After many years of waiting, the notes.ini has been documented. There does seem to be one ommission though:
makenotesgofaster=1
via Rocky
Lotus Connections
I’ve spent a while checking out the new Lotus Connections site for Business Partners. The content’s still a bit light on the ground but overall it’s a great idea with, potentially the perfect community involved. It’s in every partner’s interest to fill in their profile and get involved in a new way of expanding your network.
If you’re a partner it’s well worth an hour of your time to check it out.
Sailing Clicker
It’s obviously a week for new software. On the recommendation of Leo Laporte on the Macbreak Weekly show I downloaded Sailing Clicker for my phone to give it a try.
Basically it acts as a remote control for your Mac but it does so much cool stuff it’s well worth checking out. If you get a phone call, for example, it mutes your computer, flashes the incoming number (or name if it is entered into your phone’s address book!) onto the screen and when the calls finishes resumes as before. Then when you walk away from the computer it will pause iTunes, mark your iChat status as away and lock your screen saver. If you do presenting then your phone can control Powerpoint or Keynote and if you use iTunes it acts as a full remote with access to playlists, album art etc. And all of this in an idiot proof control panel. Very nice.
Mailplane for Gmail
I’ve been playing with the beta for some new shareware called Mailplane for Gmail. Basically it’s a wrapper for your Gmail browser window ont he Mac which makes normal mail tasks just that little bit easier. Pretty cool and worth a look if you’re a heavy Gmail user.
Sametime for Mac First Impressions
So I’ve been using the new Sametime client on my laptop for the last couple of days now and, nice as it is to have native Apple software, I’m afraid it’s not quite polished enough to call a gold release. It feels to me like a late beta or a release candidate version. There are still annoying little bugs / features which have pushed me back to continuing with Adium for the moment.
This is just a list of the bits and pieces I’ve found so far…
These are all minor issues but taken together it makes the product look slapdash and thrown out without sufficient testing. I would much much prefer to wait for a further round of bug fixing and testing to get the product right than have to deal with unfinished software.
The only thing I can say is that I hope this isn’t an indication of what we can expect for the Notes 8 release which is also based on the Eclipse platform.
Taking Notes Episode 59
After I got home last night I joined a whole gang of people in a discussion about Javascript frameworks for the most recent episode of the Taking Notes Podcast, specifically the really good looking YUI EXT project for Domino. You can download the podcast here. Setting aside my meager contributions it’s well worth an hour of your time to find out about this exciting area of community development.
Weekend Away
I’ve been up in Nottingham for the weekend catching up with my brother and his family. As usual we had a great time just doing odd jobs in the garden and not very much else.
Of course it was the London Marathon today which runs right past my flat so the drive home took almost 4 hours as a lot of roads were closed. But the weather was good, I had good music on the stereo, so not a problem. Much better, I imagine, than trying to run for 26 miles in the 23 degrees heat.
Champagne and Curry
It’s not a very promising combination but for almost 7 years now it has been the traditional fare for gatherings of the past and present team members of an old client’s development team. Last night Steve and Hekmat organised a variation on the theme with a room booked in a pub in Docklands, 25 bottles of champgne and some curly straws.
The lessons learned from the evening are that drinking champagne through a straw in the bottle is harder than you might imagine. And from Dom the view was that while normally Veuve Clicquot may be a better tipple than Moet, if / when you next have to use a straw then Moet is the way to go.
Seriously, it was really good to see so many people there last night. This whole tradition started with three of us in glamorous Brick Lane but I think there were around 20 people in attendance yesterday and everyone was on very good form. Now to push on through the day with a sore head.
MBP Back again
I got the call from the Apple store this afternoon that they had fixed my Macbook Pro again. They were gracious enough to admit that the problem with the fans due to a mistake when installing the new logic board. As I suspected, one of the temperature sensors had not been pushed home properly and so the fans were running in their default safe mode, so it was definitely worth getting fixed.
Just a few hours of work to do now to restore all of my data and programs (again).
Lets never speak of this again.