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Adam Greenwell

Category: Technology

  • New Teams or Old Teams, I Dislike Teams

    The company I work for uses the Microsoft 365 suite of products including Teams. Just today, I was prompted in the ‘new’ Teams app to provide feedback. I provided feedback…

    Teams Feedback Form
    Teams Feedback Form

    “I have to use Teams for work. I didn’t like the “old” Teams app and the “update-in-place” methodology and I really hated the constant nag about using the “new” Teams app which is just the same turd served in a different toilet bowl. It affects the sleep and standby functions of my Mac and I absolutely refuse to use it on my Windows machine because it’s even more intertwined into absolutely everything. Notifications are hit and miss if I have the Teams app running on my computer and my phone at the same time and it generally makes me unhappy. Much of my dislike and anger runs in tandem with Outlook and how it seems to get just a little bit worse with every new “feature” that gets added. I’d much rather use Slack. Hell, I’d rather use smoke signals if it came down to having to choose between teams and anything else.”

    I finally caved and switched to new Teams two days ago after I started getting nags in the old Teams app every damn day. I would start up old Teams and get an overlay modal saying that other people in my organization have switched to new Teams and then, periodically, I’d get a little dialog box docked to the settings icon saying its super easy to switch to the new Teams and that I should do it.

    These are great tactics that dirtbags use to get people to consume drugs and apparently Microsoft thinks it will work to get people onto the new Teams bandwagon as well.

    Notifications are awful

    Beside my beef with being forced into installing a new app, the last time I tried to use new Teams (about 4 or 5 months ago), the new Teams app was incredibly worse than the old Teams app. My experience is centered around using Teams on a Mac so keep that in mind. Teams, new or old, has always had issues with notifications. Not long ago, over a period of three days, I had received several Teams messages but didn’t get a single notification, no app badge on my phone, and nothing showing up in my notification center. The only place I could identify that I had a message was he little red dot on the app icon in the Dock on my Mac. I hide my Dock so unless I made the conscious effort to check it, I didn’t know I had any messages.

    Speaking of notifications, you may think that you can delete a message and the recipient won’t see it, right? Wrong. Just yesterday, when using the new Teams app, I got a notification of a new message. I went to read the message on my computer and it was gone. Some time later, I went to clear the notifications from my Apple Watch and the deleted message was there. What I could read had been truncated to whatever length the notification limit is but I could still read the bulk of the deleted message. It wasn’t thing questionable at all but if it had been, that could have been a problem.

    Resource consumption is out of hand

    The speed and resource consumption of the old Teams app was absolutely horrid. There’s no reason that Teams should ever need to consume multiple gigabytes of memory or peg the CPU. My MacBook Pro has a M1 Pro CPU with 32GB of RAM and there had been times where 7 or 8 gigabytes had been consumed by Teams. This usually only happened when it tried to update but I believe that the old Teams app had shoddy code that lead to memory leaks that would seemingly trigger at random. I haven’t had enough experience with the new Teams app yet to know if that will continue to be an issue but I’ll surely update this post if it is.

    Call quality is laughable

    Lastly, a notable issue that has continued to plague me across Teams new and old is meeting audio quality. I like to use headphones or earbuds when on meetings and I usually use my AirPods Pro. No matter what audio source I use, the quality of the audio I hear is terrible regardless of who is on the other end. The audio I hear is tinny, broken and hard to hear at times. If the call is myself and one other person, audio quality is okay but as soon as multiple participants and video is introduced, call quality takes a flying leap out the window.

    My only conclusion as to how Microsoft can put out a product like this is cynical but makes sense. What else are you going to use? Like my company, if yours is using Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), why would you spend more money to use something else when Teams comes baked into your 365 subscription? What are you going to do, switch to Google Workspace? Probably not but you probably should. Having personal experience having managed both anenterprise Microsoft 365 instance as well as Google Workspace, I can confidently say you should ditch Microsoft 365.

    What’s your experience with Teams? If you use and like Teams, I’d be interested to hear that as well.

  • One Input Device for Mac and PC Simultaneously

    Sharing one input device across multiple machines seems like a great thing at face value. If you have a Mac and an iPad (or even two Macs) then Apple’s own Universal Control works fantastically and (usually) without a hiccup. My biggest problem that I have encountered is two devices just not automatically communicating which I have always been able to fix by toggling on and off Universal Control from one of my Mac’s settings.

    That’s all well and good but what if you have a Mac and a PC and want to share input devices across the two? If you plan on using one device at a time, a KVM switch will always be the best way to go. Hardware solutions are exactly that – a physical device that connects to two (or more) machines into which your input devices are connected.

    What if you’re like me and use a Mac and a PC at the same time? Here are some solutions I’ve tried with varying degrees of success and usability.

    VNC into your second computer.

    How I would implement this is run VNC server on my PC and then connect from my Mac to the PC. This works best for me if I have multiple monitors running and then dedicate a screen to the VNC session. The benefits to this, for example, is that if your secondary machine is a desktop and your primary machine is a laptop, then you can access your secondary machine from anywhere while only carry one computer. My VNC platform of choice is Real VNC and I’ve had no issues establishing a connection from anywhere. The drawback to this is latency. If I’m connecting over my local network, latency is much less of an issue but when I’m out and about then I am at the mercy of whatever internet connection I may be using. I’ve also connected to my phone’s 5G hotspot and even though my cellular connection may consistently give me well over a 100Mb/s transfer speeds, my ping is usually hovering around the 900ms mark which makes doing any sort of sustained work nearly impossible. For things like a quick move of a file, no problem, but the constant latency from keystroke or mouse click to response from receiving machine is unbearable.

    In summary, this is a great free solution when working locally but is not reliable (for me, at least) when I want to work remotely on a computer than is stationary in my house.

    Use a KVM switch.

    I haven’t used a hardware KVM solution for a few years but changes to KVM offerings don’t change very quickly except when the intent is to share a single monitor with a single connection. A cheap KVM switch can be had from Amazon for less than 50 bucks while enterprise-grade solutions can hit eye-watering, multi-thousand dollar price tags. The pros are that there is no latency – your input devices are physically connected to the target machine. The drawback is that you can only use one computer at a time and you (typically) have to manually (with a physical button) toggle between your target machines.

    The monitor I use is a Samsung Oddysey G9 with a native resolution of 5120 x 1440 at 240Hz. Cheaper KVM switches don’t support ‘exotic’ resolutions and those that do won’t typically go above 60Hz. Luckily, my monitor has to DisplayPort inputs so I keep one connected to my Mac nad one to my PC and just toggle the source on the display and I toggle the inputs between my machines.

    When I want to work, and test code across two machines at the same time, a physical switch just doesn’t fit into my workflow. When I’m done for the day and want to play a game, especially a FPS, a KVM switch works great and doesn’t cause any input lag.

    Symless Synergy 3

    I bought a license for Synergy all the way back in 2018 and had totally forgotten about it. Perhaps that was a bit of foreshadowing but this piece of software was at the top of the search results when I looked for “share mouse and keyboard between PC and Mac”.

    Installing the software is straight forward regardless of platform and I even tried running an old Dell Laptop with Ubuntu in-line with my MacBook Pro and Razer blade to see if their ‘works on all platforms’ meant ‘works on all all platforms at once’. I was surprised but it did. I set my MacBook Pro as the host and connected the Ubuntu machine to the left and my PC to the right. It just worked.

    Even though it works as advertised and it works reliably, it wasn’t without its own caveats.

    When I have my MacBook Pro sitting next to my Razer Blade 16, it works great. I can have both devices side-by-side and, much like Continuity between two apple devices, the cursor floats between the two screens with no trouble. I can test code on both machines at the same time and all is well in the world.

    My Mac is my primary work computer so when I’m working at my desk and have my Mac connected to my external monitor, then I notice hiccups with what I believe is input lag. It’s most noticeable on my PC where I can very clearly see jerkiness when moving the cursor which increases as the cursor accelerates. Input lag from the keyboard is not noticeable but my only “testing” is what I can perceive. Keep in mind, when I am stationary, at my desk, my machines are connected via Ethernet to my home network no network latency should not be a factor. Even so, when I am on WiFi just using my Mac and PC (no external displays) side-by-side, I don’t notice any cursor lag.

    I’m going to dig into this further and plan to post a more in-depth review of Synergy 3 so stick around for that coming soon.

    There is no “one size fits all” solution for me.

    What I have determined is that each solution fits a different use case. When I’m at home working on my ultrawide monitor, a VNC session sharing half of my display works great. When I have both machines present then placing them side-by-side and using Synergy 3 is great. When I’m at my desk and want to switch to my PC for a gaming session, then a KVM switch with my keyboard, mouse and controller fixed in place fits the bill.

    Thankfully, all three of these solutions cost me about 85 bucks. A license for Synergy 3 is $29.99 and the KVM switch I use cost a little over 50 bucks. A personal, 5 device license for RealVNC is free and I’ve used RealVNC for years and have never had an issue aside from maintenance windows on their end.

    Your situation is going to be different and some, all or none of what works for me might work for you. If you’ve got a unique scenario or solution, let me know in the comments.