All these damn features everywhere! How are you supposed to be able to focus on any task when all you hear is bells and whistles?! 👿

Sticky scroll in VS Code, who ever wanted that? It's so typical of Microsoft to litter their software with undesired features enabled by default, so one needs to spend precious time to figure out how to disable all of that crap. I read somewhere that 83% of any features developed in any software are never used, or even requested by the users. This was many years ago so I don't know if it's still true, but it definitely still applies to Microsoft, who literally bloat their products with annoying stuff, and then force them upon the users, like the fucking CoPilot. Some Windows features can't even be turned off without editing the Windows registry or installing an app, and sometimes even that doesn't help. Anyone here old enough to remember the Office Assistant? Yeah, it was a predecessor to CoPilot looking like a paper-clip and behaving like a jerk. Just like with CoPilot, you could type questions and commands to it. For some reason, it couldn't be completely disabled by any normal command like "quit" or closing the window, it would always pop up again, until I told it to fuck off and it actually vanished for good.

Windows is starting to get really annoying. Of course, I've disabled all sorts of unnecessary messages in Windows and enabled "fokusstöd" (whatever that translates into in English), and yet I receive this annoying ad, distracting me from my work! Who gives a fuck about Xbox or whatever they are trying to sell!?

At my work we still deploy web files the old-fashioned way, copying newer versions over from dev to test and test to prod. For comparing and copying changed files we use WinMerge. Although our workflow sucks, WinMerge itself is actually a nifty little tool for comparing any sort of text files. But today it pissed me off in a way it never has before. I copied a diff from left to right and then meant to save it with Ctrl + S, but accidentally pressed Ctrl + D. Guess what happened? To my horror, both sides went completely blank! It looked as if the file contents had been deleted, and undo had no effect. To my relief, the files were intact when opening them in VS Code. Thinking this was a glitch in WinMerge, I restarted it but still, all files were blank. No contents displayed! Then I thought, perhaps pressing Ctrl + D again would bring the file contents back into view. And it did! So the bottom line is: Pressing Ctrl + D makes the compared files appear as empty. Now, who would want that to happen? What a nice feature, you've got here WinMerge! (I'm being sarcastic in case you missed that)

I really really really hate Edge! What kind of web browser doesn't have a proper address box where a url is a url and not a search phrase directing you to fucking Google, the most evil search engine of them all.

Traditional programming means spending *days or even weeks* to write instructions to make the software do what *you* want it to do.

AI modelling means spending *weeks or even months* to tweak instructions just to find that the software does whatever *it* wants to do.

At home, I use Cursor, which is way better than GitHub Copilot, but at work I can't choose. One thing I particularly hate about GitHub Copilot is the way the chat panel appears in the left sidebar of VS Code, on top of the file explorer. That, and their useless, arrogant, and ignorant support (or whatever it should be called) .

I filed a ticket about this issue already in July. Their support claimed that one can already move the chat window to the right. But it doesn't work the way they suggested. In August, they asked me to provide a screen recording. So I went through the hassle of making a screen recording just to prove that dragging the chat window does ineed *not* work. I did my part so I was expecting them to do theirs. What do you think happened next? Nothing! Then, more nothing! And then, they just inadvertedly closed the ticket without a resolution or explanation.

Github, that's a pretty shitty way to treat your customers!

Why do Microsoft's web browsers always have to be from hell? In Edge, I cannot even choose first page for new windows, but instead fucking Bing is forced upon me.

I haven't been able to access ChatGPT since Friday. I thought it might help to delete all cookies so I did, and managed to access their login page. However, when clicking on "Log in", nothing happens, which shouldn't come as a surprise as there is no event listener on the button element, nor on any of its ancestors or descendants (see attached screenshot).

It's outrageous that Atlassian are discriminating Firefox! Our intranet is based on Confluence and works in Edge, but in Firefox the page turns blank after a few seconds, once the blue progress bar reaches the right end. Mozilla should sue Atlassian. Or is it the other way round?

I just missed our daily scrum because of Teams. Now, Microsoft in their infinite "wisdom" have decided to integrate Outlook calendar invites into Teams so any invitation shows up as a notification, looking like a red warning light as if something is seriously wrong. Then, when you click that notification you're lead astray, moving away from what you came there for. In my case, I'm only using Teams for online meetings, usually our daily scrum which is always located in the same chat room or whatever it's called. But once lost in the catacombs of Teams, it's just impossible to find my way back in this garbage heap of a UX. So instead, I tried to use the link in the recurrent calendar event for our daily scrums. This always used to work, but now it says "On hold". Teams is such a piece of junk, just like most M$ products nowadays. I've complained about Teams, Word and Outlook to my superiors, and suggested we'd replace them with better tools, but to no avail. They go like "We've paid a lot for these Microsoft licenses so we just have to continue using them". So, the logic is like...If we're paying for crap we're stuck with the crap. 🤔

Atlassian! How am I supposed to "focus" on anything when Jira keeps distracting me with uncalled-for popups saying "Focus on building...etc."

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Many years ago, when most of you were toddlers, different web browsers were...different, and the most different of them all was Internet Explorer. Web applications were not automatically cross-browser compatible and it took a lot of adaptation/tweaking to make a webapp, or even a simple web page, work and look the same across different web browsers. Some web pages/apps only worked on a specific browser and poorly, if at all, on some other browsers. Now, in 2024, we're there again. Atlassian's Confluence works without a hitch on Edge, but often fails miserably on Firefox. Too bad. I don't like Edge, but am forced to use it just for Confluence. So, once again, I have separate web browsers for different tasks.

Caching is a fucking bitch.
Most of the time, it causes more problems than it's trying to solve.

I hate the new Teams. It's showing a distracting red icon in the activity bar when someone's sent a chat. Then, when clicking the chat icon in Teams you'd expect it to take me there so I could reset the chat and make it stop showing that irritating red notification in the activity bar. But NO, nothing happens when clicking the chat icon. Useless UX to say the least! This is one of the main reasons why I never use Teams for chatting, and I only open the application for meetings and then immediately shut it down. How come Microsoft, that's been around for so fucking long, still haven't learnt to design consistent, user-friendly and distraction-free applications? I think the answer is: They don't give a shit.

At first, you're just a baby who cries and poops.
You outgrow the baby clothes, the crib and the stroller.
Then, you're just a child who plays, runs around and starts school.
You grow tired of your toys and are no longer allowed in the ballpit.
Then, you're just a teenager who curses, sulks and defies your parents.
You grow tired of teen music, stow your stuff away and move out.
Then, you're just a student who finally gets to drive a car and vote, but has no money.
You get a job, a place of your own, start dating and fall in love.
Then you're just a noob at everything you do; new at work, newly in love; feeling your way through life.
You have children and no longer have time to spare for anything else.
Then, you're just a parent taking parental leaves, attend parent-teacher meetings and neglect your friends.
You're no longer welcome in the children's games, or even to talk to them.
Then, you're just an "old fart" or "bitch" who's only good when you give them dough.
You help the children move out, you retire and have grandchildren.
Then, you're just a senior citizen who talks about nothing but your grandchildren and go window shopping outside the pharmacy.
You're hearing and vision get impaired, you get ailments and lose your memory as well as your intellect.
Then, you're just dead.

So, at what stage of life are you really somebody?

Microsoft have recently announced two things that are related to each other:
1. Windows 11 will be equipped with a built-in Copilot that will "see" everything the user does and store it locally (at least so they say).
2. A new PC, redesigned from ground up with AI in mind, called CoPilot+ PC, will be released in June.

I'm not sure if any of this is good news. It's disturbing enough that MS Word interfers with my work by displaying "friendly" pop ups about how Copilot can assist me. And there seems to be no way of turning the damn thing off. I don't want to use Word anymore, but at work I'm forced to use Microsoft's shitty office applications. So now I'm resorting to WordPad, which has a much cleaner interface and hasn't yet been infected with M$ Artificial Idiot CockPilot.

The other day when my family and I went to the beach, I met an old friend whom I hadn't seen since 2013. We hardly recognised each other. He brought to my attention that my hair had turned grey! 😮 I was imagining it was still black, but at a closer look it's more like salt & pepper or even beyond... 🤨 I thought I was immune to aging. Hence, the update of my profile avatar, to give an honest picture of my present appearance.

Bloody ColdFusion. I hate it so much. Not only is it an inferior language. Also, every update breaks something. Adobe should have sticked with developing graphics packages like Photoshop and Illustrator, because they really suck at everything else.

User having a problem with a page in a web application : -...I'm attaching a screenshot of what it looks like.
Me: - Some scripts seem to be cached so you might need to reload the page.
User: - Now that I reloaded the page for the third time it seems to work. Then I tried another case and then it gives me the same response as in the previously attached screenshot.
Me: - Was it in a separate Firefox window?
User: - What do you mean by a separate Firefox Window?

Different professions really speak different languages.

User: - I'm seeing a redcircle with a white dash.
Me: - What is a "redcircle with a white dash".
User: - It's like a stop sign.

I hope I won't meet this user on a one-way street.

Outlook is quite bad. There's no way to enable week numbers in the week view. And once you accidentally decline an occurrence of an recurrent event, there's no way to get it back, without having to trouble the meeting organizer to resend the request, or create the event manually yourself. In addition, Outlook is ugly and I strongly dislike how the calendar and inbox are combined in the same application. To me, e-mail and calendar are two completely different things, and there should be a way to open the calendar separately, without the distraction of any incoming e-mail.

User: - The application throws an errror message.

Me: - The error message is caused by a minor bug that doesn't affect functionality, though. This is an old solution that is in the pipe to be redesigned from scratch. As this function is rarely used, perhaps you can live with this cosmetic bug for a couple more months?

User (one week later): - I haven't got any answer from you. How is this issue proceeding?

If you don't get the joke, the joke's probably on you.

Our project manager is a past-retirement-age consultant who prefers to communicate the old-fashioned way, which is to physically pop in to my office asking questions about stuff that isn't even urgent and could easily be dealt with in jira or by e-mail FFS. Way to go disrupting a dev, break my flow and deprive me of my joy of working! He even says it himself: "May I disturb?" My answer is "No, but now that you already did, spit it out!" He's a nice and funny guy, I give him that. But I don't like this particular behaviour of his. I've complained to him directly and also to my boss, but to no avail. This is where devRant comes in, to let the steam out. Anyway, if I have it my way, we will definitely *not* be hiring the same consultant for our next project.

Outlook irritates the heck out of me with its distracting notification bar that's recently begun popping up almost every time I start the god damn shitty application. What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this annoying crap. Our support technicians are unable to solve it, so I wrote feedback to Microsoft. I don't think they are ever going to answer, though. They haven't even responded to another problem with Outlook that I reported nine months ago! Microsoft are reallly inconsistent, to say the least. Some of their products, like Visual Studio, VS Code and Microsoft Flight Simulator, are excellent! But, more mainstream software, like MS Office and Outlook, suck. Windows (I'm using Windows 10) is so so. It works alright if you know your ways with the registry editor. The same goes for the support. If you're lucky, you can get hold of a real, flesh-and-blood person who patiently guides you through the cumbersome process of, for example purchasing and installing Minecraft (believe me, it isn't easy, took almost an hour for the support person to solve. Creds to him). Sometimes, like when activating an old Windows license, you get to talk to a bot and that, surprisingly, works very well too. However, if you report any bug or feedback to Microsoft through an application's help section, you 'll never hear from them. They just ignore it.

Roblox seem to believe that you can actually send texts to landline phones. At least the landline is prefix is the only choice for phone verifications when living in the Åland Islands. I've brought this problem to Roblox's attention a year ago and they promised to fix it. Then I've reminded them a couple of times during the past year. Each time, they respond with stupid AI (Artificial Idiocy) generated answers, prompt me to send screenshots and once even screen captured videos. The follow-up answers I get just prove what I've been thinking for a year now, that Roblox don't give a shit about their users. Fuck it, it's a crappy platform anyway and I'm probably better off moving on to Unreal Engine.

Viva Insights is the worst malware from Microsoft so far. Spent a good two hours finding out how to get rid of events called "Tid för fokusering" (time for focus) that kept popping up in the Outlook Calendar, just to find out that you don't configure that shit in Outlook anymore, but in Teams. Go figure.

What's SAP?
Piece of shit if you ask me.
Their Crystal Reports is so user-hostile it makes me want to throw up all over the keyboard.

Surveyor