PlanetNTF

The Sidebar was one of the great features which came with the Standard client in Version 8. One of the first uses of the sidebar was the "Day at a glance" calendar view. But what some of our users misses was a sidebar view for the "To Dos" similiar to the "Day at a glance" view. There are some workarounds for this like creating a view widget with the widget wizard. But the old C++ views looks not very sexy in the sidebar.

Last week i played a little bit with the Extension Spy and was very surprised when i found out that there is already a ToDo Sidebar Extension in the standard client. But this extension is not activated and i did not find an easy way to activate this feature in the UI. So i have written a small Widget to activate this functionality in the Standard client. You can find all information's how to install the "ToDoActivator" on the download page.

The Notes Browser plugin is a popular way to run classic notes applications in the webbrows. If you are using this technology you might find the FAQ page Kevin Macdonald has posted to the Notes Domino Wiki.

Better late then never Scott Souder has announced the availability of the ODBC driver for Domino 9.

When you have an IBM id you can download the ODBC driver from the developerworks site

The part numbers for the 32 bit version is CIMW6EN and for the 64 bit version CIMW7EN.
 

There are so many nice improvements in Notes 9, that it was very difficult to choose my top 5, but here they are:

1. The new theme.

First i was a little worried, about the new grey colour palette and the reduced colours of the icons. But after a short while i really liked the new design and every time i have to go back to my 8.5.3 Notes client at work i think the old theme looks very dated.




2. The notes.ini variable "TypeaheadShowServerFirst=1"

I really like the "recent contacts" feature, but often it is very annoying that the typeahead prefers the recent contacts over the server addressbook. With the TypeaheadShowServerFirst=1 it notes.ini variable it is possible to change the type ahead behavior to prefer the addresses from the server.

3. The new quickfind dialog.

The new quickfind Dialog is so much easier to use then the old one. I am sure our users will love this feature although there are some bugs in this new feature.




4. The dropdownbox to change the sort behavior of fulltextsearches.

Most users did not find this option in the old client which was hided in the more section. But now this option is easy to find and best off all if you change this option the fulltextsearch order result is changed immediatly.


5. The preview of image attachments in e-mails.

When you get an e-mail with many images attached it is so usefull to see what are the most important images without the need to open every image attachment.

Unfortunatly there are some nasty little bugs in Notes 9 and i am searching for an easy way to report this bugs to IBM Development. I do not want to open PMR's because they are to complicated for this little bugs. So does anyone know a way to report bugs like the following to the Development team:

The Typeahead in the new Quickfind dialog does not work, when the "TypeaheadShowServerFirst=1" notes.ini setting is present.

Without the notes.ini setting the typeahead works:

With "TypeaheadShowServerFirst=1" set the typeahead fails:

Don't get me wrong, Notes 9 is a big progress over 8.5.3 and it is a good release, but many of the little rough edges i have already criticized in the beta are still in the final version. And this little UI quirks and inconsitences are this things which separate the good from the very good software products. This is especially disappointing because Scott Souder has promised, that significant improvements in this area will be made from beta to gold  in  a Q&A session at the Edcom Nachlese in munich.

So what are my main complaints about Notes 9 and why do i think that IBM should really work on this stuff.

Many important parts of Notes still look like software from the last century.

The first impression a user gets from the Notes Client is the password dialog. The password dialog has not changed since version 6. It looks like a Windows 2000 dialog and looks really foreign on Windows Vista upwards.

 
The window tdecoration does not use the style from windows and the dropdown boxes and push button are looking like we are running this software on a very old windows version. By the way all screenshots are from my Windows 7 computer.

And there are many other places with the same old dialogboxes. And i am not talking from seldom used dialogs. For example look at the  "Open Application" dialog.


Again the icons are from Notes 6 or older and are complete different to the rest of the icons Notes 9 is using. The window decorators are complete wrong again becaue they are still from Windows 2000 and not fromWindows 7. And the funniest thing is that there is already a new designed "Open Application" dialog and new icons for Applications and folders in the product. This new dialog is used in the Designer client.


This dialog uses the correct window decorators. The widget set is from Windows 7 and the icons have a fresher look than the old icons in designer. Although there is still room for improvement in the designer dialog too, it would be a good replacement for the open dialog in the client.

Or lets look at the preferences dialog. Is IBM really thinking that it is a good idea to put an old style notes dialog in an eclipse dialog with scrollbars? I do not think that this is the "exceptional experience" IBM is always promising.

 
And i can not imagine a reason why the properties dialogs are still not resizable and not redesigned in 2013. Every power user in our company is complaining that it is really ridiculous to use such small and somtimes bad designed dialogs when you want to change a text property or even worse a table property. And again IBM has already proofed that they can do it better with the property sidebars in the productivity editors (Oh if forgot they are discontinued and all my investment in them is gone with them).


So my question is, why has IBM redesigned the already good looking parts like the CA Views and the sidebar if there are still so many very old parts of the product?

The second problem in Notes 9 is that there are so many inconsistencies in the UI.

First of all, i do not know an other application which is using at minimum four different widget styles in one application. For example look at the buttons in Notes:



This mix from different widget styles in the same application is a big problem in Notes, because it looks really unprofessional.

And now an easy one to solve. Notes 9 gold uses still different icons for the same thing.

For example follow up flags in Java View, Dialog, Old View and iNotes. Three different icons for the same purpose in four different places.  
 Or the application and doclinks (Notes client vs. iNotes)

And unfortunatly there are behavior inconsistences all over the whole application. 

For example in the new find dialog (by the way, why is this dialog not resizable?) you get help by hovering over the question mark icons and in the mail preferences on the signature tab there is the same question mark icon, but there you have to click the icon to get the tooltip. 

Or in the Notes Client you can find the open dialog in "File->Open->IBM Notes Application" and in the designer the same function is under "File->Application->Open". This and many more little differences in behavior make the Notes 9 unpleasant to use.

What is really annoying for customers which use many Eclipse plugins in the notes client is, that the IBM Development team has fogotten to adjust the colour palette in the Eclipse ui framework. So third party plugins look really alien with their blue colours compared to the new grey colour style used in the Notes 9 client.


And this would be really easy to change for IBM. I have written a little patch to some of the Notes Client plugins which changes only a few lines of code and third party plugins will look much nicer in Notes 9.



And this is not only a problem in thirdparty plugins . It looks like the same problem is in the Designer Client that some parts of the ui have still the old blue based colour palette.



So the first look is unfortunately a little bit disappointing for me, but i know from the beta that there are many great improvements in the new version. I will show some of this feature in future blog posts.