Notes and Domino

Now this is great news. Bob Balaban is looking for input on how to make Notes and Domino a “kick-ass appdev platform again”. I think all of us who are developers have a list as long as your arm of things we want added. Well this is the time to act, get over to the blog entry and add your wish list. Now.

Well, I’ve been running the Beta 2 client for two days now and am generally very impressed. It has certainly come on in leaps and bounds to the prior versions which I managed to sneak peaks at over the last few months.

I have raised a few (minor) issues in the beta discussion forum but they are most definitely not of the show stopper variety. There are some problems running a 7.0.2 client and the 8 client at the same time but I’m not even bothering to report those as they are not what you’d call a “real world” issue.

So what do I like…
– The UI is great, as we’ve been saying for a long time. I did worry that the initial mocked up vision wouldn’t translate to working software but my fears are pretty much unfounded. The new tab bar, colour scheme and general look and feel is very “now” but is also neutral enough that it’s not going to age quickly.
– The mail and calendar templates are very impressive, instantly usable and positively comparable to the dreaded Outlook equivalent.
– The calendar and Sametime sidebars will really make a difference for anyone who lives in their Notes client.
– And of course the ODF document editors are the true differentiator. Honestly, in my view they are a masterstroke because they can replace Office for 80% of users meaning a saving of perhaps hundreds of pounds per seat. If there’s one thing which will scare MS it will be these editors.

There are of course some areas that are less positive.
– As Chris has already pointed out the Feed reader is less than perfect, but I suspect the target audience is not me. I currently have about 250 feeds in NetNewsWire and trying to manage them from the little sidebar is not really practical. What may turn out to be good though is if you use RSS to track application faults, it will mean I can separate out my reading from my intranet error tracking.
– In the mail template I haven’t yet found how to enable the twistie which was demo’d at Lotusphere to show an entire mail thread from any document in the thread. I’m guessing / hoping that this is a server feature.
– We’ve lost the right click “Open In Designer” option on the database tabs in the client. A minor annoyance.
– This is just a personal bug-bear but the Eclipse preferences pane is just too cluttered. I can’t see any normal user trolling through all of the options and there are some useful things you would want them to find.
– Talking of which, the “Mark documents as read when opened in preview pane” option is disabled at install but the mail template is set to preview documents by default. I would have expected that to function in the same way as Outlook.

I’m trying to be deliberately picky, if Notes is to survive we have to give it a real pounding of real world usage to iron out the defects before it goes gold. This design upgrade is a one chance deal, any mistakes will be nigh on impossible to recover from, so I am certainly going to spend as much time as I can spare testing this thing to destruction so that my users get the benefit from it.

In the end my livelihood depends on Notes 8 being a resounding success, so far it looks like the mortgage is safe!

It’s the screenshot a lot of us have been waiting for and with my reduced ADSL speed it may take some time, but I can wait…

Jake has been talking a lot recently about YUI-EXT, yet another Javascript framework. It looks nice but I am betting on Dojo becoming the standard, at least in the Domino world based upon the stuff demo’d at Lotusphere this year. The implication was that Dojo will, over the next few releases be used in iNotes and other official Domino web templates.

That is beside the point though. Jake has come up with a great idea for a NotesSession class to be available in Javascript and this doesn’t have to apply to any one framework, or indeed any framework at all. To be honest this had never occurred to me but, like all good ideas, it’s so simple I think I’m going to spend a little time putting something very similar into a couple of my apps.

If you do any serious Javacript in your apps I’d definitely recommend having a look. The benefits should become immediately apparent to you.

I’m involved in my umpteenth SOX audit at the moment and was looking for a tool which could tell me all of the ACL settings for all databases on a server. As ever the best place to look is on OpenNTF. Now this isn’t a project, just a simple code download but it is, quite frankly superb.

Great credit must be given to Stan Uptagrafft for this code, I think maybe people have missed it as it’s not a full project but it’s just saved me hours of work!

Showing my developer credentials here, I have only just realised that I can type "tell http refresh" to pick up changes in the configuration of internet sites, or indeed completely new internet sites. In the past I’ve always used "tell http restart" which works fine as well but kills any open sessions on the server etc.

So if you’re a bloody idiot like me, then maybe this will be useful!

So, I spent a large portion of the weekend (close to 20 hours) starting a new application for a client and all was going wonderfully well. That was until I got to the office this morning when I tried to fire up VMWare to copy the new database onto the client’s dev server. The virtual machine which runs the Domino server on my laptop just refused to start, it kept on blue screening and wouldn’t even start in safe mode. Boy was I worried, but luckily a colleague pointed me in the direction of a VMWare utility called Disk Mount which, as the name suggests allows you to mount a virtual disk as a share in Windows and read it on your main machine as though it were a second hard drive.

It worked without a hitch and I’ve been able to recover the database I was working on, cue much relieved brow mopping. Not the way to start a Monday morning!

I’ve had 7.0.2 installed for 10 days now and have spent a little time playing with the new features. First thing to say is that generally it’s a great release, stable, some much requested features have been added, all well communicated. This is the way all software releases should be run.

I think my expectations of the RSS generator may have been a little too much though. The basic generator is great, it makes publishing flat feeds very easy, so if you’re just getting into RSS then it’s well worth a look. But I have a few issues once you begin to do anything a little more complex…

My first worry is that the generation is handled by an agent, not a problem for low volume sites but once you’ve published a few feeds and have several hundred subscribers you’ll be looking at thousands of page loads per day, I would have much preferred the XML be served out by a view instead. I know that’s a big ask, it’s effectively a new design element then, but hey you’ve got to ask for these things to keep the Lotus guys on their toes.

Now onto my specific problems. I, like most people, prefer to run my web sites using session authentication, which means that if you want to serve personalised RSS feeds out to users you need to create a separate site configuration which is set up to handle simple authentication. Not a big problem, but I was led to understand that 7.0.2 was going to offer the ability to selectively serve some URL’s out via simple authentication from within one site. I can’t for the life of me find out where that’s configured, or if I just misunderstood what was being given to us.
Update: Chris Linfoot has found the problem, he describes the solution in the comments here

Onwards then. The reason I wanted to allow authenticed RSS feeds was to allow people to subscribe to a view of "My Items" within a database. They can see all documents in the database but need to be notified when a document is assigned to them. According to the RSS configuration database, you shouldn’t use categorized views, so how do I build the list of documents which each individual user needs to be told about.

All of the above are specific to my own implementation and have pretty obvious work arounds within the application, I was just hoping that some of the heavy lifting was going to be taken off my hands by the server. Oh well, for me it’s continued use of hand rolled RSS for a while longer.

The new client for Notes on the Mac has got a mention on Macrumors, good news in itself. What’s even better is the tenor of the responses on the site. So far there is only one (out of 16 so far) that is of the “I hate Notes” variety, all the rest are either very positve or neutral. Is this the beginning of a turnaround?

Oh and I’ve just installed the new 7.0.2 server and clients on my Windows machines, not a single problem (of course) and the new templates for blogging and RSS look pretty good so far.

I don’t know if this is just me but ever since I upgraded Firefox to 1.5 I have been having problems with DWA 7. I can’t compose new emails and several view options are not working. Has anyone experienced the same issues and more importantly does anyone have a solution?

Update It appears that a few other people have come across the same issue (it also affects the web admin client). Apparently, according to Vowe, cross frame DOM browsing has been disabled. Although I would guess that the rich text editor does not use that so this might well be another issue.

Update Thanks to Christian for noting that “This problem has been fixed in Firefox and is not reproduceable with Firefox 1.5.0.4.”