So I’m a couple of days into using Notes 8 so I thought I’d give my impressions.
The first thing to say is that the client is dramatically quicker than Beta 3. This had actually turned into my biggest worry, but there was no need, it feels almost as fast as the classic Notes 7 client, Which may not sounds good but given that I’m running Windows on Parallels with only 512mb of memory allocated I’d say that’s pretty impressive.
Of course the client feels so much more solid than the Beta which was pretty unstable for me. I’ve been doing proper development and using the new Composite Apps and haven’t managed to crash at all yet.
Talking of Composite Apps I have actually managed to get one working which is an enormous step forward compared to my progress last week. This is still the area which feels least complete of the whole client. There are just silly little things which would annoy if you spend a lot of time using them. The “pin” to hold the components tab in place doesn’t work properly, the amount of caching which goes on in the editor in huge. To the point where if you change something you even have to restart the entire client for it to be picked up. I’m not too worried as I won’t be using this stuff again any time soon but for what is a headline feature it’s a little disappointing.
I don’t want to give the impression that there are lots of problems, though, because there aren’t. If I were able I would uninstall my 7 client today and would be happy to do everything in 8. I can’t due to work requirements but rest assured I’ll be pressing to upgrade as soon as possible.
From my point of view Notes 8 is the best combination of improvements in functionality and stability that you could ask for of such a huge product. A big round of applause for the development and testing teams from me.
I almost forgot to mention that a new episode of Taking Notes came out yesterday which features Julian interviewing Mary Beth, Ed, Alan and Rob about the release. Well worth a listen, as always.
