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A snarky essay on the trials and tribulations of cross-platform software development that is sure to offend all, to be considered as something of a documentation Easter Egg, presented as an afterthought for your amusement by the humble WordHoard development team, complete with well-considered but at best half-baked end-of-project musings on philosophy, computing, and visions of the past and future.
Most computer users have a strong bias for the system they use every day. Everyone loves to argue about the relative merits of the Apple Macintosh versus Microsoft Windows PCs. WordHoard is an equal-opportunity annoyer in this regard. Everyone will find something they don't like about the program, often because we do something the same way it is done on "that evil other kind of system." In this section we discuss some of these issues, and try to explain in a humorous way why we did some of those things that you will likely find so annoying.
Mac users will accuse the WordHoard developers of being stupid Windows bigots. Windows users will accuse them of being stupid Mac bigots. Both are right. One of the primary developers is indeed a stupid Mac bigot, and another one is indeed a stupid Windows bigot. The miracle is that they manage to work together and get along with each other at all and aren't quite totally stupid.
As with all cross-platform programs, we had to make compromises in WordHoard which will satisfy neither camp. In many cases, if you must blame someone for some feature you don't like, try blaming Sun Microsystems. They invented Java, after all, and we have to live with the limitations of their Swing human interface components, warts and all.
For Windows lovers: Our use of the term "Command" for the menu keyboard shortcut key in this manual is a conscious and well-reasoned decision in favor of Mac bigotry. If we used "Control," Mac users would get confused, because there is a "Control" key on Mac keyboards. Using "Control/Command" would be confusing and too verbose. Repeating the difference between the systems in detail every time we want to talk about a shortcut key would be absurd. Producing two versions of this manual, one for Windows users and one for Mac users, would be way too much work. Look at it this way if it makes you feel better: We do this because Mac users are dumber than you are, and they need hand-holding and talking down to more than you do.
For both Mac and Windows lovers: Yes, we use lots and lots and lots of different kinds of windows, and after using our program for five minutes, you'll find that they are littered all over your screen in a big messy pile, just like a scholar's desk that starts out nice and clean in the morning, but is soon filled to overflowing with open books and scraps of paper. Some people of both religious persuasions see this as no improvement, and consider window proliferation to be a nasty trait common to awful old-fashioned Macintosh programs. We love all of our WordHoard windows, which are like our children, and we think that while they are imperfect, they are nevertheless a more than reasonable way to tackle the difficult problem of putting a good human interface on our program. Unlike some visionaries, we don't think that the rusty old desktop metaphor is a total dead end, even though neither you nor Steve Jobs may agree with us.
For Mac lovers: We would prefer to put the menu bar at the top of the screen, not at the top of each window, as Mac users expect. Believe us, this galls us no end (it's not Windows bigotry). In fact, the gracious and well-intentioned Windows bigot on the team wasted many precious days trying to make this work right on the Mac, much to the amusement of the team's Mac bigot, who knew better than to even try (based on past experience). Unfortunately, this is not currently possible due to a bug in Apple's implementation of Web Start.
For both Windows and Mac lovers: Let us tell you the saga of the dialog button wars. In dialogs, Windows users expect little-endian (*) button order, with the default button, whatever it may be ("OK", "Cancel", or whatever), always on the far right, as God and Bill Gates intended. Mac users expect big-endian (*) button order, with the "OK" or "doit" button always on the far right, whether it is the default button or not, and with the "Cancel" button always on the left, as God and Steve Jobs intended. During development of the program, the Mac and Windows developers kept changing the rules, since they were both OS bigots, with each one a firm believer in his own system's one true way of ordering buttons. The result was quite a mess, which changed frequently, with nobody able to guess where the "Cancel" and "OK" buttons might end up from one day to the next, or from one dialog to the next. Finally a truce was declared, and they agreed to use OS specific code, to place the buttons the way Mac users expect them on the Mac, and the way Windows users expect them on Windows, with a coin-flip deciding the fate of UNIX users (they get the Mac arrangement). We realize that this decision may offend and confuse OS hermaphrodites who actually have the nerve to use both kinds of systems, or are more likely forced by circumstances to have to use both kinds of systems, since they will find their buttons jumping around on them when they switch back and forth. In addition, the screen shots in this manual are often wrong for half our readers. Did we make the right decision? You be the judge.
For lovers of the World Wide Web: We love the web too. We couldn't live without it. It's one of those truly life-changing technological revolutions that comes along only once in a generation or so. But if you think WordHoard should have been developed as a web-based application based on fill-in-forms, HTML page flipping, javascript, and dynamic HTML, with over engineered back-end architectures like business logic tiers, enterprise Java beans, and application servers, like some cheap online banking or airline reservation system, well, we choose to disagree. We've written our share of those kinds of programs, and for anything more complicated than doing your taxes, online shopping or submitting an HR form, they are nearly always horrible. Those who think that this is the future of all kinds of computing, and that everything can and should be forced into this architecture, are just plain wrong, in our humble opinion. We much prefer the simplicity, elegance, and power of plain old Java objects, made persistent using relatively thin and transparent tools like Hibernate, and made visible via a traditional direct manipulation graphical human interface. The fewer layers between us as developers and our users and between us as developers and our object model, the better, because it results directly in fewer barriers between the human beings using our program and the information they are viewing and manipulating. Your web browser is a wonderful tool, and it may in theory be a universal Turing machine, but it is not the right tool for solving the problems WordHoard is trying to solve. (It is, however, a fine tool for presenting this user manual to you!)
A note for UNIX lovers, just to make certain we offend you too, even though you are such a small minority that you're barely worth the effort, and this is going to be rather cheap because it's so easy: You are used to persecution, and most likely could care less about the issues discussed above, because all of your programs already have random human interfaces, and none of them have readable user documentation. You have bigger fish to fry, like getting the program to work at all on your box. We hope our program works on your box, but we're not willing to produce a command-line version of it just for you, so don't bother suggesting it. We've tried to make it work on your box, and we've actually managed to get it to run ourselves on one version of Linux. We have not, however, tested it on all of the many flavors of UNIX, so it probably won't work perfectly on your particular dialect. If it doesn't, you're welcome to dive into the 170,000 lines of source code and try to figure out what's wrong. Be aware, though, that whatever problem you're experiencing is more likely due to the misconfiguration of some incredibly obtuse X-Windows setting, or fonts that are too brain-dead to understand Greek letters or accent marks, or some other typical UNIX hassle. You did remember to install the right version of Java for your box, didn't you? You're used to this kind of aggravation, so this should not be a big problem for you. If you didn't actually enjoy spending nearly all of your time on this kind of trouble-shooting, you'd be using a Mac anyway.
A note for the WordHoard developers, who perhaps love themselves too much: If this last rambling diatribe on UNIX seems harsh, we must confess that the WordHoard developers use UNIX every day to do their work, and couldn't do their work without it, and are actually quite fond of it. See the Developer Notes for proof that software development tools really haven't advanced all that much since the 1970's, or perhaps for proof that the WordHoard developers are closet Luddites, or old dogs who are too fond of the tricks they learned as puppies, who refuse to use anything more advanced than plain text editors, terminal windows, and makefiles on XML steroids. How's that for irony?
We should perhaps apologize for the too cute by half humor of this addendum, which is not at all typical of the rest of our fine manual, which is otherwise serious and professional and duly soporific. We will not apologize, however, because the only sane way to deal with these issues is with a sense of humor.
(*) One final insult (actually, three), in a footnote no less: For all you literary geeks who can't count, "endian" is a reference to the way bits are ordered in different computer architectures. For all you computer geeks who can't read, "endian" is a reference to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. For the rest of you who can do neither - what are you doing here again? Our allusion is intended to have both meanings. Mac OS (for the moment) runs on Motorola PowerPC chips, which have a big-endian architecture. Windows OS runs on Intel chips, which have a little-endian architecture. The Mac vs. Windows wars are at the same time reminiscent of, and as ridiculous as, the theological disputes between the big-endians and the little-endians in Gulliver's Travels, as is well-illustrated by our saga of the dialog button wars.
This all makes us wonder about a bigger question: Is the war between the Sciences and the Humanities described in C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures as silly as the Mac vs. Windows war, as we believe it is? Or is our little program doomed because it is designed for the intersection of the set of all literary geeks and the set of all computer geeks, which may be too small to matter? But this cosmic question must remain the subject of a different addendum to this manual, which shall remain unwritten, and you can thank us for that small favor.
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