Bugs and screwups in the digital workflow

No way, it's worse!

1 (9.1%)

It's about the same, nothing to see here, move along

5 (45.5%)

Software is sooo much better now, quit complaining

5 (45.5%)

Abort, Retry, Fail?

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 11

[Damon Lynch]

When I was younger, I had this quaint, naïve belief that surely in the future, software would crash less, be more reliable and easier to use. As we depend on software more, it would in turn become more dependable. Now I ask myself -- is this a myth? Yes, our software is far more powerful now, and in some ways a lot easier to use. I'm sometimes amazed by how much better I can make my old photos look using current generation software. And for sure we're not in the bad old days of the notoriously crash prone Windows 95/98. But compared to say the Photoshop CS era have we really made much progress in terms of being able to get the job done reliably and free of in-your-face annoyances?

A few bugs that come to mind in my own recent experience, from silly usability bugs to data corruption:

Lightroom: Am I the only user who ends up mistakenly collapsing the left or right side panel when what I really wanted to do was simply click on the scroll bar? My laptop's pointing device is not exactly high precision, and neither am I, come to think of it.

500px: Their Lightroom plugin is surprisingly poor. Bizarrely, recent versions do not allow you to specify the image category, e.g landscape, people etc. It never notifies you of an updated version. It is constantly claiming images have to be re-uploaded because something has changed, when in reality nothing has. As for the 500px website itself, for me at least the crop function has stopped working, and editing vertical images from the Organizer screen no longer seems to work. Sigh. At least they fixed the website bug where GPS values were being ignored, and the location subsequently not set.

Nik software, e.g. Color Efex Pro: Position your mouse above the OK button, and a ridiculous tooltip appears saying "Click to apply the filter". If the cursor is moved just a tiny few pixels up so it is now above the tooltip, clicking results in nothing except an error sound, instead of doing something useful like actually applying the filter. Who decided this was a good idea?

Photo Mechanic: when saving an XMP template from the IPTC Info window, it includes the photoshop:DateCreated field, meaning every time the template is used on a different image, the image date on the new image is silently replaced by the value from the old image. When I reported the bug to the developer, he said that it was better to use the IPTC Stationery Pad, and declined to fix it. Maybe for some workflows he's right, but not for mine, and a bug is a bug.

Topaz software: Scroll around quickly while zoomed in and in mask view, and the filter can abruptly exit with a meaningless error message.

PTGui: fails to write out the majority of useful EXIF values, getting at least one of the few it does write out wrong. Really, my focal length was 1225.1 mm?

Photoshop CC with Intel integrated graphics drivers: colors don't display properly when graphics acceleration is turned on in Photoshop.

Windows 8.1: pauses for about 20-30 after the desktop appears during startup. Something seems to be blocking the system, until it finally times out. Maybe it's third-party software, maybe it's Microsoft --I have no idea what or why, or even how to diagnose it. This is hardly the first edition of Windows to do this. 

What is your experience?  Can you get through a solid day of work without some software bug or flaw getting in the way of what you're trying to do?

[Jan K.]

Windows 8.1: pauses for about 20-30 after the desktop appears during startup. Something seems to be blocking the system... I have no idea what or why, or even how to diagnose it...

You could try something like BootRacer... http://www.greatis.com/bootracer/download.htm

If you don't like the simplicity, then another tool is TN AutoRuns... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

Can you get through a solid day of work without some software bug or flaw getting in the way of what you're trying to do?

Funny that my Windows machine has been running bug- and crash free for at least a decade by now...

And for the last couple of years that even included Nikon Capture NX2, but still not seen a single crash... 

[Jeremy Roussak]

Two useful, paired dicta:

1. All non-trivial software contains at least one bug.

2. It is a sufficient condition of program triviality that it contain no bugs.

Programs such as the ones you mention are vast, complex pieces of engineering, sold at what ten years ago would have been, and even now can be, regarded as astonishingly modest prices. It's hardly surprising that there are problems: but generally, they do the bulk of what they set out to do jolly well.

Jeremy

[Damon Lynch]

You could try something like BootRacer... http://www.greatis.com/bootracer/download.htm

That program is pretty useful, thanks! I dug around in the windows log files, saw an error message about Internet Connection Sharing, turned it off, and rebooted. BootRacer reports total boot time was reduced from 85 seconds to 36. Now that's more like it 

Funny that my Windows machine has been running bug- and crash free for at least a decade by now...

That's great. One thing I've learned is never to upgrade the OS in place, e.g. from 7 to 8, or 8 to 8.1. When I've done that there has always been an obscure problem, the strangest being the system maxing out a CPU thread whenever the display turned off in Windows 8. Thankfully you can now download the ISO installers directly from Microsoft. I always upgrade my Linux installs by doing a clean install too (of course that's far easier in Linux because of the very clean separation of user and system data).

[Damon Lynch]

Hi Jeremy,

I completely agree that all of the programs I mentioned are complex, and it's unrealistic to expect they would be no bugs whatsoever. I understand the difficulties of software engineering. My first job out of university was teaching C programming to new inductees in a large IT transnational corporation.

Nonetheless some bugs there are absolutely no excuses for, e.g. the usability bug I mentioned in the Nik software.

Moreover, when we compare say 500px with Flickr, in my experience Flickr is considerably more dependable. Perhaps 500px is growing quickly and reliability is less important than new features, whereas Flickr is more mature having being around a lot longer. Perhaps Flickr is more reliable because Yahoo self-hosts, whereas 500px rely on other people to run their data centers. I'm just speculating of course, but the end result is the same -- 500px has far more issues than Flickr. And far more than it should, from my perspective.

Damon

[Wayne Fox]

Lightroom: Am I the only user who ends up mistakenly collapsing the left or right side panel when what I really wanted to do was simply click on the scroll bar? My laptop's pointing device is not exactly high precision, and neither am I, come to think of it.

Certainly there are annoyances with any software, often to the point of exclaiming “what were they thinking”. I for one still don’t understand how opening a file from lightroom into the default Photoshop will prefer a copy of photoshop nested 10 layers deep on some backup volume, instead of assuming the copy that resides in the same application directory as Lightroom is the default one.  How hard can that be? The only solution to this is to exclude backing up Photoshop when I backup my hard drives.   I think the little things get overlooked ... sort of opposite the theory that Adobe touted at the 2013 Photoshop World in vegas where they spouted the adage of “just fix it” (or something similar to that)... an effort to fix all the little things and roll them out through the CC.  They even had engineers coding at the trade show supposedly to address this.  There are many little annoyances like this in most software.

However, this particular issue you stated hasn’t bothered me for some time.  I rarely use scroll bars ... on the laptop a 1 or 2 finger swipe handles scrolling the area I wish to scroll, and on the desktop the scrolling feature of the mouse is much easier than trying to access a scrollbar.  In fact, I disabled the visibility of scrollbars on my Mac.  I assume windows has similar gestures on the trackpad.

[john beardsworth]

Lightroom: Am I the only user who ends up mistakenly collapsing the left or right side panel when what I really wanted to do was simply click on the scroll bar? My laptop's pointing device is not exactly high precision, and neither am I, come to think of it.

Switch the panels to Solo Mode and you'll not need the scroll bar.

[Damon Lynch]

Switch the panels to Solo Mode and you'll not need the scroll bar.

Very useful - thanks John!

[Jeremy Roussak]

Nonetheless some bugs there are absolutely no excuses for, e.g. the usability bug I mentioned in the Nik software.

You're obviously right, and I wasn't attempting to trivialise the annoyance caused by buggy software. I've written huge volumes of code in various languages and there were, er, issues with all of it at one time or another. There's a difference between showstoppers and mere irritants, though, and sometimes people get the two out of proportion (that's not an accusation!). A good software house recognises that its stuff will have bugs and fixes them quickly; and it tells its tech support people not to say "why on earth did you do that?" when customers complain.

Jeremy

[john beardsworth]

Very useful - thanks John!

Many such irritations can be resolved by having a good loud whinge!