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technology features you love or hate

alasdairm

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which features of technology really impress you because they are well-designed, are intuitive or are simply very cool?

which features of technology drive you up the wall because they don't work the way you think they should, are unintuitive or just plain suck?

i love the fact that, in adobe photoshop, if i create a new file, the image size is set to the size of whatever is currently in the clipboard.

you?

alasdair
 
i love that in Windows Mobile 5 and 6, theres a setting that automatically sets the ringer to vibrate when the calendar knows youre busy.
 
i love that in winamp the volume control doesn't just adjust the windows system volume.

i hate that, unlike the above, in cyberlink powerdvd the volume control just adjusts the windows system volume. it's infuriating.

i hate that in winamp i can't adjust the size of the 'open folder' dialog box.

alasdair
 
I love interactive map software, like Google Earth. In a related vein, the first time I used the globe feature on someone's Wii--the one where you can put the hand-icon a city and see the weather, or grab the globe and spin it like a top--I just thought it was the coolest thing, ever. :) Let me also include interactive planetarium software like Starry Night or Cartes du Ciel under this rubric.
 
I love this thread already... I'm going to let the hate flow:

I love how amarok takes a stab at assigning album art based on amazon listings. When it doesn't find the exact match, it gives me choices. Definitely preferable to the all or nothing approach that iTunes uses.

I hate the ambiguity in iTunes between "import" and "add to library". Further, I hate how frequently, even if something is marked as part of a compilation, it isn't represented as such. Fixing it is usually a matter of using a third-party tagger. Not cool. Also, and I'm not sure if this is the case or not, but it seems that alterations made to ID3 files in iTunes don't survive importation to other programs to play music. I'll let everybody know if this is the case when I run amarok 2 for the first time on my macbook.

I love VLC for its out-of-the-box codec support. I have moved on to Mplayer because I like its controls better, but I shudder when I think of my video viewing life before VLC.

I hate every cell phone user interface I've ever encountered.I have yet to doodle around with an iPhone, but everything I've ever used-- across provders, manufacturers, and years-- they all suck universally. Bad voice dialing, bad bluetooth implementation, too many menus to get to where I want to go, not enough features without paying extra. I patiently await an affordable, better than an iPhone phone.

I hate little LED lights on everything. Its bad enough that most of my stuff is drawing power while its "off". Its beyond tolerable that it has to let me know by blinking, or glowing at me in an otherwise dark room. My LCD tv has a very bright blue oval when its off, and nothing when its on. What sense does that make? If I wasnt afraid of damaging the screen, I'd take it apart and disable it. The macbook does the same thing when it goes on to standby-- a throbbing white light at eye level while I sleep. Call me strange, but I find this all very off-putting in a dark room.

I love greasemonkey and adblock. I hope an ad and nag-free internet isn't something from the golden age that I'll be telling my kids about. My installed scripts have already addressed most of the things that would have made this list (dictionary popups in the online new york times, for one).

I hate my new microwave oven's controls. I was spoiled by a very simple layout on the old one. With this one, I haven't even figured out how to set a proper cooking time on the thing yet. Nobody uses anything but full power, microwaves in restaurant kitchens just have a big dial. Keep it simple, stupids. Nobody is going to use the "broccoli" setting.
 
nice post pander bear.

i appreciate (and agree) that technologies like broadband and wireless are great but i encourage people to think of aspects of design - technology features - rather than just broad technologies themselves.

alasdair
 
I love that my alarm on my phone doesn't just turn off when I press turn off or snooze, just delays it for 9 mins. I actually have to go to the alarm menu and turn off, without it I'd sleep in far too often
 
^ it's a windows control but it doesn't behave that way in all applications. in firefox, for example, i can resize that dialog.

alasdair
 
gotcha.

everything about my old sony ericsson w810 phone.I loved how there was a button that took you straight to the (2 GB!) mp3 player and then back to what you were doing. I love how the mp3 player actually worked. The thing was quick as a whip, and the texting was prefectly laid out and quickly accessible.

I recently had to switch phone companies, and my new phone is an absolute piece of crap. Take all those things above, and apply them in the negative to my new Kyocera e2000. such a piece of shit.
 
I love mapquest and google and wikipedia. I love learning shit and those 3 get me where I need to go and get me what I want to know the fastest. I love them.

I hate networking issues. Nothing makes me want to go off on a rage induced "BREAK EVERYTHING AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY"-fest like networking issues I can't figure out how to fix.

Alt-Tab is also very nifty. So is Youporn.
 
Pander Bear said:
I hate little LED lights on everything. Its bad enough that most of my stuff is drawing power while its "off". Its beyond tolerable that it has to let me know by blinking, or glowing at me in an otherwise dark room. My LCD tv has a very bright blue oval when its off, and nothing when its on. What sense does that make? If I wasnt afraid of damaging the screen, I'd take it apart and disable it. The macbook does the same thing when it goes on to standby-- a throbbing white light at eye level while I sleep. Call me strange, but I find this all very off-putting in a dark room.

Two words for you. Electrical Tape. Don't let those LED's bother you any longer!
 
the TV's light is in a ring surrounding the IR receiver! :(

I love Exposé for my OSX. Hot corners that hide or arrange windows are things that I can't bear to be without. Its become an important part of my daily style. Compiz/fuzion on ubuntu never really worked on my box, but it was almost as lovely as Exposé on my brother's ubuntu box.

I hate the way when moving from gCal, google reader, google maps, and gmail, the links in the upper left hand corner open to new windows, when it makes so much more sense to open in the same window. There was a script to correct this, but I didn;t bookmark it.

I love google reader, by the way. I had used simpler RSS readers before, but they were very inelegant to me, and I didnt really see the point. Feedburner/google reader really cuts down on the amount of time I spend reading various social media and blogs (or maybe it increases it, I dunno, lol)-- but the experioence is very rewarding. I find myself sharing articles I love with friends, its gmail integrated, and saved articles are searchable via google's killer algorithm.
 
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psychetool said:
Two words for you. Electrical Tape. Don't let those LED's bother you any longer!
heh. my keyboard has masking tape over it for the same reason. (you can still see the lights, but they're not like little lasers any more.)

love: the way i can switch my xbox on or off from the wireless controller.

hate: the way it isn't clever enough to go into a proper standby mode and wind down the constant & noisy disc spinning.
 
Heh I agree with the love there felix.

But my xbox has 3 different fan levels - quiet when on the desktop, little bit louder to prevent overheating when watching a dvd but unnoticeable with film sound, and loud for playing games.

I also love how if you're downloading something on your xbox and turn it off, it continues the download and powers off completely when that's finished

I hate that my monitor doesn't does off automatically when I turn off my xbox like it does when I turn off my pc

I hate that the down arrow isn't programmed to cycle down through the modes on my monitor (VGA, HDMI, Component, etc). So to go from VGA (my pc) I press up and its on Component (for my xbox) but then to get back to VGA you have to cycle through them all and its really slow
 
I love middle-click paste in Ubuntu (its probably in all linux distros, or maybe GNOME). All you do is highlight something, the middle click where you want to paste it. No more select, CTRL+C, click paste location, CTRL+V.

I love Firefox tabs. Nuff said

And I love the multiple desktop concept in linux. I HATED cramming 10 applications onto the screen in windows. Now i just spread them over my 4 desktops
 
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