Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

[Thad]

There are UI decisions that merely annoy me, and there are UI decisions that professionally offend me.

Disabling paste into a password field is the latter. Fuck you for actively deterring me from using a password locker, you mouth-breathing twit.

[mharr]

That reminds me that GeForce Now is a pretty useful service overall, but it disables paste into an entire virtual machine. Also it always reacts to mouse and keyboard input even when another application is displaying in front of it and has the window focus. They must have put a lot of effort into getting that one wrong.

[Thad]

Seriously why doesn't SwiftKey know that the spacing for a colon is exactly the fucking same as a comma

[Thad]

Checkbox for "do not" or "disable".

You shouldn't check a box to make a thing not do something and uncheck it to make it do something.

[mharr]

Reddit just reminded me how stupid this is: The signage to tell you which lane goes where in UK cities is mostly painted on the road surface. Real fuckin' useful whenever the road has, y'know, a bunch of vehicles all over.

[Thad]

Rebooting and shutting down are neither diagnostics nor settings. So maybe don't put them under Diagnostics or Settings?

[Thad]

Move the Blu-Ray player over from the other house to put in the workout room.

Hook it up.

Can't find the remote. Not sure if it's in another box or still at the old house.

That's okay; I can just use the player's built-in controls. It has buttons for power, play/pause, stop, and eject.

Put in Batman: TAS.

Wait through the WB logo; arrive at the menu. "Play All" is highlighted.

Press Play.

"This function is not supported."

You can't use the goddamn Play button to play the goddamn video. You have to press the Enter button. Which I do not presently have access to.

God dammit, all I wanted to do was watch some goddamn Batman on the goddamn elliptical.

[Mongrel]

Oh man, I remember having similar problems back when our DVD player worked and goddamn did that piss me the fuck off.

[mharr]

Capitalism's terror of people sharing media has been a hilarious self-own to watch over the decades. It's become a reflex to use unofficial channels by default because you just know going legit will be a miserable experience. DVDs vs any screen that'll accept a usb drive are the absolute poster child.

[Thad]

Why are modern environments so bad at conveying which window is currently active?

A border around the window that isn't active? Really, Manjaro KDE?

This was a solved problem in the 1980s. Quit fucking with it.

I know that part of the answer to "why don't they just decorate the titlebar for the active window differently than the inactive ones" is this trend away from titlebars and menubars. And I fucking hate that too. It makes sense on a phone. It does not make sense on a 27" 1440p monitor.

[Thad]

Hey, phone fucking ate my post; that's cool.

I don't know why it did that, but at least I'm in the right thread to wonder where the fuck the undo button is.

[Thad]

Fuck, happened again. SwiftKey is definitely fucking up.

[Thad]

Okay, hotspot's working; I can type this on a real keyboard now.

Anyway. Storm knocked the power out for a few hours last night; cable's still out. This brings me to two points:

Hey Cox, if there's an outage, I shouldn't have to spend a minute and a half navigating various menus to hear that information. I'm calling from the phone number associated with the account; "there's an outage in your area" should be the *first* fucking thing I hear if I call during an outage.

Hey Sony, I know it's not personal, but booting to a lecture about how the "off" switch works every time my power goes out is a little insulting.

[Brantly B.]

Ah, new to PS4, are you?

Cox does have a service status thing first thing you see on their frontpage, which does sound like they understand what you're asking for but, you know, only if you can access their frontpage.

[Thad]

Ah, new to PS4, are you?

Hey, I don't always immediately complain about everything that annoys me the first time I see it.

...

...okay, I don't always immediately complain on the Internet about everything that annoys me the first time I see it.

Cox does have a service status thing first thing you see on their frontpage, which does sound like they understand what you're asking for but, you know, only if you can access their frontpage.

The really baffling part is that I'm almost certain they used to tell you there was an outage in your area first thing when you called in, but changed it at some point to make it less convenient.

It's possible I'm thinking of some other utility, but I'm pretty sure it was Cox.

[Thad]

Can't get into my desktop today. Sent a help request from my phone.

Apparently Outlook for iOS won't bother to tell you that you're not logged in and can't send an e-mail. It just sat in the outbox until I noticed I didn't have any messages in my inbox since Tuesday, tried to refresh, and *then* got a password prompt.

[Thad]

I don't like Kate's new icon.



Precisely what the fuck about this says "text editor"? I keep missing it when I tab through programs because that symbol is not remotely what I'm looking for.

[Upthorn]

It has a giant k shaped bird on it. what more hint of "text editing" do you need? Some kind of a cursor shaped bird?

[Thad]

Desktops Are Not Phones, Part Seven Hundred Million: "Hey, let's make system settings a single-screen app. I mean, it's not like anybody would ever want settings for more than one thing open at the same time."

[Thad]

"Commit date: 5 years ago"

That's not what fucking "date" means, Amazon.

Who asked for this? Who are the users who were saying "You know, I like being able to sort by date, but you know what would make it better? If you hid the actual date information from me and showed some fuzzy and imprecise ballpark figure instead"? What problem does this solve?