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I have a lot of gripes about a lot of software. You don't have to tell me that most of it is just whining. Understand that I am coming from a Windows background. I am not really qualified to talk about the design of software. All of these gripes come from my experiences as a user. I imagine that most of the things I gripe about have technical reasons why they are like that, but I have been ignorant of those reasons so far.



I primarily use Firefox for all of my web browsing. I also have about 15 different RSS feeds that I subscribe to. Right now, I use YARSSR to read those RSS feeds, because it provides all of the functionality that I need. However, it isn't available in Windows. And I would really like to have my RSS reader integrated into the browser.


Above is a picture of the Live Bookmarks feature in Firefox. It's a great idea, because it's easy to use, and the location where the headlines shows up makes sense. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism that allows you to know if you have already read the story or not. This to me is a complete deal-breaker. With 15 different feeds that I read every day, there is no way for me to remember which ones I have read or not. And yes, I know about the Sage extension, but it would be nice if the integrated Live Bookmarks feature differentiated between read and unread headlines.




gFTP is an FTP client that I frequently use. It has almost every feature that I would regularly want to use. The one feature that it lacks, however, is really, really irritating.

In Windows, I use LeetchFTP, which has a very similar interface to gFTP. The main difference between the two clients is that LeetchFTP uses NOOP to make sure that the connection stays open while I modify files. gFTP does not. This means that the connection will be dropped if I don't keep sending commands.

It's incredibly irritating to me, because I would like to be able to download the file, modify it, and then upload the file. Instead, what I have to do is, download the file, and while I am modifying it, I have to keep going back to the gFTP window and do stuff so that the connection will stay open. Otherwise, I will have to log back in and send my password in plain text over the internet again when I want to upload the file.

I probably just need to stop using FTP, but it would be nice if gFTP used NOOP so that my connection didn't get dropped every minute.




Performing a presentation in Linux with my laptop is a snap, partly because the external RGB port is always on. This allows me to hook up the projector at any time and start presenting. Why can't it be like this in Windows? In Windows, you have to hit some special function key combination to cycle between various options for the external RGB port, but why does it ever have to be completely off? That just doesn't make any sense. The software should just leave it on all of the time.

The problem is compounded by the special function keys requiring a driver to operate properly in Windows. So, if you can not find the Windows driver for those function keys on your laptop, there is no way for you to turn on the port. This is totally unacceptable.




Coming from a Windows environment, I really felt like I needed a C/C++ IDE in order to do my work. KDevelop3 was available as a Debian package, so I decided to try that first. As soon as I installed it, I went ahead and attempted to compile one of the programs I had been using and received the following error:


Ok, so I figured out that I had to install libtool. No big deal. The only thing that made that annoying was that the error message really didn't give me an indication what was wrong. But ok, that's an easy enough fix.

Ok, then I had problems compiling projects if there were spaces in the directory names where the files were located. That was pretty annoying. Especially because it wasn't obvious what the problem was. Ok, but I can deal with that, too.

The really annoying problem that I had with KDevelop3 was that math.h doesn't get linked in properly. The symptom is an error message like "undefined reference to `sin'".


It turns out that you have to go to Project -> Project Options -> Configure Options, and then under "Linker Flags (LDFLAGS):", add "-lm" (see above image). I have never gotten a satisfactory explanation why KDevelop couldn't be configured in this way in the first place.

Other than that, it's not a bad IDE. Although, I have to admit that I do prefer Codewarrior 9 in Windows.




Here is where I expose my total ignorance of programming in general.

I am constantly using Undo to fix things that I have done wrong in a variety of applications. Why isn't there an OS-level undo stack in any OS? For instance, sometimes I close a window, and a split-second later, realize that I did need something in that window. And then I wish I could just hit ctrl-z and bring it back.




Microsoft Office has so many completely useless features, and they keep adding more with every version. It is constantly trying to "outsmart" you by uncapitalizing stuff you've intentionally capitalized, with the end result that the user must outsmart Office's outsmarting. Whenever I try to write a long paper in Word, I feel as though I have to defeat Word in order to get it to display everything properly. There really needs to be an easy-to-find button that turns off all of the features.

Some features are easy to figure out how to turn off, while others are not. For instance, if you do a lot of copy and paste operations, the clipboard window will show up (see below image).


First off, the Office clipboard doesn't work the same way that the clipboard works in every other Windows program. That is annoying enough. What is even more annoying is that it doesn't even work right. Sometimes, multiple copies of the same clipboard appear in between copy and paste operations (as they did in the above image). In some versions of Office, it is easy to disable this feature by unchecking the box next to "Use smart cut and paste" (see below image).


In other versions, it is more difficult to find. I wish that they would stop adding features that just get in the way, or would add an easy way to turn all of the features off (so that I can manually select which ones I want on).