General Gripes About the State of Software (feel free to add yours)

Top level desire is an automated means for outlook to recognize contact information in an email and store it as such in its own repository.

In today’s exercise, the information I needed to update existing contacts is sitting there. I wanted an option other than manually searching and keying the data by hand, proof reading, etc.

The iPhone contacts pass through was a workaround that resulted in some duplicate contacts - which are easier to deal with.

Well, yes and no. PWAs were the attempt at fixing a lot of the issue with cross-platform issues, but since they don’t have full access to all of a system’s capabilities, you might miss a lot. The main problem is, each basic OS has its own language and its own restrictions on how to use it for programmers. MS has the bandwidth and money to throw at 3 different teams to work on three different platforms, but in my experience with speaking with MS employees in the past, even working on the same product, they’re often in their own silo, so they don’t always even know of all of the features a different team is working on. Meanwhile, Apple in particular likes to have granular control of how you implement features, sometimes insisting things go through already built Apple software almost as a middle ware for functionality to work, which is insanely painful for certain features from what I understand. (take that part with a grain of salt as I’ve not really dabbled in IOS/MacOS development). But yeah, in theory, you should be able to design the same basic UI that gives all the same features if you’re connecting to the same database. It’s just sometimes not worth it to develop.

Can’t you just send Outlook messages directly to OneNote, bypassing half of these steps and then move it to contacts and get the VCF that way? I honestly haven’t tried on MacOS since I stopped using OneNote a couple years ago. But it worked similarly on Windows when I was using it IIRC.

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I’ve dumped almost all the subscriptions I had. I’d had enough. The only ones remaining all offer new content over time, or at the least an ongoing service that definitely does cost the companies significant amounts of money.

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You are correct about architecture issues.

Isn’t this an amazing contrast between two of the most highly valued tech corporations on the planet: too busy to worry about consistency, and obsessive/compulsive about control.

I’m running Windows 10 and 11, with a subscription for Office 365. Back around OneNote 2007, there was a “Create Outlook Item” menu option in the old Tools menu. That functionality has apparently been deprecated. It is possible to send and existing Outlook contact to OneNote by clicking on one button. Emailing contact information straight to OneNote doesn’t trigger recognition or creation of the vcf. Something MS Lens is doing seems to create it. :man_shrugging:

Maybe I’m missing something.

A similar capability existed in the iOS version of Evernote up until 2018 or so. That’s when the (semi) automatic “read text/create contact” features seem to have been pulled from several apps.

These “vote for features” pseudo prioritization strategies are about the lowest common denominator of feature sets. Power users (or whatever it is our tribe here represents) are almost always off on one end of the bell curve for some of the exotic features, but the poll numbers justify ignoring us.

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Oh yeah
Samsung Laptops
S-Pen is hard coded to open up Samsung’s air command. I know the radial menu thing exists and its buggy, but Lord Almighty, this right click is the hill Samsung is willing to die on?

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Yes But No GIFs | Tenor

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Windows 11 upgrade that is downloaded in the background without my consent and present itself as a “regular update”, does not take no for an answer (actually there’s not even a “no” button). It also hard coded itself to "update and shutdown " button to hope that I missclick. On a low power Celeron N4000 system.

I’m not going Win 11 as long as MS keep their terrible fixed taskbar. Just no. :upside_down_face:

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ok, so speaking of awful webapps. Spotify.

There are several things I hate about Spotify, but the biggest is how they roll out test updates to just some users, who don’t have the option to reject them, they’re just suddenly there, and often times not all that stable. And, the bigger problem with all of this is, all of their customer support options have basically been disabled because they can’t keep up with the demand, so they’re on pause.

Most recently, I’ve been experiencing a bug with my Android alarm that plays an awful alarm sound that isn’t even part of my options instead of the selected Spotify playlist. This was a bug in September that Spotify supposedly fixed, but it’s back again. Can I contact Spotify about it? Nope. I can’t even report it as a bug. All I can do is gripe at them on Social Media about it.

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Speaking of music apps, a few months ago Amazon changed their Prime Music to include song selections in playlists that they felt mixed in well. Or something. So my playlist of cat music for relaxing my cat in the evening suddenly has weird stuff like dog music, with whimpering, whining, and howling which alarms and stirs her up instead. Thanks a lot, Amazon. I no longer use that app. :anger:

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Spotify did something similar, though you have the option to turn it off. I haven’t tried Amazon’s yet. I am thinking of switching to YouTube music though at this point. I tried it once, and I think my biggest issue is it was missing some of the artists on my most used playlists. I’ll have to take another look though. Switching from Spotify will be a pain though, because I have a lot of heavily curated playlists I’ll have to rebuild in whatever app I move to.

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Mine was free with Prime so I had to take what I was given. No option to turn it off as far as I could find. I’m currently using playlists on SoundCloud and putting up with the commercials since I haven’t decided whether or not to subscribe. A big part of the determination is an Apple Watch app which they do not have anymore (discontinued for some reason) but there’s a third-party one that sort of kind of works. Most of the time.

In an alternate (better) world Freehand would have beaten out Illustrator to become a dominant drawing app. Illustrator is very powerful, but at least for me comes with at least as steep of a learning curve and I don’t use it often enough to acquire the skills long term to make it anything other than highly frustrating to use. Freehand OTOH felt more natural for me from the outset.

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I’ve been using AI since v3.2 on a NeXT Cube.

It simply isn’t a good drawing program, and its usage facilitates many technical errors, and I’d be a much younger and more energetic and happier person if I could have back all the time and effort and emotion which I have had to apply to fixing files made in Adobe Illustrator.

Serif’s Affinity Designer is workable, as is Inkscape, and the Quasado folks became GraviT if you can use a web app.

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Even when I had Prime, I never used Amazon Music even though it was free. I was just too invested in Spotify, so I ended up paying for it anyway. I hate that I’ve been so locked into it with its issues, but I just haven’t had the time to invest to find a good alternative.

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Thanks for the warning :sweat:, so far I have been able to refuse it on my laptop for work, I hope I can continue to do so for at least another half year.

Which is why I still buy CDs when possible and have proper backups of digital media. Streamers are bad about losing the rights to my favorite versions of things and expect me to be happy with the “remastered”/alt versions that never got radio airtime in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. @Dellaster @James

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I have most of my purchased music backed up on a hard drive, and also have uploaded it all to YouTube Music, back when it was Google Music. The problem with YouTube music now is, there are several things I can’t access my already purchased and uploaded music with, unless I have a subscription.

I also have tons of CDs in my car, but I rarely use them. Just starting up Spotify on bluetooth is so much more convenient.

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If you ever get an inkling, Plex Premium is worth it just for the Plexamp if you are a music listener. Rip your music to your PC, and you’ve instantly got a self-hosted Spotify service. You can even have it stream and cache to your player as much of your library that you want, in as high or low of quality that you want. I have mine set to highest/lossless when possible.

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