Over the past 11 months or so I've had the opportunity to fairly regularly use a video conferencing tool known as Zoom and I'm finally rid of it and thank heavens. Ever since I stopped using it, I'm free of:

  • absolute CPU killing performance; now that I am not using it any more, my machine is fast again
  • the requirement to always have a shirt on - I work from home and my office gets hot at times
  • getting nattered at about not always facing the camera; I have multiple machines so I can get work done while video conferencing is running
  • constant log in and log out issues when you have multiple machines like, oh I don't know - iPhone, iPad, laptop; not an uncommon use case now a days.
  • its many user interface idiocies including the fact that they want you have a "zoom number" which is like a phone number without the chunking. So if you have to type it in manually, which for me happens constantly, you have to try and read this:

zoom.png

The stupidest thing of all on this last point is that the damn system understands a chunked phone number because it formats the number for you when you type it in. Why they can't generate the url like this: http://zoom.us/j/649-428-379 and then just throw away the dashes, I do not know. The whole reason the US has area codes is because of chunking and its not hard to understand. Even if we're not trying to remember it permanently, its easier to visually see and type it in. Why don't I want to use the link? Well I'm a developer and my calendar isn't always on the box where I want to take a video call.