This time, let’s cover a little bit more controversial topics.
Windows font rendering
As usual, the elephant in the room. Fonts in Microsoft Windows don’t look as good as they do everywhere else. I know the difference is not that big, it’s all just a matter of preference, and if you’re used to them, they’ll look great, but who gives a shit. I’m no font expert, but here are the problems I can see:
- The default fonts are not cute enough. Specifically, in my opinion, the default UI font, Segoe UI, looks like an absolute ass compared to Roboto, San Francisco, and even Cantarell.
- As far as I understand, the fonts are extremely hinted, pushing every glyph into the pixel boundaries and deforming the intended design. As far as I know, by default, no other operating system does that.
- Subpixel rendering is used, which while slightly improving the resolution of the rendered glyphs, distorts their color. In addition to that, it makes it an absolute pain in the ass to edit the screenshots and is technically more difficult to implement and display properly. Most of other modern operating systems don’t do that by default.
Apps working only on specific screens
Many cancerous proprietary apps nowadays are guilty for this one, and, holy fuck, I hate it so much. Usually this problem manifests itself in form of:
- The app just straight up refusing to switch to the landscape orientation
- The app showing an unclosable error message if you’re using it in the wrong orientation or on the desktop/mobile
- The app going apeshit or refusing to work on low resolutions
I can kinda understand the last 2 - the developers may be lazy or greedy as fuck or using some overengineered garbage to build the UI. An ability to use the app somehow in any case would be nice, but whatever. The first one, however, just doesn’t make any goddamn sense. If you’ve built your shit with a modern UI toolkit, there’s no way it can break completely after an orientation switch. Some minor things can occur if you’re building something really complex, but, come on, you’re not that lazy.
Improper namespacing
Or, quite often, the complete lack of it. I’m talking here mostly about variables in programming languages, but it can also apply to many other things. Here are some examples:
- UNIX shell and classical PHP - everything is just dumped into the global namespace and requires careful naming.
- C - in addition to the problems of shell/PHP, careful naming is needed even more due to libraries, and the standard is fucked up (not only in terms of naming) and extremely long names can (theoretically) just not work on some compilers.
- UNIX file hierarchy - a lot of not the best naming and duplicated functionality; not that bad overall, but needs to be simplified.
- JavaScript - despite opportunities to properly separate everything into modules, the global namespace is fucking enormous and contains things you probably don’t even know existed.
- DNS - it should’ve been in reverse.
Printers
Ink problems aside, we live in the 21st century, so you have no excuse for not using PDFs instead. Just stop wasting resources.
WYSIWYG editors
I don’t know, they just won’t work for me. Complex ones like {Microsoft ,Libre}Office break everything if you’re trying to do something really sophisticated, while simple ones like your favorite note taking app are much less useful and rarely compatible with each other. They also often produce horrendous and barely human-readable plain text (or even worse, binary) markup, which is a pain in the ass to correct by hand. It’s easier to just use a plain text editor and type Markdown if you need something simple and HTML+CSS if you need something cool, which I do.