Mika Heinonen's Blog
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Recap: Why Notes 8 Standard sucks
Thursday, 27 September 2007 22:21:12 EET

I feel like I'm fighting against a windmill again. Everyone talks about Notes 8 Standard, and tries to use it with great frustration and complaints.

Although I'm a fanatic Java hater (because I don't understand why coders are too lazy to do decent C++ code), it does not justify alone to make Notes 8 Standard bad. I've tried to use it many, many times, but there's always something which kicks me back and tells me this sucks.

Today I was running Notes 8 Standard without any bad thoughts, but then I started to develop an LotuScript agent in Designer and everytime I switched to Notes the whole damn Action menu was empty. So I had to keep closing the Application and opening it all over again to get the Action menu contents back.

Moreover, there's many other things which make Notes 8 Standard earn the "it sucks" label:

  • It's too slow, and it gets jammed for several seconds from time to time, especially when changing settings in Preferences
  • The integrated Java Sametime sucks too, it's also too slow and sluggish, and it also crashes from time to time, and it lacks of context-sentive smiley interpretation: 8) is not always a smiley with sunglasses!
  • Windows focus goes nuts and you have to click and click to get the previous focus back
  • The selection bar is missing completely (does IBM really think people want to do keyboard acrobatics using Ctrl, Shift just to mark documents? Do they think it's more convenient than the old selection bar? And how on earth should people with accessibility restrictions come clear with that, have you thought about that too? Actually the old selection bar functionality should be even developed further so that you could save and load the selection to disk (=to a notes database))
  • There's no documentation about the .jar files and how to fix and customize the Notes 8 UI, the keywords and tags found in the .xml code can not be found on Google either
  • You can't just move Notes 8 Standard installation to another PC, but you have to reinstall the whole crap (using the Windows registry should be forbidden! You can do the same thing much more user friendly with .ini files)
  • It's Beta 4, or Beta 5 at best. IBM's quality control on Notes 8 has slacked horribly, it was released abrubtly in the middle of the most bugs in Beta 3
  • Scrolling up and down in the mail file using Ctrl-End and Ctrl-Home loses the selection focus also
  • The production tools are a joke, why would someone use an buggy and obsolete OpenOffice version? As long as "Edit Attachment" works with OpenOffice 2.3 and saves the changes back to the Notes document, there's no need for an integrated obsolete OpenOffice in Notes. As if Notes 8 Standard isn't big enough, I was shocked how long it took to copy the files to a 4GB USB stick, also lots and lots of small files, look at Quake2, they had everything in one single .pak file.
  • The running apps tab doesn't have "Open in Designer" anymore, also the "Open in New Window" is missing. This is also something many customers have complained about.
  • I just opened Notes 8 Standard while writing this line. What the hell is it doing? The busy flash blinks, the Windows cursor is an hourglass, and I can't do anything for 1 minute (the same time it took me to install the whole OpenOffice 2.3 suite earlier this evening). Also the -nosplash switch which worked fine in Beta3 is now removed or bugged, and I have to watch the spash screen for several seconds, I can't even click it away like in McAfee Enterprise. Notes 8 Basic opens instantly at any given time, and there's never any unknown delays or business.

    All those things work fine in Notes 8 Basic.

    • Patrick Kwinten
    1 Friday, 28 September 2007 10:45:02 EET
    Hej Mika,

    I can not say either that the new client makes me wrk more efficient. I can't make a sense where the 'old' understandable interface items have gone. Took me a while to get the damn workspace back.

    Also the silky smarticons make my eyes hurt. They all look the same.

    Well probably it is a matter of adapting...

    Survival of the fittest

    John C. Cummins
    2 Friday, 05 October 2007 13:53:04 EET
    Hi Mika,

    I work for IBM, so am not really objective. I was in the Lotus competitive team for 3 years and now am in a different division of IBM.

    Some of your comments are certainly valid, but others less so. I can also give you a tip and an explanation.

    TIP
    To change the UI (such as fonts, colors, etc.), go to this folder and edit the notes.css file
    C:\notes\framework\shared\eclipse\plugins\com.ibm.notes.branding_3.0.0.20070803-1143\themes
    replace c:\notes with your installation directory.

    There is also an InfoCenter on Lotus Expeditor which explains how to change the branding. I agree it is still too complex, but it is possible.

    EXPLANATION
    It does take a while to copy Notes 8 because the Eclipse architecture is to have lots of files and folders that are encapsulated from each other. That means you have something like 300 plug-ins. It is very modular and flexible, but there are some performance hits in this version.

    Mika
    3 Saturday, 06 October 2007 22:20:30 EET
    Thank you John, this looks like very valuable information to me.

    I will check those things out, and see what else I can figure out using the same scheme.

    You can hear about my conclusions in a new blog main topic soon.