Really Bad Software
I Have Owned
by Steven Salemi
Tornado Notes was
a DOS-TSR-Utility incessantly advertised in PC Magazine circa 1986-1988.
The idea was a kind of DOS-based on-screen "virtual sticky notes"
system that you could bring up within other DOS applications, using hot-keystrokes.
The notes could be sized and resized, and the information contained in said
notes could be searched, cut and pasted, etc. Mysteriously -- nay, inexplicably
-- Tornado Notes used to win all kind of awards. Funny thing how all those
heavy-advertisers in Ziff-Davis Publications win all those awards! Sounds
like a mutual admiration society to me, or to use SPY Magazine's words,
"Logrolling In Our Time." Of course, Dell Computers are still
winning all those awards...
Anyhow, back in the Reagan-80s, I had plenty of money to burn, so one day
I succumbed and sent the company (now defunct, I think, that is, I hope)
a check for $ 150, for the deluxe version of the product ("Tornado
Notes Gold"). I still cringe when I think about it -- all that good
money, poured down the cyberspace-drain. I had Tornado Notes on my system
for about 3 days before removing it permanently. Tornado notes was an incredibly
useless and stupid piece of software, rendered absolutely, positively archaic
by the arrival of Microsoft Windows.
Retrospect Express
Backup by dantz Corporation -- yuk! Hoping for a fresh-faced, low-cost
alternative to the familiar Veritas (formerly Seagate) Backup Exec shipped with
thousands of HP Colorado and Seagate/Conner tape backup drives over the years, I
gambled one hundred dollars of a client's money on this turkey. I should
have known -- it was originally developed for a Macintosh, and the screen shots
in the manual are from a Mac. Contrary to the manufacturer's hype --
"the easiest, most reliable personal backup" -- this program has one
of the worst user interfaces I've ever seen, violating every known rule of
order, logic, and common sense. It prohibits users from backing up
individual files or groups
of files within a folder; you must back up the entire folder -- even if
you have no need to do that. After making required backup settings and
changes, it forces you to
"cancel" or "X-Out" window after cascading window -- with no feedback whatsoever as to whether
your changes have been saved or forgotten -- instead of the reassuring,
user-friendly method of "applying" or "okaying"
or "agreeing" or "saying yes" to the changes. It uses an
arcane system of "volumes" and "sub-volumes" that do not
correspond directly to Windows/DOS files and folders, but exist purely for the
purposes of the program itself -- ostensibly making things easier, but in
practice, making things very confusing. And -- worst of all -- it isn't
any cheaper than Veritas Backup Exec, which has none of these
shortcomings! In short, Retrospect Express
Backup from dantz is a thoroughly nasty piece of software that should never have
been ported to the PC platform. I suppose Mac people are happy with
inferior products like this, although we know that they don't know any better, and
besides, when it comes to software of any kind, and particularly specialty
software like automated backup programs, Mac people have to take whatever they can
get. So, friends and neighbors, if you need to perform unattended software
backups, just stick to our old friend from Veritas
and steer a wide berth around Retrospect Express Backup from dantz!
Hot Metal Pro was
an HTML "WYSIWYG" (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) Web Editor that was oft-advertised and frequently cited for its ease-of-use. Some people
even pretended to like it. Actually, I've never used a more cumbersome and
frustrating piece of software. As if HTML isn't hard enough to work with,
when your Hot Metal Pro code wouldn't work, the program didn't just flag
it -- it stopped functioning. The manual started off with an idiot-tutorial
that anyone could complete in five minutes, then stopped dead in its tracks (as
the tech writers ran out of steam -- or budget),
simply listing HTML commands instead of doing the real work of providing
useful information. HTML commands were artlessly assembled in a bunch of
toolbars that made menu commands look easy to use by comparison! Oy vey,
what a shoddy product! The only good thing about Hot Metal Pro was its name,
which was so good and so cool it made you think the product might be good also. But
it wasn't. Hot Metal Pro sucked. Aspiring web page designers, steer a wide
berth around those used copies of Hot Metal Pro at the computer flea market. Try
brand new licensed copies of Adobe
PageMill or Microsoft
FrontPage 2000 instead, if you want to code web pages in a WYSIWYG
environment.
Long
File Names 4.0 was a band-aid, stop-gap product that purported to allow
long filenames in the Windows 3.X environment, and also, for Windows 3.X
applications running on Windows 95. Nice idea, but after the thing stopped
working in both Microsoft Word and Works, and the Long File Name technical
support people (including the fellow who actually coded the product) had
no idea why, I figured the thing hadn't been thoroughly tested and took
it off my machine. In the "long" run (pun intended), all Long
File Names 4.0 amounted to was another great reason to move to Windows 95 and
Win95 apps ASAP!
Select
and Samna Word, both early MS-DOS word processors for the DEC (Digital Equipment
Corporation) Rainbow platform.
Beastly software, unbelievably awkward and slow. Select came before the
days of "live editing," meaning you couldn't simply enter text into a
document. You had to first tell Select that you wanted to enter
text, using some strange key combination that put you into a special text entry
mode. Then -- you guessed it -- you had to exit this text entry mode and
enter a special editing mode before you could begin editing what you'd just
entered. The horror, the horror! With modern word processors you can
enter and edit text simultaneously, quickly, in real-time, but Select
wouldn't let you do that. I never had the courage to throw out my IBM
Selectric typewriter until after Select was replaced by superior products.
Samna Word from Samna Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia was superior to
Select -- but just barely. This beast would automatically
repaginate a document every time you added a single character to the text,
sometimes resulting in five minute repagination-pauses between character
entries! In those days, DEC was very interested in anybody who'd "offer"
to write code for the proprietary Rainbow platform, and so both the Select and Samna folks
milked DEC for all it was worth in order to perform the ports. Postscript:
Lotus SmartSuite users beware -- Samna Word is the granddaddy of today's
Lotus WordPro -- an old, old dog, in other words! Thank God we have Microsoft Word today!
Eclipse
FAX, a down-and dirty FAX program shipped with many low-cost modems. This
program actually had some potential, but its few nice features were outweighed
by more numerous bugs and flaws. As just one example, when the cover page
memo included with your FAX was too long, Eclipse FAX would simply cut off
the end of the message -- without warning or indication that the end had,
in fact, been cut off prior to sending. Confused and annoyed FAX recipients
were the result. Goodbye Eclipse FAX, hello WinFAX
Pro.