Weblog by month (August 2007)
On Notes 8 mail
A brief note on the issues with printing in Notes 8 that have been taken as yet another slur on Notes 8…
Re the comments to John’s post especially, end users don’t give a rat’s arse whether their mail client does activities or talks to “enterprise” servers (at least, not until they need to connect them to these things, as harried corporate admins and developers the world over are all too aware).
What they do care about is whether their client works as they’d expect. This is why we get so much bitching about Notes, despite you, me and everyone’s mother telling these people that Notes is so much more than email.
This is clearly the tack Volker is taking with his posts on Notes 8*. This is a client that has been trumpeted as the panacea for all woes brought by over fifteen years of Notes client cruft. Of course there will be issues. Now, we could turn this into Yet Another Whinge about vowe, or we could at least consider that the views of people who don’t use Notes every day count just as much as yours or mine. The success of the new Eclipse-based technologies all hinge on mindshare. If new users coming to the fold still don’t like it / get it, then we’re sunk.
Yes, I think vowe has tended to focus on the downside of Notes 8 to the exclusion of the “pluses” but no-one seems to get that we need this: there’s plenty of positive press out there already. Time to balance up. If we don’t keep hammering on at IBM / Lotus, then the niggles don’t get addressed. I just don’t see why this hammering has to happen in design forums and the like. For many of us, if we come across something in technology that we don’t like (hallo Redmond), we tend to post about it on our sites; I fail to understand why the new version of Notes should be treated differently. Betas, yes. Gold versions? No.
* well, that and the fact that I reckon Volker’s an imp who likes to watch Notes Apologists rise up to try and give him a good bashing
A new addition
My congratulations to Matt and Jess, I gather that mini Stratton has finally arrived! Well done guys!
Well, not quite the same thing as a new baby I know, but the Poole household had a new addition today. Say hello to Pickle!
Irony
Spam folder on Google mail.
DominoWiki in the news
Mr. Bruce Elgort spotted this tidbit yesterday. Thanks Bruce! (update: Brian Green also spotted this)
Old meets new: Lotus Domino and Atlassian in which Dennis Howlett talks about Atlassian and DominoWiki on the intranet. A good quick read. I really need to get 1.2 out of the door eh…
Interestingly, the chap Dennis spoke with is Alek Lotoczko, whom I met earlier this year in London at a Lotusphere Comes To You event. Alek is blogging on his work with Confluence which we also use at my current employer (it’s awesome). Way to go Alek, and thanks for the hat-tip to DominoWiki!
A brief announcement
Now that it’s official at work, I can announce it here: after almost twelve years with my current employer, I have resigned.
Next steps? Not really sure, although there are a few things out there percolating…
The real question to the panel: as a senior developer with a few years under my belt (I’m nearly thirty-five) do I even attempt to continue working with web / Lotus / IBM technologies (I’m well-versed in Websphere, Eclipse, Java, relational databases, web development, Sametime, etc., etc. and very experienced with Notes & Domino), or is it time for a complete change??
Exciting / scary times!
A new Prophet
Occasionally I post stuff relevant to my eighties past, when I was a bit of junior synth freak. There I was, lusting over Roland Jupiter 8s and Sequential Circuits’ splendid Prophet 5 (I still want one of those). Well, Dave Smith, the man behind the fabled Prophet 5 (an instrument now nearing its 30th birthday if I’m not mistaken) is up to his old tricks. The popular money is on some kind of 21st-century update to the famous Prophet range, a real back-to-basics analog synth. Judging by the MP3s linked in the post below, it sounds fantastic.
Matrixsynth: Something New from Dave Smith Instruments This Way Comes.
The Dark Crystal
I don’t think I’ve written about this film before. It’s one of my favourites, and has been since I saw one of Henson’s creatures on a chat show back when the film first came out.
The Dark Crystal was released in 1982; today I was pleasantly surprised to see that a 25th anniversary edition is in the offing (update: in the US. UK release slated for 1 October).
This film made a big impression on me as ten year-old, and like I say, I still love it. Credit for this has to go in large part to Brian Froud: his designs for the film are nothing short of astounding.
As an aside, the novelisation is also incredibly good—hats off to A.C.H. Smith, using David Odell’s screenplay.
The early eighties were splendid for FX-laden films with real stories: think The Empire Strikes Back, E.T. or the Indiana Jones series. All great films and great fun!
My kids enjoyed The Dark Crystal too, with its central quest and extraordinary puppetry—I find this quite heartening in the age of sophisticated CGI in films: there’s still room for stories and quirky conceptualisations.
Further reading
- IMDB: The Dark Crystal (1982)
- IMDB: The Power Of The Dark Crystal (2008). Something new; not many details, but intriguing nonetheless
- The Dark Crystal Review
Via Retro Thing.
Technical post
Ever wondered how your mouse pointer works? This is a tricky technical area, but see how you get on:
Mr. Brill
A very happy birthday to Ed Brill. Sorry that this message isn’t very exciting, The GIMP et al are not really my forté!
Doh! Almost forgot! It is also Julian Woodward’s birthday!
Yowzers part 2
Getting better!
McDonagh versus Eclipse
The Captain, AKA Rob McDonagh, takes issue with IBM’s implementation of Eclipse as its base design tool of choice, and the man has a point:
Are you actually trying to make it more difficult for people to build apps for your systems? Is there some ulterior motive to weed out the less geeky and drive up salaries for those developers masochistic enough to continue working with your tools? Seriously, WTF?!?
I think I know where Rob’s coming from, and I do sympathise. He draws parallels with Microsoft’s development tools and there are indeed many arguments to be made in MS’s favour when it comes to Visual Studio et al. Nicely put-together, they look good and work seamlessly. But it is realistic to expect Eclipse to be the same when you’re trying to code something as specific as composite applications? I don’t think so. Visual Studio is designed for one specific environment, over which Microsoft have absolute control. Compare that with the herd of wildebeest that Eclipse tries to shepherd.
Eclipse is many things to many people. As a plain ole’ Java development environment, it rocks out of the box. Add a few plug-ins and you can do some great stuff with web technologies, enterprise Java development, PHP, testing, modeling, the list goes on. But that kind of configurability means that having stuff that “just works” is pretty darn tricky.
For composite application development, Notes 8 development and so forth, there’s clearly a long way to go. I think Rob is right to criticise IBM’s attempts so far, but to add balance, I would say you need to criticise the right tools. Composite application development in plain ole’ Eclipse is always going to be challenge right off the bat. Composite application development using the forthcoming Eclipse-based tools from IBM (plus Lotus Expeditor right now), have to be a lot easier than the steps outlined in the composite apps weblog (check them out. Oof!). developerWorks and the other resources IBM are throwing out there rock. We know they’re listening to developers too, but make no mistake: developer tools are hard to get right, and there’s a lot more work to be done before IBM can really challenge Microsoft in this area.
Internet Explorer or MSN required
Note to IBM: you might want to re-consider your survey partners. To get a screen like this in 2007 is nothing short of farcical:
… Especially when the user gets this screen after they have just filled out a load of personal details (which were not beamed back to Keynote “securely”).
“Join the panel that’s changing the web”? Bah!
