It was a great experience to spend three days doing nothing but listening to incredibly smart people talk about the things they’re passionate about in software. In fact, it was positively luxurious, and it really fired Stewart and I up to start getting a fresh current of ideas into our everyday work. I left wanting to learn Erlang immediately (Joe’s talk was a particular treat), to have my systems continuously available, to base everything on a web architecture, to do JIT architecture and, oh, everything all at once, even if the enthusiasms were mutually incompatible (write it all in Scala! AND Erlang! and Ruby!).

Of course, a set of unstructured enthusiasms does not a plan of action or a coherent system make. But all those sessions felt like a set of design patterns for approaches, rather than for software problems – and that’s a useful resource for anyone in any business.

I'm speaking at QCon London

I have a sneaking feeling that being surrounded by all those clever people is going to make me feel woefully simple….

Of course, if you hover over a link in Mail.app, you get a little tooltip that tells you what the target is. Maybe it takes a fraction of a second too long to pop up — I know I get horribly irritated by this in Eclipse, which has perfectly sensible tooltip timing on WinXP, but needs a written invitation on Leopard — but I perceive it as taking something like the standard time for tooltips on OS X, rather than the week I wait for SWT. And generally Apple have good form (at least in my opinion) when it comes to HCI and timing…

All of which has deprived you of the debatable benefit of my pithy wit this time round. There are at least three distinct conclusions I could draw from the whole sorry affair:

• I am an unobservant muppet
• Generally, tooltips on Leopard take just a little too long
• Notes’ UI is so poisonously bad that obvious things are obscure after using it

I tend toward the last with a little of the second; natural reserve prevents me from prejudicing your views in regard of the first.

By all means do it the simplest way possible — in fact, we’ll have words if you don’t — but please don’t abandon your professional self-respect: it’s the placeholder stuff that will haunt you at 2am in three years’ time, not the polished production code you slaved over for three days to refactor into shining elegance.

I should know. Not only have I written my share of placeholder code… but an article called “placeholder” is just asking for trouble.