Although I prefer my list of software I’ve loved, like most media, most software is bad or mediocre. And some of it is painful, annoying or even deadly. Unlike movies, software robs and blackmails. That’s hate-worthy. But, for me, the software I’ve hated most is software I’ve used a lot, but that share(d) some key characteristics. Not just annoying to use, but really obviously flawed in a fundamental way, but ultimately popular anyway. Like a shitty movie that makes millions, these are product that may touch many peoples lives, and may be “successful” by most metrics, but which fundamentally fail as software. That makes me hate them.
- Eclipse – The invert of IntelliJ. The first couple times I tried to use Eclipse in grad school, I literally gave up on the intro screen. It had four options, none of which were straightforward actions like create a new code file. I clicked one. It was some kind of package manager, but for plugins? I was on a Mac, it looked like Windows (I guess it was/is Swing?). My fan whirred on. I hadn’t written a line of code and my top of the line laptop was having to give it’s all. A few years later, when you had to use Eclipse for Android development, it had improved. I made it past the launch screen. But it remained ugly, slow, inconveniently and excessively customizable, resource heavy, cluttered with too many features I didn’t need and lacking some basics I expected. It’s integration with the Android toolchain was brittle at best and more often wall-punchingly inane. I kind of liked building Android apps, but I very much hated Eclipse.
- iTunes (some versions) – A clichéd choice but a necessary one. I’ve used iTunes since its primary purpose was to rip and burn cds, and manage your music library. It also had an equalizer that was fun to fiddle with, and a visualizer that was a beautiful demonstration of the Mac’s graphics power. Then came the iPod, and the Store, and sharing, and Podcasts, and the iPhone, and videos and tv, and iCloud, and iPad, and TV again, and Apple Music and Ping and and OMFG this interface makes no sense. Each view is different… what is wrong with a sortable table? It’s fluctuated in usability. The version in Sierra is useable, if confused and inconsistent. But boy, have their been updates where I thought, “the designer of this literally hates people who want to use this workflow. They did this to vex me.” And, yet, it’s running even as I type.
- Explorer – For a period Explorer was the best browser available for OS X and I used it voluntarily. It was resource heavy, but fast and its rendering was spiffy looking. At other points in my life, I’ve used Explorer, but always found it to be ugly, slow or just not worth the download. But there were also points where Explorer was the worst and I worked in companies that mandated its use. I actually liked Windows NT okay. But I remember cursing the name of Bill Gates sitting in a shipping office in Seattle, as a temp, trying to load a large page of information into my little desktop and not enjoying my experience. Also as someone who’s done web work, fuck Explorer for their non-compliant weird old browsers still causing problems for web devs and users worldwide.
What do these three POSes have in common? Complexity, slowness, monopoly. They are tools that do too many things (or try to), do them slowly or unstably, but that I had to use. Even though Eclipse is a FOSS, non-profit, at that time, on Android I was not free. There was no real market or competitor, and that led to shitty bloatware.