Clean and simple UI. Making any HTTP request is a staple for developing web applications, especially when backend/API heavy

The Software gets more and more bloated over time. Also more and more aggressively monetized. Forced or strongly incentivized login, many unnecessary features leading to longer loading time.

Make it more lightweight. Don't try to force the PRO and Team features on users. You just make their life harder

It's still my go to, but I would recommend to first check for more lightweight alternatives

It's quite a nice autocomplete while working on code. You write code in VS Code and Copilot suggests completions for words, lines, functions, classes. The main advantage is that it works directly in context: directly where you write, with knowledge about your repository

The cost made me stop using it. I think it is expensive for an autocomplete. It can write boilerplate and save a bit of time here and there. But it cant solve your real challenges, even though it has full knowledge of your code base. The chat functionality, where you try to solve problems in an open ended chat style conversation, rarely gave helpful input in my case. So I ended up rarely using it.

Bring down the price, make it focused on a really good, cheap autocomplete. Instead of pitching it as something that solves deep problems

Very situational. I also know people who swear by the productivity gains that they get from it. I would recommend to try it out, but to be very critical of the benefit it really gives

The fact that Gitlab allows to self-host the community addition is the most important feature. That means that you get a high grade and completely private source control. Other things that standout: The fact that continuous integration is a first class citizen in the gitlab world, making you put more focus on CI. The clean and simple UI which mostly works very well.

Groups have always been confusing.

I am inventing things because Gitlab is already a pretty well rounded product. What could improve is a more opinionated setup of branches, branch names, workflows, Ci pipelines ... or at least a templating of that. Other: the various searches and filtering features are not top notch. For example, if you don't use almost exactly the correct project name, the search misses.

my go to source control UI

I write this review from the perspective of a Product Owner, not a Designer. Based on experience with various design softwares over the years: Figma helps guide designers into working cleanly. It has a bias towards component-based workflows and organisation, which makes the designs more consistent. Especially for larger projects. The collaborative mode is great. What I like especially: It does not try to shove obsolete AI features in your face.

Not really any persistent issue. To describe the worst issues I had to date: I experienced such lag while using a clickdummy/prototype that I had to borrow the PC of a colleague for a pitch. On their PC, the clickdummy worked smoothly, while on mine there was crippling lag (with no apparent reason)

A predetermined design workflow. E.g. in-design, engineering ready, v1, versioning, ... This is currently solved by creating Design files named in a specific way. Which tends to lead to chaos and inconsistency

state of the art for software application design

Collaborative creation and management of content that just works. What it does well at the core is rich text. The formatting options strike a very good balance between simplicity, smooth interaction and richness. Editing pages together with others works very well (Better than Word, etc.). Most of the reasons that I like Confluence are simple things, like how easy it is to link other pages or insert the current date. I use a lot of diagrams, so the direct embedding of draw.io is a crucial feature for me as well.

There are a few small pain points. 1. When editing a page with images, tables and embedded diagrams, the contents flicker around a lot while loading and it is tedious to navigate through that. 2. There is not a good and cheap way to selectively publish content, e.g. for software documentation while keeping parts of it internal

Better Support for public-private Documentation

It's great, but maybe there are cheaper alternatives

It does its job. In an intuitive, trouble- and bug-free way. I like the search (with one caveat, you have to know how to search for things to find them). That's a very important feature, since a lot of your life ends up in Emails

1. It is hard to understand the sequence of conversations because of the way it is rendered (mobile). The sequence of messages mixes replies, cc'd messages, attachments. 2. Features like "delete all in folder" are missing (mobile app). When selecting and deleting all from "General" folder, for example, more (undeleted) messages will keep loading after that

For example, the "select and delete all from folder" workflow as described under Cons

It's good and does its job, but from experience with Google products, there is a danger Google will start turning up the price lever in the future. Also, you are probably being spied on. Check alternatives

Teams is overall an OK software. It does its job most of the time. Teams does not have any glaring flaws (unless bugs are introduced by updates). What I actually like is its integration with the rest of the office suite. For example, I end up using the calendar in Teams even more than the calendar in Outlook. They are well synced and saving one click is valuable. Also, the search is OK

Aside from disliking Video Conferences in general (dependence on network, hardware connectivity issues, not looking a person in the eye), there are a few points I dislike about Teams specifically: 1. the audio hardware is not working in at least 10% of calls, forcing me to switch around the audio devices until it works. This changes back and forth from update to update, sometimes it gets better, and sometimes worse. I own quite a good headset, so that should not be the bottleneck 2. audio device settings are slow and unresponsive 3. bugs and frustrating behaviour are regularly introduced. for example, when trying to write or edit an answer to a thread, the UI often randomly jumps up a few posts, bringing my post out of screen and forcing me to scroll down again. That often happens a few times in a row 4. bloated with redundant features like Copilot 5. It is unnecessarily hard to copy-paste content out of Teams. Goes for text and especially images

Suggested features to make Teams more valuable: Improve the basics. Really streamline the UI. Remove bugs and improve responsiveness.

try alternatives before you lock yourself in

The industry standard for editing geometry data, actively developed by a nonprofit foundation. Extremely extensive feature set

The UI is not streamlined and sometimes unintuitive. But that is more than made up by vast online resources, stackoverflow and reddit community, turorials, guides, ...

I have to review and modify spatial data from time to time. A specific problem I solved with QGIS is splitting shapefiles. In terms of geometry, thats a simple operation. Many large polygons with a lot of vertices each are split along a grid of 500x500m and then saved as new geometry layer. QGIS can easily process many GB of data.

If you have any spatial data problem, use QGIS

The Signature platform itself is as good as it gets in terms of UI and functionality. What really stands out as well is the API, which allows deep and flexible integration into business processes. It has a lot of features and switches, e.g. setting persons with different roles in the signature process. Based on the role, persons have to sign, are informed, get a copy of the document, etc. Mobile integration is perfect as well (e.g., process starts on notebook, but you sign on the phone with your finger)

The UI feels a tiny bit unpolished visually, but the 100% reliable, smooth and rich functionality makes up for it and you don't notice it anymore

Digital signatures in professional and personal area, as well as API based integration of signatures into business processes

I don't know any better digital signature solution

The ability to also store "secure notes", which can be used to store secrets which are not tied to a web login (like API tokens) or as a quick method to securely store passwords (e.g. when you know the website but you don't have the exact login website). The sharing features are good.

The browser integration is frustrating. 1. When you need it, it is flimsy. It often does not find the correct password. When you have more than one account for the same domain, it is hard to find the right account in the context menu. 2. The browser integration often activates for fields which are not a login. It might even block UI you need to click to continue. 3. It pops up for websites for which you didnt store the password in Dashlane. In that case its possible to deactivate, but it feels finicky to do. 4. When you are logged out of Dashlane, it feels finicky to log in via the browser integration

Password sharing (cross usage enterprise accounts)

I don't have personal experience with alternatives, but I would recommend to shop around

To my knowledge, the best (and maybe only) text editor that manages to edit large text files (4GB+) while preserving correct encoding. This is important if you are a tech. For example (as was the case in my team in the last month), you might need to do small edits to SQL dumps, before they are imported to another DB. Open the file in VS Code, and it crashes. Open the file in Microsoft Notepad, and it crashes. Notepad++ manages to open the file quickly, lets you do edits and search-replace operations quickly, and then saves the file in correct encoding (e.g. UTF-8)

The Menu and Navigation is oldschool and partially unintuitive. But that is mitigated by good online resources.

We used it to edit large (4GB+) SQL dumps of certain Geodata containing binary, UTF-8 encoded geometries (Geodata). We did small edits to column names and added a few lines for index creation at the end. We also created a minified version of the dump for testing purposes (i.e., we deleted 90% of all lines). This was not remotely possible in other text editors we tried it in.

Notepad++ is a staple for special purpose text editing, and it's free

Jira is a staple for my tech projects. I can't imagine doing any serious project without it. It is not a joy to use, based on its nature as an administrative tool. But Jira has a nice UI, good navigation UX like linking related tickets, hierarchy navigation (but search is bad, see below). There are often useful new features, like sheets. The software is still getting better over time.

THE SEARCH IS BAD Since years, I am saying to my colleagues, if there is one thing that can bring Jira down, it is a copycat competitor with simply a better search. Search gives irrelevant results and it is hard to find the ticket you are looking for. You have to fiddle around with combinations of keywords from the ticket title and from the ticket description until you find it. Sometimes, I end up creating a duplicate ticket because I can't find the original one (which is extremely frustrating). Search does not even have a simple typo tolerance. I.e., when you type the exact ticket title but with different casing or one wrong letter, then you won't get your ticket in the results. @Atlassian: Stop releasing redundant AI features and improve search first 🙏

Improve search, see pain points

The best project mgmt software I know, especially for tech projects. It can get expensive, so I would not recommend it to price-sensitive colleagues and friends.