Software Papercuts

Thursday, October 27, 2022

The amazing thing about software is that it can do literally anything its writers tell it to do. The frustrating thing about software is that is does literally what its writers tell it to do. My current frustrations:

• On my Linux laptop, if the screen locks because the machine went to sleep or suspended, on wakeup I can simply start typing my password to get logged back in. But if it is simply locked but still active, I have to click the mouse once before I can type my password.
• I have a dock which I use with my work Macbook. I can use it fine with one monitor and the Macbook screen. But when I plug another monitor into the dock, macOS clearly registers that the second monitor is there, because it displays a perfect image—but only mirrored; I can’t put it into the mode where the monitors form one desktop. There’s not even an option.
• Whenever I upgrade my Macbook to macOS 13, the Preview app will no longer display Postscript. This is irritating because I have a shell function set up that whenever I run man, the manpage is converted to Postscript and opened in Preview. I find that easier to read than in Terminal itself.
• SAP Concur, which my employer uses for expense reporting, does not work in Firefox, as certain key buttons, such as the one for “Submit,” just don’t appear. Worse, it doesn’t even warn you if you try to access it in Firefox. Is this 2022 or 2002?
• There is no unified method across operating systems to type characters which don’t appear on the keyboard. As an English speaker, I don’t need accented characters often, but I use the emdash and endash quite a bit. And it’d be nice if the OS would default, say, to using smart quotes in a proportial font, but straight quotes in a monospace font.

I’m sure this list will expand.