might not seem impressive but losing money to late fees is a recurring theme in adhd communities.

pronik2• 4 years ago

I'm honestly baffled every time I hear about people in the US spending their time literally paying bills. Direct debiting works and has worked for decades in Germany, and also across Europe since SEPA. Same goes for savings and transfer scheduling, no problem at all. Doing "if below X, do this otherwise don't" is not something easily done with bank's own software, true, but I suppose it could be mostly automated by going FinTS.

marssaxman• 4 years ago

Direct billing works here too, but I steadfastly refuse to sign up for it, because I would rather decide when it is convenient for me to have the money leave my account. I will never forget that one time back in the '90s when all the utilities decided to withdraw a certain month's payments before the relevant paycheck had actually arrived! Not a good experience. Doing it manually makes it much easier to determine how much money I actually have to spend in my debit account at any moment.

johnnyballgame5• 4 years ago

"Windows could not reconnect all network drives."

luckylion• 4 years ago

Companies still ignoring business. I tried to get a company account at getsby, nothing happens. I email them, silence. I'm pretty sure I'm not blacklisted by MC/Visa because I have both from my bank and my company has way more money than it knows how to spend.

Oh, and Paypal's payments not working 50% of the time. Probably something with using firefox or being on linux, or having an adblocker. I have a secure password. I use 2fa. It still fails so often, I now avoid it.

jeffbee3• 4 years ago

iPhone hotspot over wifi has always worked flawlessly for me, with all types of clients from macbooks to imacs to chromebooks and chromecasts and even my car.

jlengrand• 4 years ago

For me, it's what's getting worse over time.

It's accepted to wait 6 seconds for your TV to start. Washing machine to light up, dishwasher to be responsive, or even apps to take seconds to boot up....

It makes me go crazy.

sdenton4• 4 years ago

Video game controllers. Even in the world of steam and unity, controller behavior and configuration is a huge crapshoot and often just doesn't work.

SV_BubbleTime3• 4 years ago

I’ve never had an issue on a console, ever.

You are just describing PC fragmentation.

falcolas8• 4 years ago

Nah, just use a 3rd party controller. You lose functionality on a console (for example, NFC reading and HD rumble on switch 3rd party controllers), and they can't even begin to accept that you might have different button labels than their first party controllers.

QuadrupleA• 4 years ago

Web search - being able to find anything but half-assed listicles and content farm dreck.

estebarb• 4 years ago

Connecting a laptop to a videobeam. It is still plug & pray.

recursive2• 4 years ago

What's a videobeam?

classicalcomplx• 4 years ago

Bluetooth. I’m fairly vested in the Apple ecosystem with a MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad, and a few AirPods, and never have I seen a feature that creates so much instability across such a wide range of gadgets. I have gotten kernel panics on my MacBook, hard crashes (straight to the Apple logo) on my iPhone and iPad, and had several AirPods refusing to switch devices without a hard reset, all from the Bluetooth dameon. And, don’t get me started on default audio inputs with Zoom calls and whatnot. Rolling dice seems to have better odds than getting the right input to connect from the start.

sandreas• 4 years ago

This is my personal opinion. No offense to any developer or project, but:

The linux touchpad experience... After shifting around responsibilities for a decade between libinput, compositor, desktop environment, applications and back, not many people seem to really see the importance of the touchpad as input device. Especially precisition, interial/kinetic scrolling + rubberbanding and palm detection do not feel optimal.

After digging around with libinput and libinput-config on fedora 36, I have achieved at least an acceptable level of touchpad usability and I'm looking forward to 2023 :-)

mariusor2• 4 years ago

The only thing you might want to be mindful of is to place the blame where it lies, not "shifting around responsibilities [..] between libinput, compositor, desktop environment, applications and back". Most of the time the true culprits are the hardware vendors that don't provide technical specifications for their devices, not anyone else.

Open source devs have reverse-engineered the pointer acceleration curves for countless devices and should be thanked that one can use an off the shelf laptop with a working touchpad instead of thinking they're somehow to blame.

johnnyballgame5• 4 years ago

Version control of Microsoft Word and Excel documents.

jacknews• 4 years ago

Wifi hotspot works fine for me.

What doesn't work is just sharing stuff between different people and devices. I want to send a web page to my son on his desktop. I want to play a video on the TV. I want to play some music on the main speakers. I want to collaborate on annotating an image with my wife. The whole family wants access to the e-book collection, movies, music, etc.

All these things are possible now to an extent, but each and every one is some degree of difficult to set up, and it's own little thing. And not even mentioning the fractured wasteland that is messaging.

All of this should be baked into the very fabric of computing by now IMHO, a seamless landscape of shared data.

wizzwizz47• 4 years ago

Latency.

Back in the day, you flicked your computer's on switch, and it turned on. (And then it took ten minutes or so to load software from the tape drive – much faster from floppy, but still far from instant.) Now, our processors and storage devices are millions of times faster, and computers can take minutes just to start. Software needs to load itself into memory, then initialise the initialisation routines, then actually initialise, then you have to wait for the data to populate, then it's still slow until the cache has warmed up.

It's 2022 and if I want to play a rhythm game, I have to calibrate my input device because, since the days of PS/2, keyboard latency has gone up so much that I can hear the delay between the button click and the computer's reaction.

It's 2022, and when I draw something on one device, it takes several seconds for the drawing to make its way to the other, even if they're in the same room, because the data's being sent through four layers of format conversion in JavaScript, and the traffic's being sent half-way 'round the world.

It's 2022, and "blazing fast" means "slower, and probably more buggy, than Windows 95".

prego_xo3• 4 years ago

With all of the extra power we have in our components these days, companies feel like they need to utilize all of it, otherwise it's wasted. Thus the suite of horrible programs required to get a USB controller to have deadzones, or for keyboards to have custom functions. The amount of background processes in one Windows 10 instance without having opened a single program manually is mind-boggling.

glitcher2• 4 years ago

Yes!

My biggest gripe lately is being forced to move more and more of my daily work off of a very fast and beefy local workstation to an AWS Workspace that feels like I'm time traveling backwards 20 years to a laggy remote desktop connection.

mrob3• 4 years ago

Low latency is still available. Get a fast gaming keyboard/mouse/monitor/NVMe SSD. Use a latency-tuned kernel, e.g. with full preemption enabled. Disable swap and run a userspace OOM killer to avoid the problems this would otherwise cause. Run Xorg with compositing disabled and TearFree disabled. Disable vsync everywhere. Don't use software that caps the framerate low (e.g. terminals using libvte[0]). Turn off all UI animations.

Most software I use feels more responsive than anything from the Windows 95 era.

[0] https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10704

acuozzo3• 4 years ago

Now, our processors and storage devices are millions of times faster, and computers can take minutes just to start.

Can't you boot directly into a UEFI shell very, very quickly? Is this not equivalent to flipping a switch and jumping right into DOS?

Don't get me wrong. I agree with the sentiment and general message of your post, but it does seem like the goal posts have been moved.

soupfordummies• 4 years ago

>It's 2022, and "blazing fast" means "slower, and probably more buggy, than Windows 95".

I was at a vintage computer fest a few months back and got to play around on an old ~96 Pentium box running Win95. I was ASTOUNDED by how fast it was.

Yoofie2• 4 years ago

Reminds me of these videos from Casey Muratori:

30 million line problem - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk

Twitter and Visual Studio Rant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U

gilbetron• 4 years ago

You must have used a different Win95 than I did. Slow and buggy in nearly everything. Had you said Win2000 or XP, I might have agreed more, except that they were really slow. My windows laptop boots up in about 5-10 seconds, and it is rare that something crashes on it.

Seems more rose-tinted glasses than anything.

wizzwizz47• 4 years ago

No, I'm aware how buggy Windows 95 was. I used Windows 98 SE, which was still slow, and would occasionally just get stuck in an uninterruptible "non-fatal" BSOD, hang, BSOD loop before deciding that actually, it is a fatal error after all. From its reputation, I imagine Windows 95 was worse in both respects. I am comparing modern computers to this. Rose-tinted glasses my foot: I am pointing at a computer that would assume the delete key was held (for no identifiable reason) at boot,¹ and I am saying it's more predictable, less buggy, and faster than modern computers.

It took under three minutes to cold boot (~5 seconds from hibernation), took less than a second to load a static HTML page from the 2GB hard drive, and could play tanks.swf[0] for hours without spinning up the fan.

Compare that to modernity: your average Windows 10 machine will normally refuse to cold boot in favour of "fast startup" (basically hibernation) because it takes so long to start normally. If you try that anytime, good luck getting to "I can type with less than a second's lag between a keypress and the character appearing on the screen" in less than ten minutes. If you have an SSD, 16GB of RAM and an octacore processor, you might be able to get that down to 3 minutes – juuuust about edging out the "wait for it to boot, double-click on a document, and wait two seconds for Wordpad to open" of 1999 laptop hardware and software. (And if you give those resources² to Windows 98 it'll boot the whole OS and have your file open in less time than it takes Microsoft Teams to hide its splash screen.)

In a modern web browser, it usually takes less than a second to load a static HTML page. But sometimes it just takes upwards of 10 seconds, sitting there and spinning on a blank page with a blank address bar and (aside from the fan noise) no apparent sign of life.

And… well, good luck with tanks.swf these days; without active cooling, you can feel the temperature difference through the case. My laptop³ went up over 10°C with the fan. A simple Flash game where the majority of the gameplay is stationary graphics idles at half a core, averages one-and-a half cores and peaks at ~2.8 cores (70% CPU utilisation).

I think it's fair to say that computers have got worse.

[0] https://archive.org/details/tanks_flashgame

¹: Yes, it would beep incessantly during the DOS phase of the boot sequence (BIOS beep, then a pause, then a faster, higher-pitched beep I can only assume came from WIN.COM), then proceed to try to delete all the files on the desktop once the desktop loaded. If you timed it right, though, you could tap the delete key before the first beep, and save yourself the hassle of waiting for the keyboard buffer to drain.

²: Minus the RAM, of course; that's enough to overflow its 32-bit address size and make its memory allocator think there's no RAM.

³: 4 (logical) core Intel i5-5200U @ 2.20GHz, with integrated GPU

lonelygirl15a• 4 years ago

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

johnnyballgame5• 4 years ago

Disconnecting / reconnecting a Windows laptop from a docking station.

andybak6• 4 years ago

Closing the lid on a Windows laptop and being 100% confident it won't decide to wake up either in the middle of the night thus feeling the room with an eerie glow - or in your backpack thus cooking the motherboard.

falcolas8• 4 years ago

Well, you can be 100% confident that it will do one of those two things (if not both), so there's that at least.

falcolas8• 4 years ago

I'm sorry to say this is an issue everywhere. I've had a mac BSOD from unplugging a dock (doing it while the computer's suspended is/was a surefire way to trigger this particular bug), and linux is even more picky since it depends entirely on the hardware underpinning the dock.

nikau4• 4 years ago

My most reliable dock has been the cheapest one possible - a display port 1.2 adapter that exposes the usb2 port which I've chained to an 8 port hub.

No special drivers required, everything I've connected it to has worked flawlessly including macs, windows, my Samsung phone.

USB2 only seems bad on the surface, but the combined bandwidth of the webcam/mouse/keyboard/mic doesn't come near saturating it.

jrootabega4• 4 years ago

Buying a dozen eggs and not having one of them be cracked when you use them. The clear plastic cartons might help you see a fully smashed egg, but it doesn't let you see the small cracks. Especially for brown eggs. The cashier double checks the eggs anyway, but there's always a cracked one once I have paid.

socialismisok5• 4 years ago

I've had this happen maybe once or twice, ever. Interesting to hear that someone out there is getting all my unlucky eggs.

jrootabega4• 4 years ago

I'm probably the guy getting hit with all your CAPTCHAs, too!

alexb_4• 4 years ago

Do you not check the eggs before you buy them?

jrootabega4• 4 years ago

I'm the weirdo who opens the carton and gently rolls each egg to see if it's stuck to the carton underneath.

ar-nelson• 4 years ago

Cross-platform user interface libraries, including desktop<->mobile. GTK and QT work for desktop-only apps, but once you include mobile there's no good, solid solution for this except a web view.

notacoward• 4 years ago

Gotta add another vote for printers in general. All of our computers "lose" the printer at least once a month, even though it has a static IP address etc. Only solution is to remove and reinstall. Then it never remembers quality settings, which is important because normal quality is utter crap that nobody would ever want. (TBF that last part is more of an OS problem.) Then there's the "can't print black because you're out of yellow" thing, and so many more. How can everything about printers still be so awful even after decades of that awfulness being so well known that it's the subject of memes and jokes?

Special bonus: suspend/resume on even the most vanilla of laptops. The one I'm on now keeps hanging on wakeup because (I'm 90% sure) the fingerprint-reader driver is total trash. I've been hearing lots of reports of suspend/resume problems with 12th gen Intel processors, on multiple platforms. Windows or Linux, same. Again: how is this something that vendors can't even test properly, after all this time?

t8sr• 4 years ago

I think you have the arrow of time backwards. Technology seems to be getting less reliable, not more so. Every time my laptop manages to connect to a hotspot it's a small miracle.

tilolebo• 4 years ago

Education in Western countries.

Budget cuts every year, ministers more preoccupied by putting their name on a law or reform than to actually improve things.

fsiefken• 4 years ago

Perceived sluggishness in the desktop response. Perhaps it's my memory or imagination but I remember that dos/win3.11 had an almost immediate desktop and application response on a pentium. I'm sure with a lightweight linux I can approach the speedyness and MacOS on an M1/M2 has a good enough desktop response.

falcolas8• 4 years ago

It's not just you - we went from "render when ready" to "start an animation of a fixed duration when ready". At least, that's one of the issues I've found.

yamtaddle4• 4 years ago

BeOS was magically snappy and responsive on 7200RPM spinning rust with a single-core 166Mhz Pentium and 128MB of memory. Felt luxuriously powerful. The only widespread current OS that's even close to that level of responsiveness and good-use-of-resources is iOS, and it's been slipping for years such that I now hesitate to make the comparison. And it gets there largely by cheating (suspending backgrounded programs).

wizzwizz47• 4 years ago

The USB 2.0 stack has higher latency than the PS/2 stack – but that's no excuse for the sheer lagginess of the OS.

Ooh, just learnt that USB 3 fixes this problem! Never mind.

mrob3• 4 years ago

USB 2.0 has a theoretical minimum latency of 125us. PS/2 has a theoretical minimum latency of 659us, because the maximum serial clock is 16.7kHz, and the smallest scancode is 11 bits. This ignores considerations of matrix scan rate, debouncing, key travel distance, key activation point, the fact that many PS/2 scancodes are bigger than 11 bits, and the fact that USB can transmit more than one key at a time.

rtings.com measures the keyboard I'm using at 0.5ms latency[0]. I'm confident this is faster than any PS/2 keyboard.

[0] https://www.rtings.com/keyboard/reviews/razer/huntsman-v2

nikau4• 4 years ago

I turn off animations in win10, makes everything much snappier feeling.

Scharkenberg• 4 years ago

Digital signatures for the wider public are still very cumbersome. The number of times I have had to print a filled PDF form just to sign it manually, scan it, then upload it back to the issuer's website is too damn high.

I am in Germany.

falcolas8• 4 years ago

Home routers doing a good job at Quality of Service - at allowing both big downloads and a responsive video call at the same time. This is a common enough usecase these days that it's crazy how a software update on one computer will obliterate a video call on another, even with "QOS" turned on.

cassianoleal2• 4 years ago

This is true. If you have a reliable upstream connection though, you can get quite far with SQM on OpenWRT.

falcolas8• 4 years ago

You absolutely can...

If you forgo trying to run a branded home router out of the box. You have to find a brand you can run OpenWRT on, and then install and configure OpenWRT. AKA, you need a somewhat specialized skillset that most folks won't have (it's always worth remembering that only 35% of people are able to complete tasks using only a computer and the internet).

jmnicolas• 4 years ago

Flying cars. We were supposed to have them 22 years ago and now they're saying that I should get a bike to go to work.

socialismisok5• 4 years ago

Flying cars are a nightmare.

Ebikes are incredible. They are the most efficient form of transportation there is, they don't pollute, they are speedy, and they are compact!

prego_xo3• 4 years ago

And they've been dumped all over city sidewalks in California because it's a legal grey-area.

falcolas8• 4 years ago

Some downsides bikes have which flying cars would not:

- No weather protection

- Don't work (well, if at all) in snow, ice, heavy rains.

- Limited (or zero) safety features, despite going fast enough to cause injuries and using the same infrastructure as cars

- Limited speed and range

- 2d congestion limits throughput

alexb_4• 4 years ago

We have flying cars. They're called helicopters.

acuozzo3• 4 years ago

I think they're called airplanes. Are most helicopters capable of "taxi"-ing?

acuozzo3• 4 years ago

Flying cars

Most drivers (in the US, at least) have trouble enough navigating two dimensions. Adding a third would undoubtedly make matters worse. Hell, just look at the safety record of private jets.

socialismisok5• 4 years ago

First past the post voting systems.

How have we not fixed this yet?

em-bee• 4 years ago

how would you fix that?

fsh• 4 years ago

Connecting external screens or projectors to a PC. It never made sense to me that the devices on either end take many seconds to realize that something was plugged in.

mrob3• 4 years ago

I recently installed Debian Unstable on a new PC and it came with Pulseaudio installed by default. Just like it did when I first tried Pulseaudio on a different computer many years ago, the audio intermittently desynced from video playback on Firefox. Thankfully, Debian compiles Firefox with the optional ALSA support enabled, so I uninstalled Pulseaudio and everything worked perfectly again.

_caw4• 4 years ago

Windows search.

It is so incredibly slow and inept at finding anything, whereas the app Everything by voidtools has no problem and works instantaneously.

Yoofie2• 4 years ago

Windows search is hot garbage. That's why I install Everything Search [1] on every windows PC I use.

[1] https://www.voidtools.com/

fsw• 4 years ago

Outlook shows national holidays in the calendar, yet its "Scheduling Assistant" is unable to figure out that people don't work on that day.

nonrandomstring• 4 years ago

Encrypted email and search.

It's no easier to send a confidential message using the most widespread communications protocol than in 1980.

Searching for anything serious/interesting I pause and think: Do I have it locally? Else, which specialist databases or sources I might try. Else use a bash script that hits a bunch of "alternative" search engines. Finally, use Google/Bing as last resorts. What happened to search?

rgoulter• 4 years ago

I can play quake in my browser using webgl compiled from c++ code running as WASM

but I still can not scroll though a table of 5,000 items.

via https://twitter.com/samccone/status/902542169524772864

capableweb10• 4 years ago

but I still can not scroll though a table of 5,000 items.

Well, something is wrong with your computer then probably. Here is a HTML table with more than 10,000 elements and it works fine for me even on my shitty computers: https://gist.github.com/CapableWeb/5714c672dc433c1963a45625e...

You can even confirm they are all being rendered with `document.querySelectorAll('tr').length` which confirms all rows are in the DOM and it renders smoothly at 60 fps for me.

DocTomoe• 4 years ago

1. I still can't seamlessly stream from Spotify/android phone to Google/Nest Home speakers. Takes up to 30 seconds to sync, randomly breaks down. I switched to iPhone two weeks ago. Spotify/iOS connects to Google Home immediately and works well.

2. I keep giving different variants of the same command to my Google Home, which often gets answered with "I have no idea how to do that", or sometimes minute grammatical details change the command for the computer, or sometimes it refuses to remember a task that it did the day before with that exact phrase, or sometimes it randomly does something completely different. Why does "Turn living room off" do something different from "Turn off living room"?

I am slowly moving away from Google's ecosystem because nothing ever works seamlessly.

boring_twenties4• 4 years ago

The Spotify Android app is at a minimum in the top 3 lowest quality pieces of software I've used in my life (been using computers since 1992 or so). Probably #1, I'm just hedging in case I'm forgetting something.

throwaway0x7E6• 4 years ago

we have only 3 browser vendors left, and they mostly cooperate with each other, and still the default styles are so all over the place that even simple pages often end up with broken features between browsers on the same platform

_caw4• 4 years ago

The ability to change default Google accounts without signing out of every account.

At this point, I'm absolutely convinced I'm doing something wrong. Maybe this is painless in Chrome?

sys42590• 4 years ago

Recently installed Linux Mint, what baffled me in 2022 is that regularely upon log-on it nags me to install security updates and when I acknowledge the request, it asks me for my password again. I agree that general package manager operations should be a privileged operation... but approving the installation of security updates should not have the user being greeted by just another password prompt.

dingaling• 4 years ago

They're exactly the same filesystem operations, it's just the semantics of why they're being installed that changes.

What frustrates me about updates is that they nag at log-in when I've already been waiting for the computer to boot and just want to get on with the task at hand.

Ptchd2• 4 years ago

I once had ubuntu change that behavior but for some reason they reverted quickly...

sam_lowry_• 4 years ago

Message quoting in Outlook.

ryandvm• 4 years ago

Trying to find a setting in Windows' 3 or 4 generations of control panels. Honestly, it's amazing to me that Windows is such an unpolished turd after 30 years of development.

ggaughan• 4 years ago

Two brand new Bosch ovens side by side, both showing different times on their digital clocks. Why don't they auto-adjust with daylight saving or at least synchronise with each other. I'd rather have no clock than two wrong ones.

_caw4• 4 years ago

We've flown a helicopter on Mars. We've crashed a vehicle into an asteroid.

I have to type 25 character random passwords into AppleTV with no mistakes 5-10 times from a remote.

On that note, it's 2022 and I cannot set up an AppleTV in the Home app on a Mac. It's apparently impossible.

joshka6• 4 years ago

This has two solutions:

1. Devs incorporate an OAuth code based flow. Many apps do this. Passwords should rarely need to exist on a TV device.

2. Paste using the remote app if you have an iPhone.

The first is caused by dev laziness (and possibly better for rare scenarios where there isn't a second device) and the second is perhaps a cost thing (do you have an iphone?)

_caw4• 4 years ago

I do wish the first was more widely adopted.

The typing experience on AppleTV is actively user hostile - the password is masked (you cannot reveal it) so if you even think you've made a mistake in one of your 25 characters, you need to start over.

The second doesn't work for me: we only have Android devices. It's unclear why our 3 MacBooks aren't sufficient for this purpose; I didn't have any suspicion that this would be the case.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 4 years ago

My MacBook Pro 128 GB has "Pro" in its name but it takes a whole night to upgrade Xcode to a newer version on this model if I just pick Upgrade in the App Store (I no longer do it and download it manually instead, and then delete the old version manually before installing the new one).

BeetleB2• 4 years ago

Charging cell phones is more of a pain than charging my cordless home phone.

Even 30+ years ago, it was simple. The phone has a docking station, and you simply place your phone into it.

Why do I have to fiddle with a cable to charge my smartphone? Some phones support wireless charging, but they're rare, and some manufacturers have dropped support for it.

capableweb10• 4 years ago

Even 30+ years ago, it was simple. The phone has a docking station, and you simply place your phone into it.

I don't remember it being so simple. Every mobile phone I had in the 90s/early 2000 had a different charger, even within the same brand. They all had little holes with one pin in them, but all had different sizes, or completely different "couplers". I still have a assorted box with probably 10+ mobile chargers from the same amount of phones.

At least now all Android phones are mostly using the same kind of charger, and Apple being forced to support it as well. Hopefully we'll all be using USB-C for quite some time now.

BeetleB2• 4 years ago

Every mobile phone I had in the 90s/early 2000 had a different charger, even within the same brand.

I'm referring to cordless phones, not cell phones:

https://www.google.com/search?q=cordless+phone

No fiddling with any wires needed. Why can't we get docking stations like these for cell phones?

domador2• 4 years ago

The display of sender emails on various email clients and services. It is discouraging to see how blindly clients trust the name provided by a message's sender and display it as-is (and without the actual email address) to the user. The client will naively display

"Amazon Customer Service"

as a message's sender when the full name and email that come in the message are something like

"Amazon Customer Service" <contact@amazonfakedomain.com>

So many technically-sophisticated verification processes are currently run on incoming email to throw out spam and scam messages, yet this particular, rather clumsy form of attack remains unaddressed. Email clients will warn you about everything else but this! I can think of a few simple ways in which clients could detect suspicious sender emails and/or names and help users know that there's something seemingly fishy about a particular sender. Yet I'm surprised that so little attention is paid to this attack vector.

glitcher2• 4 years ago

Default crapware installed on non-tech savvy family computers.

fetus8• 4 years ago

While not the most "mission critical" application, making basic Siri requests via a HomePod has never improved since the HomePods came out in 2018. Asking to do simple things like turning on a specific light via HomeKit, or asking for the weather, and having the request fail for some strange, unreported issue makes for a frustrating experience.

HomeKit accessories in general have been extremely hit or miss, I had two Logitech Circle View cameras that constantly lost their network connection and had to be power cycled to get back online. I tried many things over the almost 2 years I had them set up in my house and nothing seemed to improve their connectivity. I replaced the indoor one with an Ecobee camera, and the outdoor one with an Eve camera, and haven't had any network issues since. I've seen similar behavior with "cheaper" HomeKit enabled light bulbs too. Certain brands seem to have major issues with connectivity, while others are 100% reliable. Maybe Thread will address this?

giantg2• 4 years ago

Jest's memory leak

DemocracyFTW2• 4 years ago

Bluetooth is still every bit as horrible as it was on day one.

barbazoo2• 4 years ago

Even worse than printing I find scanning. It's like we're stuck with some ancient technology that works maybe 20% of the time. When it works, the scanned page of text is 8MB. Open in Acrobat Reader, export with "reduce file size", 6MB. What the hell?!?

Shadowed_• 4 years ago

Things that could help: -Scan as black&white (grayscale) and save as such (8bit instead of color which is 24bit) -Increase contrast so background is pure(r) white instead of varying grays -OCR and save as docx/pdf/txt with actual text instead of image of text.

gadders• 4 years ago

Easy Windows or web programming in the style of Visual Basic (original VB, not VB.net).

Balgair• 4 years ago

Search in Windows.

I have a term I know I used in some set of documents. I can't remember where I put those documents in some file structure. I use the search function. Friggin' 10 minutes later it finally stops searching, returning a gazillion files which have nothing to do with the term I was searching for.

Yeah, yeah, search is hard on local systems. Turn indexing on. Blah blah blah.

Like, I have endless Halo and ads in the home menu, but I don't have the ability to actually use the computer in any productive way.

IshKebab• 4 years ago

I feel the same way about Chrome's browsing history. I was definitely looking at this site 5 minutes ago, why can't I find it in the history?? Plus it only stores like 30 days of history. What's the point of that? I have to install a third party extension to make history usable.

My theory is they deliberately sabotage it so you have to use Google instead to try to re-find what you were looking at.

dole• 4 years ago

Windows Search has almost always been useless IMHO. I've used an old copy of Funduc Search and Replace forever for this and when I can't on another machine, it's FINDSTR from the commandline. If you're looking for just filenames, voidtools Everything is awesome.

rasz• 4 years ago

voidtools Everything

Markoff• 4 years ago

Pull down to refresh in mobile Firefox.

RCS as standard/API available to use in any app.

soderfoo• 4 years ago

FWIW pull down refresh is a feature in Firefox nightly, not sure what is taking so long getting it in to regular FF.

easywood• 4 years ago

You mean printers, right? Everything about them?

johnnyballgame5• 4 years ago

Stating the obvious... There are billion$ to be made in this thread.

1970-01-01• 4 years ago

Ctrl+Alt+Del on a Windows system waiting on a hung process during shutdown.

oliwarner• 4 years ago

Home automation and security.

Why isn't there a single model for sharing video and alerts to a local PVR? Why do so many crappy cameras require internet access and 1st party apps?

I want cameras, I want alarms, I want heating and lighting automation, and I don't want to share access with some kid in China, or have nine different apps.

HomeKit? Sure, but on my terms, not Apple's.

Euphorbium• 4 years ago

Clicking 2 devices together does not pair them, or at least initiate pairing. Have to scroll through a list of 100 cryptically named devices without any indication which I should connect to.

Protostome• 4 years ago

Bluetooth.

rado4• 4 years ago

AirDrop – how is a 50% success rate remotely acceptable? And my personal favourite – macOS carries over the input language from an app to another, which makes no sense at all and is frustrating me for 17 years now

rado4• 4 years ago

OS becoming unresponsive because of a network/IO error

NautilusWave• 4 years ago

Sharing WiFi connection details via a QR code in iOS. On Android it's intuitive; but last I checked a few months ago on my spouse's iPhone, it was a weirdly complex process that didn't leverage the information the phone already had to connect to WiFi.

rado4• 4 years ago

Windows, the top gaming platform, switching between a few resolutions before starting a game, making the desktop shrink etc

yndoendo• 4 years ago

Control desktop monitor settings still requires using the display's built in controls. This should be directly accessible to the OS so one can quickly lower or raise the screen's brightness like on a laptop.

Manually turn off bluetooth once disconnect from paired device, such as a car or headphones. Save battery and reduced in-store tracking.

Interactions with smart phones still requires multiple attempts to properly format text, fix corrects on unknown words or industry jargon, and copy and paste text.

Android 12+, Google camera no longer follows the standard of allowing to select the photo gallery application and requires open it manually. Older versions allowed for it. Now Google forces you to use their application and break standard. Another Do as I say, not as I do.

orev2• 4 years ago

Ask HN: What is your fav “I can't believe in 2022 this still doesn't work right”

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