Ancalagon
03-12-2009, 10:28 AM
This thread is about software you love to hate. Or not love maybe, maybe loathe would be better.
Now.... the particular software I hate, I'm not sure I should mention its name or its maker. Call me paranoid, but they are kind of a supplier for our company, and even though our entire company thinks their software is complete trash, I dont think it would do us or me any favours for me to mention them by name. So I wont.
What I will say, is what it does and doesnt do.
It doesnt like mapped network drives - if you have a mapped drive, disconnect it, or else it wont work.
Its uninstaller doesnt remove everything, and reinstalling when you havent properly manually uninstalled is likely to fail. This, coupled with the fact that it shotguns files everywhere means they suggest that if you want to reinstall the software, you should format your hard drive. Their words, not ours. This isnt beta version stuff guys, this is the real deal, this is a fairly late version of it and it costs fortune to license.
Installing the client and server on the same machine causes it to delete the files you need to install the client on another machine, forcing a reinstall or reformat.
You want to exit the client? You click an inconspicous green icon and click quit. Expecting a nice "X" at the top right? Nope, apparently its still stuck in the 80s.
In fact, being stuck in the 80's is its biggest problem. Got an error message? It repeatedly pops it up after you click on it, and its modal, so you cant do anything to make it go away.
The server part of the program runs as a normal program, not as a service. Thus, if multiple people log into the server via remote desktop at once, say for admin purposes (ours is running in a virtual machine), it starts up an instance of the server for each logged on user, which of course doesnt work.
We phoned technical support for help, were told to delete a certain file, and later realized we'd been instructed to delete the dictionary file. Yes, the technical support person had us delete the dictionary file which means all of the strings (text basically) vanished, and although we still got an error message we now couldnt read what it said.
Honestly, I've come across some bad and user unfriendly software, and this is what I've encountered trying to install it. Just install the server and the client and have both running. Thus far, we havent got the client working properly except when we installed it on the server, and after we did that we couldnt install it anywhere else. It is terrible, its embarrassing, it shouldnt exist. It looks like someone cobbled it together using VB6 and designed it to be as unfriendly as possible. I'm so glad I'll never be a user of this software, I just have to develop something for it (which may or may not end up being more painful depending on how lucky I am). It does involve ActiveX, but we managed to find the IDL file for it (which is another story).
Now.... the particular software I hate, I'm not sure I should mention its name or its maker. Call me paranoid, but they are kind of a supplier for our company, and even though our entire company thinks their software is complete trash, I dont think it would do us or me any favours for me to mention them by name. So I wont.
What I will say, is what it does and doesnt do.
It doesnt like mapped network drives - if you have a mapped drive, disconnect it, or else it wont work.
Its uninstaller doesnt remove everything, and reinstalling when you havent properly manually uninstalled is likely to fail. This, coupled with the fact that it shotguns files everywhere means they suggest that if you want to reinstall the software, you should format your hard drive. Their words, not ours. This isnt beta version stuff guys, this is the real deal, this is a fairly late version of it and it costs fortune to license.
Installing the client and server on the same machine causes it to delete the files you need to install the client on another machine, forcing a reinstall or reformat.
You want to exit the client? You click an inconspicous green icon and click quit. Expecting a nice "X" at the top right? Nope, apparently its still stuck in the 80s.
In fact, being stuck in the 80's is its biggest problem. Got an error message? It repeatedly pops it up after you click on it, and its modal, so you cant do anything to make it go away.
The server part of the program runs as a normal program, not as a service. Thus, if multiple people log into the server via remote desktop at once, say for admin purposes (ours is running in a virtual machine), it starts up an instance of the server for each logged on user, which of course doesnt work.
We phoned technical support for help, were told to delete a certain file, and later realized we'd been instructed to delete the dictionary file. Yes, the technical support person had us delete the dictionary file which means all of the strings (text basically) vanished, and although we still got an error message we now couldnt read what it said.
Honestly, I've come across some bad and user unfriendly software, and this is what I've encountered trying to install it. Just install the server and the client and have both running. Thus far, we havent got the client working properly except when we installed it on the server, and after we did that we couldnt install it anywhere else. It is terrible, its embarrassing, it shouldnt exist. It looks like someone cobbled it together using VB6 and designed it to be as unfriendly as possible. I'm so glad I'll never be a user of this software, I just have to develop something for it (which may or may not end up being more painful depending on how lucky I am). It does involve ActiveX, but we managed to find the IDL file for it (which is another story).