The Cafes

IBM’s Bill Higgins takes a very unusual way of explaining why Mac apps should look like Mac apps and Windows apps should look like Windows apps. It also explains why desktop Java failed.

I’m not sure his analogy really holds, but I’m not sure it doesn’t. His conclusions are correct, even if his reasoning and/or evidence turns out to be faulty.

He makes a good argument that SWT is the right way to design a cross-platform GUI, and Swing is the wrong way. The problem here is that empirically Swing delivers more native cross-platform apps than SWT does. When theory clashes with experience, either the theory is wrong or there are factors not accounted for in the theory. I suspect the latter here.

I’ve noticed a nasty trend in comment span here lately. So far it’s only a couple of posts, but it could become a flood. Comment spammers are copying sentences out of legitimate comments and resubmitting them with a link or two changed.

If you’re not careful, this can even fool a human inspection since the spam is thereby on topic and relevant. If it comes a couple of months after an original article was posted that received a lot of comments, it’s very easy to miss.

We may need to adjust comment filters to flag comments that copy content from previous comments. I’m not sure if any of the existing filters do that or not.

Even worse, now I’ve caught at least one apparently Polish spammer copying text out of other blog entries that reference this one and submitting that as comments here. The only hint that it’s spam comes from the site linked to. I don’t know if Bayesian analysis will catch these. Possibly a quick, automated Google plagiarism search might be in order?

WP_Cache seemed to work well for Mokka mit Schlag so now I’ve installed it here on The Cafes too. It dramatically speeds up performance by caching query responses while still allowing for live comments and editing and all that yummy fired goodness WordPress is famous for. We shall see. If anyone notes any problems on this site suddenly cropping up, please holler.
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I’ve written previously about anonymous blogging, and if that’s really what you want to do, by all means do it. However most of us are rather proud of what we write and aren’t trying to hide our identity. Nonetheless many bloggers effectively hide without realizing they’re doing it. If you do want people to know who you are, do yourself and your readers a favor: sign your posts.
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While Mac programs usually have very consistent user interfaces, and most programmers religiously adhere to Apple’s human interface guidelines, there is one persistent glitch that continues to annoy us: the behavior of the Home and End keys. On a Mac, these keys should always, always, always move the cursor to the beginning and end of the document respectively.
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