The Most Borked App You Ever Used
 

Coat Rooms been pretty dead lately, so I figured I'd take a crack at starting a conversation.

When I say borked I don't mean "doesn't work", I mean "doesn't work as advertised." I especially want to hear stories of programs that break at the least opportune times.

Example: I had a program called Pharos that allowed me to print to any of my colleges campus printers from my laptop. Basically, you would send a job to the campus-wide cue, and then enter in a student ID to link your print job to. Then you could walk up to any printer, swipe you student ID, and it would give you a list of your papers you could print. Viola! Nifty little app our IT department turned out for us at BYU. And I really liked it, for the most part. It just had a habit of dying at the most inopportune moments.

One time I needed to print off a term paper for a Japanese History class. So, I hit command+p, enter and took off for campus (I was trying to be on time that day, you know, being the last day and all). I walked ten minutes to the closest printer which was next to my Japanese Class, rather convenient.

I swipe my card in the printer and take a look at the screen only to see...nothing! The print job hadn't made it from my computer to the campus-wide cue! And I had 5 minutes until class!

Fortunately I had my laptop with me. So I woke it up, connected to wifi and tried to send the job again. No dice, the program had decided it was corrupt, and despite my repeated (and increasingly angry) attempts, it wasn't budging. It just wouldn't work.

After a bit of swearing (under my breath, it was BYU after all) I eventually just emailed the paper to myself, hopped onto an empty Windoze terminal and printed the paper off...five minutes too late for class. Oh well, why break the streak, right? :D

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So, this is what I'm looking for. A terribly piece of software that put you in a tight spot. Any takers?

(PS -- Mac, Linux, Windoze, TI-83, don't really care, just share it if it's a good story.)

MSIE, esp. version 6, but that's rather too obvious.

I'd say the most 'doesn't work as advertised' was the CAD software I used in College (ran on a Mac II). Never did what you wanted, manual was ..... challenging, so the track drafter got used rather more often. No tight spots though, everyone knew it wasn't up to speed.

In general, I'd say that drive and OS failures have caused more problems than specific software.

日本の歴史は勉強したね？日本語をよむができますか？

I'm still thinking about borked software, but in the mean time I'll answer AMO's inquiry: できません

ちょっと分かります。大学に勉強したがだめですね。大学からRosettaStoneに日本語を勉強しています。いいですね。。。

Yeah, my grammar needs lots of work (I can't remember the particle for 'via'). To explain: The way they taught Japanese at BYU was terrible, it was mostly by rote and I just couldn't grasp it. Rosetta Stone works via images, and it really helps me. The sentences I (badly) constructed above I would not even have attempted after two years of Japanese at BYU, but with some Rosetta Stone... I know they're not correct, but I think they somewhat convey what I mean.

And yeah, I studied Japanese History, I focused mostly on religions (Buddhism and Shrine Shinto mostly). I really enjoyed it, Japan has a rich history and there's a lot to be learned from it. Time well spent in my humble opinion :).

Speaking of broken software. The text books we used at BYU had software that came with them. They were based off of an old macromedia player of some fashion. That almost never got around to working properly. Worse, it never let me pause dialogue (which we needed to transcribe). So I would listen to a 30 second passage, maybe get the first two words, then have to restart the whole thing... Terrible software that stuff.

Mac OS 10.0 ! and 10.1......10.2 bearable.....10.3 getting there.....10.4 Horray it sort of works......10.5 Nice.....10.6 Very nice

Don't know if 10.0 would qualify as 'borked' based on the original definition here. Everyone knew it had issues.

No one gets to install x.0 of anything AND complain about the problems!

little joke really.....

I think many web browsers are borked on the Mac. The WebKit (the actual thing, not Safari's underlying tech) kept crashing and hanging. I couldn't take it so I reverted. SRWare Iron (Chrome clone) didn't quite cut it for me; the user experience wasn't so good. Also MS Word on some Windows machines: I finished writing a text for class -- 2 pages and I'm not a very fast writer -- and MSWord locked up and crashed when I pressed save. :confused:

But the worst are games. A lot of them aren't even worth it. Just check this video out to see. My brother showed it to me and I couldn't stop laughing.

Have been using a Windows PC this week (a 5 year old Thinkpad T41 1.6GHZ on XP/IE8) and the web browsing is still faster than all my modern "superfast" Macs on any browser !

by the way, Jay Carr's last post translates to:
"Just a little you understand. It studied in the university, but being useless, the shank. From the university Japanese is studied in RosettaStone. In calling shank. . ."
Thanks, Dashboard. I love Engrish. :P

Oh, my. Where to start on this one!

Installers for Adobe flashplayer and shockwave. Seems they never get this right. Apparently, they will not install over an older version without problems.

HP "all in one" software.... never been able to get all the functions to work properly. Once I reached the point I could scan, print and copy I just refused to upgrade again. I NEVER upgrade anything, including system updates, at a critical time. Just too much chance the printer/scanner is going to crash. HP Updates to fix problems lag months behind the OS updates.

Dreamweaver CS4. Forced to upgrade to CS4 because Leopard killed Dreamweaver MX, which worked great. CS4 forces you use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which I hate. I'm an amateur on web pages. It is WYSIWYG, but good luck on getting what you see to be what you want without writing a bunch of rules/overrides that don't seem to work half the time. Suspect DW works great for the pro's, but I'm just not interested in investing 100's of hours in learning the intricacies of what was supposed to be easy to use WYSIWYG software.

Just for starters:)

Entourage is evil...borked on purpose in my mind by MS in attempt to keep the Mac from being a viable corporate system.

Click and drag an email to your local folders...it makes a copy. There is no way to move the email unless you a)click the move menu, b)hold option as you drag, c)right-click and choose move.

Public Folders have always been a problem, Out of Office was a feature that had to be added into Entourage 2008. 2004's official OOO answer was to use Ooutlook Web Access

...and getting emails into/out of Entourage. oy vey!

It's bad enough that MS is going to release Outlook for the Mac (again) sometime this year.

Normally after using a pile of steaming code like this you switch email clients...unless of course you're at a company which is running Exchange. Your current email options are Entourage 2008, OWA, or a terminal server.

Surprised (crash) no one (crash) has mentioned (crash) Flash (crash) pl(crash)ay(crash)er. (crasssssshhhh)

No joke, it happily drags my browser to SCODville every day. Borked app for sure.

Oddly, acme's post translates to: "Don't you think? it studied the Japanese history? Japanese is read, but it is possible?"

That despite the fact that acme lives in Tokyo, speaks Japanese, and his text clearly reads: "You studied Japanese History... Do you speak Japanese?"

I'm nominating the translation widget as another app that only kind of works ;).

Okay, 2nd post for this one, and I'll include a story this time. :D

The application, or lack thereof that has borked on me very epicly, and caused me a lot of pain, is Windows XP. Or rather, it's DRM.

I had an old 600MHz Celeron with 128MB of RAM happily running XP Home SP1, and while it was slow, it was stable. I had an English paper due the next day at school (which started at 7 AM, mind you), and it was about 9 PM. Windows XP informed me it had an update ready, so I let it do it's thing. I was taking a break.

(I suppose I should mention, this copy of Windows was registered and legitimate.)

Windows restarts, and instead of finishing the boot sequence I get a nasty error: "This copy of Windows must be activated before you can use it." Well what the sh-, fine, activate.

"Activation failed, hah." Fine, call it in. Couldn't get ahold of anyone.

At this point, I was left with one option: Re-install XP. Which I did. And I downloaded an activation patcher so that little problem would NOT happen again.

I ended up completing the paper around 2 AM.

Not fun.

Back to the Nihongo hijack...

I had a Paul Frank t-shirt that had "watashi wa baka na amerikaijin desu" written in Kanji on the chest. I can only read a little romanji, so I had no idea what it said...just thought it was a cool design.

At work one day some guy asked me if I knew what my shirt meant. Being happa, I regretfully said no. He told me, and instantly I realized like this shirt I've worn ~20 times was mocking me!

I want to say it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that's not the right term...



FYI, roughly translated it said "I am a stupid American"

Umm, sorry to change the subject, but does anybody know of a good laser tattoo removal place?

Since we're talking about things of sub-par quality in here, I think you're asking in the wrong place. I mean, given the subject matter, I'd think you'd want a *good* place for tattoo removal, not sub-par.

(Teehee see what I did there.)
:)

None of the apps I've used in recent years have been as bad as the worst offenders from long ago.

Back in the System 4 days, when Macs were toaster-shaped, I bought Font Editor, for editing and creating bitmap fonts. (You remember bitmap fonts, yes?). You had to create a resource file to save your edited fonts in. Fine, but there was no method by which you could then move your font to the System file so as to actually make use of it! Font/DA mover wouldn't open the bloody resource file. There was no menu command for moving or converting your new or edited font. No README file or Help. I wrestled with it for days before someone showed me a copy of an app they had, FONTastic, which did everything Font Editor did except without the dealbreaker limitation of being unable to do anything with the font once it was created.

Another loser was a combo hardware & software nominee but the software was the real disaster. I bought an ADB graphics tablet from Summa Graphics called the SummaSketch tablet. (Not wireless). It emitted a perpetual high pitched squeal when plugged in (that's the hardware part). The worst thing about it, though, was the Control Panel software for configuring it. You see, it didn't auto-configure the x / y coordinates of the tablet to match the screen. When you first plugged it in, and tapped the upper left corner of the tablet, your mouse arrow might jump to a position in the middle right section of your screen, nowhere close to the apple at upper left corner. So you had to "map" it using this Control Panel (reconstructed from memory):
http://home.earthlink.net/~ah3files/...rom%20Hell.jpg

Do you immediately see some of the things that are brain dead about that Control Panel? Imagine instead if there had been a button that said "Configure Upper Left Corner" and you click it and it said "Put mouse cursor in upper left corner and hit Enter to register that position". Instead, to use THIS thing, you would first use the regular mouse to put the cursor somewhere useful (like the upper left corner), then click somewhere on the tablet surface and the mouse would jump to some other position. Then you'd adjust the numbers and repeat, trying to zoom in with the settings to the point that the mouse-clicked position matches up with the tablet-tapped position. Well, once you've got some gross semblance of correspondence and are trying for fine tuning, your tendency is to want to keep your tablet pen poised at the same place and click at the same location on screen and not do anything else with the mouse cursor until it ceases to move at all when you alternative between mouseclick and tabletclick. Yeah, but changing the numbers REQUIRES CLICKING THE MOUSE on the down and up arrows. AND when you use the mouse to do the clicking, you have to move the mouse BACK to the intended "target" point.

@AHunter3 -- Wow, talk about un-intuitive. Not a terribly helpful tablet. I vaguely recall having to do calibrations on a Palm Pilot, and despite the fact that it was more intuitive than the device you just described...well, lets just say calibration is happily a thing of the past :).

@biovizer -- You should consider starting a new thread about tattoos (with tattoo removal being mentioned in it), maybe we can get anyone with a tattoo to post their ink! Then we can recommend laser removal places to people with bad 'tats...

New Story:

Not mine, but a Computer Science professor I had.

Apparently he was around for the big switch in computer tech: going from pushing a button for 1 and 0 to actually having punch cards you could write a program on (talk about high tech!)

He was telling us about how he was a Doctorate student in Boston (I think MIT, but I don't really recall). Well, University of Maryland installed a really nice new "card reader" computer in their labs, and my professor wanted to use it to run some calculations. So he got a bunch of punch cards, wrote out his program (very carefully, you don't want to rewrite a punch card), put the program with a few spare cards in a brief case and headed home for the evening. The next morning he boarded a flight for Maryland.

When he got to Maryland he opened the brief case he'd brought with him and discovered that his app contained an ID10T error. He'd brought the wrong brief case, the cards were still in Boston.

This left him with a choice, recreate the program from memory or fly all the way back to Boston and grab the cards, then fly back, an 8 hour journey. Remember the program was trivial, as it was fairly simple. The bigger concern as how much time it would take to write and debug the program with just pushing a 1 and 0 button...

He flew back to Boston and got the cards.

I feel a story thread cannot go without this being mentioned:
http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

My most favorite story ever.

A lot of ports (from Win/Lin) to Mac get borked. Some ports are just horrible, and the UI so cramped you can't figure them out.

Also, when I upgraded the laptop, which had Quay on it, to 10.6, the whole thing broke down. Every 5 seconds, a dialog box popped up how the system broke it. Since I'm not an admin on the laptop, my dad had to come and delete Quay. Now I still have to find a way to remove the launchd entry as root.

A really great story! For those who care, it is often the case that the third prong of an outlet is not actually at ground; it depends on how far away it is grounded and how much current it carries due to an imbalance in the 110 volt loading on the two sides of the of its 220 volt circuit. It is called a common mode voltage.

When I was a grad student at MIT in the 1960's, most labs were running 1 or 2 volts common mode (as measured to a copper water pipe), and since my thesis involved a lot of tricky instrumentation that I built myself, it was easy to blow away a day's work if you weren't careful about that.

@renaultsoftware -- Yeah, take Steam for example. It's great to have it, don't get me wrong. But working through all the kinks has been a somewhat trying experience. My wife's install of Steam recently borked itself (she was not happy, she likes her Torchlight). Steam actually had to give me step by step instructions on how to remove it completely from her hard drive so we could re-install it. Not fun...

I heard Steam was available when I bought iCreate (in France). But I don't download games or even play them: I'd rather do some work in Xcode or do my homework, than waste my time on games. But I'm not your wife, and I know a ton of gamers who'd be happy to have Steam or whatever.

@renaultsoftware -- Well, in my wifes defense. She doesn't do any programming, and she's done with college, so she has no homework. Seriously, what else is there to do in life :D.

Ah, why doesn't she learn programming? ;) Still, some apps can be VERY borked. I remember at school, some games were horrible. No mouse, all Win32 stuff. :P

Related to borked apps, does anyone have tech support stories? I remember when we still had dial-up internet last summer, which broke one day. We had to call Bell Canada, but their support lies in India. One guy asked "are you using the Windows Macintosh?" Is this guy talking about Parallels, Fusion or Bootcamp? I'm sure he was talking about Windows OR Mac.

"Thankyouforcallingoursupportlinemynameischinthanaichelvanhowmayiassistyoutoday???!!!"

Ah, Indian tech support - so many memories. Definitely a victim of it's own early success. Compaq Canada used them for a while then switched back to Mississauga.

Ah yes. We're hoping to get a family plan with Rogers, since they have tech support in our own town (Pembroke, Ontario), and besides their iPhone deals seem so sweet. As my mom said about Bell, "the higher their Eng[r]ish the lower their tech help!"

I'm amazed that you think Rogers is "sweet". They're among the most expensive in the world. That's why I have a Touch and a bottom of the line, cheapest plan GSM phone.

Well Rogers is one of the only iPhone providers where you can get a reasonable family plan.

And Rogers isn't alone in overpricing, either -- you really don't get choices because there's no real competition.

I'd like to see if there are borked mobile apps out there. Probably so.

USA Today Crosswords has been borked several times. Currently working, sorta.