As you know Lotus Notes is built on Eclipse so following Eclipse plugins and projects makes a lot of sense from a platform point of view. Surfing the other day I stumbled over an Eclipse project that provides a Ribbon IDE for the Eclipse platform. It makes your mind wander to Microsoft centric but it might make sense for other applications incl. Lotus Notes.
For more info see “Eclipse plug-in sightseeing: Ribbon IDE / Eclipse”. There’s also a PDF showing it off.
lekkimworld.com 
Well… except MS patented it … and created a licensing program for the "ribbon UI" …. and:
"Microsoft won’t license their ribbon UI patents for products that compete directly with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access."
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/11/22/microsoft-sets-offices-ribbon-ui-not-quite-free/
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Jeremy I wouldn’t be too worried about that since MS swiped the idea lock stock and barrel from Lotus and therefore IBM.
Prior art and all that.
This came up a few years ago…
http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/archive/20061129-1157
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