💾 Archived View for adamthiede.com › log › 2023-09-14.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:31:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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Microsoft Teams is an embarassing product. It continues to astonish me how bad this incredibly popular piece of software, made by one of the world's largest software firms, continues to get. It's not like it was bad and stayed bad, it's always been bad and it just gets worse.
I don't use the native program, because why would I - it's a web app. But not really. Teams is not a "web" app, it's a "chrom*" app. It only supports chrome. But if you use firefox and change the user agent, the stuff that theoretically only works in chrom* suddenly shows up and works fine. Wow!
When you get a call, it shows a rectangle with the caller's avatar, and two buttons for answer/hang up. But on this rectangle, superimposed behind the content, is a blown-up blurred picture of the caller's avatar. So if this person uses his face for his avatar (perfectly reasonable behavior) the background of the calling notification is a ghastly jack-o-lantern like blurred face with the actual avatar sitting directly on the huge face's nose. It's insane design. Kinda terrifying to look at.
Every time I make any change to my audio devices on Linux (plugging in headphones, attaching a bluetooth headset, docking my laptop) teams gets confused. It is the only application on the computer that exhibits this behavior. Every other program is totally fine. "Oh you plugged in headphones? Let's route through those. You switched your microphone from the laptop mic to the bluetooth headphones microphone? Cool, that's the default now." I don't have to relaunch firefox, or audacity, or any other program that handles audio, to deal with these changes. Everything works just fine. Except for teams. It could be 15 minutes - if a change is made I have to relaunch the program, or join a call, realize my audio gear doesn't work, then re-join it, and it does.
How does Microsoft make software this bad? They have armies of coders depending on teams every day for comms. It's got to be annoying enough to where they fix it, right? Although that's not really a surprise - it probably works fine on Windows, and if you're using windows you're already accustomed to lower-quality user-hostile software.
/rant