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Evil, hateful software

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In a sidebar to Shellbot’s ‘Tumbleweeds’ discussion, TR member Darryl~ described Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer 2007 as “the most hateful application I’ve used”.

For me it was Scala InfoChannel, a video presentation package. We bought it around 2000 to create employee news displays for TV screens in our lobbies, cafeterias, etc. A vile app, it looked like a mid-80’s DOS file management GUI. Take a look at this screenshot from a 1999 independent review:

http://www.dvdcreation.com/Images/Features/1999/Paulo_Scala/Paulo_Scala4large.jpg

None of the buttons or toolbars behaved like I expected; the whole interface ran counter to everything I’d learned about using a Windows-based app. (The review above considered this an asset!) I consistently had problems accurately inserting new pages where I wanted them. I quickly came to hate requests to update the content. After six months I recreated the entire presentation in PowerPoint, augmented by a couple of free plug-ins to handle refreshing the weather and traffic slides. It took a couple of days but was much easier to maintain.

In it’s defense, it was way more tool than we needed, intended for presentations far more sophisticated than ours, a space shuttle when all we needed was Sputnik. It was selected by HR or PR without IT input, then handed to me without much training. Wikipedia says InfoChannel has been reborn as Scala5, but I hope to never encounter it. Once bitten…

What application causes you to cringe at the thought of having to use it?

Topic

mine was

In reply to Evil, hateful software

a software I won’t name, for fear they might sue me.

It was a privately developed software out of a home-office in NJ that did payroll, budget, AR, AP, etc.

The SQL calls were horrible, half the custom coding they did for us didn’t work, etc.

I ended up re-writing most of the application to work properly…after the owner of my company paid them $1ks for customs, then $1ks more for source code rights.

He should have just paid me instead…since I cleared only $808 a month at that job.

Can I only pick one???

In reply to Evil, hateful software

DataEase… an old database app..its hideous.
Don’t mind old tech.. cut my teeth on FoxPro..but DataEase is a piece of cr@p.

And Access..I despise access..I can’t form words to say how much i truly hate it….

I wondered how quickly Access would reared its key-shaped head.

In reply to Can I only pick one???

I suspect it’s going to be popular. Or unpopular. Whatever.

Access is to databases what PowerPoint is to presentations. Both make it too easy for someone to think they’re creating chicken salad when they’re actually working with chicken ‘not-salad’.

Its my number 1

In reply to I wondered how quickly Access would reared its key-shaped head.

i will do anything..and i mean anything to stay away from that one

feel bad for me then

In reply to Its my number 1

I’m maintaining a 3 app suite written entirely in Access/VBA.

I’m still trying to convince my boss to let me:

a) re-engineer the app in a web interface
b) re-engineer the database to be more efficient
c) do it after January 1.

I’m not real fond of Access either, and I am in the middle of 15,000 lines of VBA code and about 90 forms almost daily.

Rather you than me

In reply to feel bad for me then

There was one guy on here a while back explaining the joys of Javascript, 10,000 lines of it embedded in 100s of web pages….

My eyebrows went that far up I was able to to disguise my receding hairline for a week.

LMAO ~nt~

In reply to Rather you than me

.

There’s a really GOOD use for Access

In reply to I wondered how quickly Access would reared its key-shaped head.

I wrote alot of crystal reports against large datasets.

Simple queries in access’s grid let you pull up subsets very quickly to verify data.

often much quicker than crystal
but also can print a default dump without writing a report.

I would actually run xtal on one pc and access on the other to verify data.

As a desktop adhoc analysis tool

In reply to There’s a really GOOD use for Access

or for trivial low volume (transactions and concurrent users more than data) apps, nothing wrong with it. It’s when we get given it to do a high volumne multi user, ctitical client server enterprise back and front end people like me Shell and I tend to get somewhat irritated.

Nothing wrong with using it as a prototype either…

An app can be evil and still be useful.

In reply to There’s a really GOOD use for Access

I hate shucking corn, and it influences my decision to buy fresh corn on the cob, but it does serve a purpose.

Um I can’t tell you

In reply to Evil, hateful software

Cause I could be fired.

PM me if you really wanna know.

James

Condor

In reply to Evil, hateful software

It was a DOS database program and it was a major POS!

I was writing a training product management system. In the version we had, you needed to use the development environment to get the [u]mandatory[/u] spacing correct, but you couldn’t run code from inside the development environment, you had to exit, start the run-time, and compile to test your program. In the days of 5.25″, 360-k floppies, that was a lot of disk swaps.

I was so glad when we got dBase II…then got FoxBase six months later.

Of course, I’m not facing that fate anytime soon, so I’ll go with anything that’s got the ribbon.

Visual Basic 6

In reply to Evil, hateful software

Never used 1 – 5 thank Cthulu. Didn’t work like anything I’d used, defaults to writing seriously crap code, no threading, no OO to speak of..
Fought it for two years, Pyrhic victory at best.

I find VB6 liberating

In reply to Visual Basic 6

No real standards, no need to cast, no need to prototype, no need to worry about pointers, no need to work with abstract layers. Though it can do a lot of this crap, it is not required for anything normally done in VB6. And it did have threading, it was just difficult to do and generally not recommended :).

The crap code thing I don’t understand, what do you consider crap code?

Crap code ?

In reply to I find VB6 liberating

Load, dim dim as new set let…
Variants
deferred intantiation
reinstantion
defaulting to no need to declare variables
No real inheritance, no real polymorhism
crap encapsulation
too much implict casting
vast difference in behaviour beteen run and compile
crap deployment wizard
Pathetic memory management
F’ing control arrays.

Just off the top of my head, it’s been five or six years

It did not have threading, you could sort of do it with COM. You could try the thread APIs, but synchronising safely with the main thread is nigh on impossible, which is why it’s not recomended.

I ended up writing decent code in it eventually, but it was hard work finding out how. 99% of the examples I found were flakey limited rubbish written by late 90s .dot com boom rejects.

The real killer for me is I was given an application written by their VB6 guy. It worked sort of and was one of the steamiest pieces of crap I’ve seen in my career, and I’ve seen some right bogglers in my time.
This was given to me as an example of how to do it.

Lets put it this way, job two was to rewrite the ‘example’ so it worked like the good one….

First lets get rid of the 20 global recordsets. I sh*t you not. 20 “select * from tables”. Oh well at leat I knew why there was a splash screen….

sounds more like

In reply to Crap code ?

someone programmed VB that didn’t know how to write software well.

That and if they *did* need 20 recordsets, then their DBA should be fired. My whole HR application only uses 14 tables. Scary.

If you needed threaded, OO apps then you should have been using VC++ anyways.

And talk about crap code. VC++ 5 “wizard” pushed out about the crappiest code ever.

Ugh, bad memories.

Never used VC , so couldn’t say.

In reply to sounds more like

VB6 was written and aimed at the untrained. To that end it does things like instantiate objects if you forget to. Better still if you did instantiate and then free’d it, if yo referenced it again, it would figure you forgot and instantiate it again.

Shite, pure and simple.

Design wise I agree, but most languages you have to work at writing crap code, VB6 encouraged and forgave you for it, after all you are only learning. Unfortunaelty a lot of people picked up some extemely bad habits.

yeah

In reply to Never used VC , so couldn’t say.

It was Microsoft’s foray into “can we make a language that even adolescents can learn?”.

I just never got huge into OO programming. There is a time and a place for it, but I was writing so many simple apps for internal use that designing an OO based system would take me more time than actually writing a cut-and-dry one.

But as much as .NET has good OO stuff, its slow as snot. I time tested (back in .NET 2003 days) the ADO from VB6 vs the ADO.NET 2.0. There was a big speed difference. Don’t know if MS cleaned it up in a subsequent .NET incarnation, but it befuddled me why you release a language with newer but less performing constructs.

Ah well…no matter. I might be out of IT all together in a year or two. I would much rather have fun when I go home on my PCs than have it remind me that I have to sit at a computer again for 9-10 hours the next day.

Because it’s JIT compiled

In reply to yeah

unless you use NGEN which is a whole ‘nother tin of worms you have to discount the first run with .net (and similar languages).

Trying to speed up that first execution is a major PIA as well.

To be fair, thats not entirely the languages fault

In reply to Crap code ?

That’s just a bad programmer. The accepted standards even say no variants.

And Control arrays were awesome if used correctly. Though certainly a poor substitute for a proper method of generating visual controls.

But VB6 was designed for ‘bad’ programmers

In reply to To be fair, thats not entirely the languages fault

By making it tolerant of silly mistakes, such as forgetting to instantiate, so as not to put some newbie off with ‘irrelevant’ detail, they guaranteed no one using it would get a clue that they needed to know it.

I mean, exactly what does defered instantiation do for a competent programmer?

Oh and no exceptions. pfft..

You mean create the object that instantiate it later?

In reply to But VB6 was designed for ‘bad’ programmers

That actually has a lot of purpose, especially in loops.

Create is instantiate

In reply to You mean create the object that instantiate it later?

An unconstructed instance is a pointer to a type’s constructor
A constructed instance is pointer to an instance.

It’s a nasty kludge to avoid cluttering a VB6 developer’s mind with basic OO principles.

PDF’s!

In reply to Evil, hateful software

I hate them, the portable document format is the least portable format! It requires stupid software, most common being adobe reader, I need not describe that one.
It’s a format that always seems to have stupid vulnerabilities.
It’s a format that, can be converted to freely, but, converting it back, that costs you, and is never perfect.
And when it’s done, 9 times out of 10 the file it creates is bigger than the source file.

.Doc is actually more portable than PDF, Windows can natively open it (Word pad), And OpenOffice has no problems with it. And everyone has software to open this format. And that software’s gurth can at least be justified as it can also make the documents, not just read them.

Pretty much in agreement there

In reply to PDF’s!

I am not a big fan at all. Pay Adobe big bucks and you can make over complex documents of dubious quality that might render the same if you are lucky. The fact that it’s slow bloated trash with catalogue of security failings that would give Balmer pause, is of course an added bonus. I’d still rather do PDF that VB6 though.

“Wipe out”

In reply to Evil, hateful software

The software seems to characterize itself in one column.

Paint.

In reply to Evil, hateful software

Am I the only one here who finds that useless?

One purpose.

In reply to Paint.

It’s good when you need a .BMP of error message screen shots.

One word.

In reply to One purpose.

Gadwin.
Byebye Paint.

Back when I had neophyte users

In reply to One word.

who had never handled a mouse, I’d start Paint and let them play with it. I’d have them draw squares and triangles, then color them. It helped them develop mouse control.

It keeps my 5yr old occupied….

In reply to Paint.

or it did when she was 2 or 3 anyway 😀

That’s about the extent it gets used in our household.

Peregine ServiceCenter

In reply to Evil, hateful software

NOTHING is right in this POS. They violate EVERY usability guideline. For example, in one window, F2 is refresh (not F5 the GUI standard) but in another window, F2 is OK. I could go on and on………..

On top of that, it’s not even a real application. It’s a RAD demo masquerading as a finished product.

Never used it

In reply to Peregine ServiceCenter

But I’ve seen it. Also heard about it from a few people. :-&

I know that pain!

In reply to Peregine ServiceCenter

Peregrine is the worst POS I have ever used. I hated Remedy but managed to get along with it. Tivoli could make me curse like a wounded pirate. But Peregrine? We used to have an office pool running- who would be the first on the team to destroy a computer as a result of the frustration caused by using that dumper. We had two people whose only job was the care and feeding of that monster. Yeesh!

Oh boy, now you’ve done it

In reply to Evil, hateful software

Mine, without a doubt, was a product called ChartV*****n. (Not going to name the product here, but you know who you are) We purchased it in 1996 as a system for storage of our legal medical record. We were supposed to be able to scan in our records, assign deficiencies to the physicians for completion, manage information release, etc…

I’ve never seen a bigger load of cr@p in my life. They had the nerve to try to charge us for the Y2K upgrade in 1999. We told them to take a hike, and did it all ourselves. After I got back from a week off with Pneumonia over Thanksgiving, I had a whole bunch of frantic calls from the company on my voice mail. It seems we were the ONLY site that had managed to successfully do the upgrade and they wanted to know how I did it. I told them that I’d give them a discount and only charge them $90,000 for my professional services.

Later, at another hospital, they had purchased, you guessed it, another of that company’s products. It delivered nothing that was promised, had a backend that was ridiculously expensive, I had to reboot the whole system daily, and the only printers that the system would print to had been retired by HP for well over a year before installation, and required a $600 upgrade.

In healthcare IT, there is an organization called KLAS. They rate various offerings and interview people who have experience with those systems. They present the info in a nice chart form and include good and bad comments. They are a handy tool when you decide you need a new pharmacy system, lab system, etc… that can cost well over $500k. Needless to say, when they called me for an interview of this chart system, I was more than happy to tell them what I REALLY thought of it.

I spent 30+ hours a week just keeping it running (read that as limping).

Applicant Tracking System…

In reply to Evil, hateful software

…at a former employer called ‘Deploy’. I referred to it as ‘The plop’; since it was a big steaming pile of worthlessness.

Customer Support Rep: “Oh, you mean you’d like to know the person’s name to whom that resume belonged?”

Me: “It would be helpful, don’t you think?”

It should be noted that this was one of the firm’s first forays into SaaS, and it was also one of the last (while I was there, anyway).

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