Examples of brain dead software design

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#3290082 2-Oct-2024 14:25

The default at work until a few years ago was single sided, and that has most definitely been changed to double by 'work admin'.

MadEngineer

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#3290138 2-Oct-2024 17:02

Senecio:

richms:

It seems that microsoft wanted to be green so forced a default to print on both sides into windows. Which means we use more paper because things come out on both sides so we have to do it again with it not on both sides. Which side it chooses seems to be arbitary depending on the pdf you are printing.

That's usually an admin setting in the printer driver. A company I used to work for did this to reduce printer costs and wasted paper but they went one step further and forced all printouts to black & white by default which often led to the same document being printed 3 times. Once in black & and white and duplexed, again single sided but still in black & white because you forgot to change both settings and finally in colour and single sided which is what you wanted from the beginning.

It took a year and a 40% increase in printing costs before they changed it back.

Two prints in black and white is still a fraction of the cost of printing in colour. B&W prints can be a few cents a page, colour only takes a few pages to make $1.

You're not on Atlantis anymore, Duncan Idaho.

Ge0rge

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#3290297 2-Oct-2024 22:30

Every day, the Garmin App on my phone asks for permission to access location data to download the weather. Every day, I select "Don't ask again".

See you tomorrow, Garmin 🤦

Behodar

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#3290475 3-Oct-2024 14:18

Microsoft again... this time SharePoint. How in the world do you add a link to the left panel on a page? Well, the trick is to put the mouse pointer in a bit of white space maybe a dozen pixels tall and then, and only then, an extra button will appear. Who designed this thing?!

Rikkitic

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#3290527 3-Oct-2024 15:00

I use an old MacBook Air for email. It works fine for that and I don’t use it for much else. I have never been comfortable with Apple and I prefer Windows for most things. I have Chrome and Thunderbird on the Mac so it works almost like Windows and I am completely happy with that. Sometimes when I am browsing I get complaints that my Chrome version is too old, but if I try to update it, I get other complaints that my OS is too old. I already updated that and it can’t be updated any further. But I don’t really mind. Most things still work well enough for my needs. I suppose the laptop will have to be replaced one day and that’s a shame. Although I don’t like Apple much, I have to admit that the build quality is fantastic. That laptop will probably last a hundred years. Even the battery is still good! Why should one be forced to update something that still works perfectly well for its purpose?

I run a few extensions on the Chrome Browser. I accidentally deleted one today (Archive Page). Damn. I use it a lot.

Oh well, no bother, I can just download it again from the Google Store. Oops. No, I can’t. Google says my browser is too old. What the Foxtrot? It worked before.

Of course Google has all the time in the world so it doesn’t mind wasting other people’s. I used up another of the few remaining afternoons of my old age chasing my tail and going in circles and popping down rabbit holes to figure out how to bypass this latest stupidity. I didn’t believe for a moment that my browser really was too old to run the extension, especially since it was still the same version and worked fine until I deleted it.

Things were made more difficult for me because of the Mac. Apple is very unintuitive to me and having to do anything demanding on it is excrutiatingly painful. But after a lot of faffing around my elderly brain finally woke up and I had a bright idea. Instead of trying to install the extension I downloaded it as a CRX and copied it to a flash drive. I then pasted it onto the browser extension page. Problem solved, everything works fine. Stuff Chrome. Especially stuff Google!

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

Behodar

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#3290548 3-Oct-2024 15:48

Apple this time. I'm in Safari (on my iPhone) and find something a friend might like. I click in the URL bar, Select All, Copy. I switch over to Messages, Paste.

"Messages would like to paste from Safari. Do you want to allow this?"

Why in the world do I need to confirm a simple copy/paste?!

cddt

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#3290570 3-Oct-2024 16:24

Two items in this post.

Windows. Since the v11 upgrade opening "File Explorer" or whatever it's called takes about 5 second from clicking the icon in the taskbar. Windows was faster and more responsive in the 1990s.
Office applications. Since the aforementioned v11 upgrade, "Recent Files" don't include all the recent files you had open. I thought I was going crazy, but my colleagues confirm the same is happening to them. Some files end up in "Recent Files", others do not...

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Quic Broadband

Move to New Zealand's best fibre broadband service (affiliate link). Note that to use Quic Broadband you must be comfortable with configuring your own router.

Behodar

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#3292748 4-Oct-2024 08:47

And now I've had a Microsoft product arbitrarily decide that I want to use the "preview" version (i.e. even less tested than the current one, I'm sure) while I'm in the middle of trying to get work done.

mkissin

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#3292773 4-Oct-2024 09:57

Behodar:

Apple this time. I'm in Safari (on my iPhone) and find something a friend might like. I click in the URL bar, Select All, Copy. I switch over to Messages, Paste.

"Messages would like to paste from Safari. Do you want to allow this?"

Why in the world do I need to confirm a simple copy/paste?!

I believe some malicious apps were using the clipboard as a way to intercept passwords and such while they were being copy-pasted into various things.

Behodar

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#3292822 4-Oct-2024 10:03

I don't follow. People don't install malicious apps on purpose, therefore they don't know they're there, therefore they're going to click Allow regardless. Am I missing something?

KiwiSurfer

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#3292849 4-Oct-2024 11:03

Behodar:

I don't follow. People don't install malicious apps on purpose, therefore they don't know they're there, therefore they're going to click Allow regardless. Am I missing something?

Non techy people install all sort of game-type applications all the time -- some of which are pretty shady. They may assume it's just a game not realising it's also quietly exfiltrating your data in the background.

cddt

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#3292875 4-Oct-2024 12:11

Behodar:

I don't follow. People don't install malicious apps on purpose, therefore they don't know they're there, therefore they're going to click Allow regardless. Am I missing something?

Some popular apps were found to be accessing the clipboard - often with every keystroke or hundreds of times every minute. Including Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok. This alert began being shown in iOS 14.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53305388

https://x.com/m0nald/status/1278757106468806656

Better technical write up: https://www.mysk.blog/2020/03/10/popular-iphone-and-ipad-apps-snooping-on-the-pasteboard/

More worrying should be that the apps were accessing the "universal clipboard" which, if you are deep in the Apple ecosystem, may include what you had copied on your Mac laptop/desktop. Not expected behaviour at all...

My referral links: BigPipe | Mercury

neb

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#3292889 4-Oct-2024 12:33

Behodar: I don't follow. People don't install malicious apps on purpose, therefore they don't know they're there, therefore they're going to click Allow regardless. Am I missing something?

If a random popup from an app you've never heard of before appears asking for access to your clipboard in the middle of doing something else the assumption is that you're not going to click OK, compared to when you've initiated the cut&paste yourself.

Behodar

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#3292944 4-Oct-2024 12:51

Right, I get your point. I still don't see why there needs to be a prompt when I've triggered the paste myself though.

Interestingly cddt's post above says that the prompt was introduced in iOS 14 but I didn't encounter it until yesterday (iOS 17.7). Meanwhile this article supposedly tells you how to disable the prompt, but under 17.7 neither Safari nor Messages has the "Paste from Other Apps" menu item.

I wonder whether I'd disabled it years ago and then forgotten about it: has 17.7 changed things so that you can't disable it any more?

neb

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#3292947 4-Oct-2024 12:59

Behodar: Right, I get your point. I still don't see why there needs to be a prompt when I've triggered the paste myself though.

The layer that checks for unauthorised clipboard access doesn't know who or what triggered the action. This was a big problem when UAC was introduced in Windows, the UAC checking layer was often far-removed from whatever triggered the UAC check so the prompts were often devoid of useful information.

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