As mentioned previously I have a couple of friends who work at IBM and while at a social Christmas gathering last night one of them showed me the build of Notes 8 he is running on his work laptop (Notes 8, M3). It was quite funny to actually see the product and I think I have to pay him a visit later in the week to play a little more with the client.
I only played with it briefly but first impression is that it looks nice and more Windows-like (in a positive way!). It sure still looks and feels like Notes but with a touch of Expeditor/Eclipse RCP. The most noticeable differences are that the bookmark bar on the left is gone, there is a Start-style launcher button on the top left and a bar with miniapps (Sametime, RSS feeds, todays calendar etc.) on the right. Other than that the old-style preferences has been replaced with standard Eclipse style preference pages but other than that I looks like you would expect. I don’t think most users will have any problems getting used to it.
I’m sure there’s tons more, but that’s my first impressions. Funny to actually see the client we’ve been hearing about for months now from Mary-Beth Raven and Ed Brill.
I have been doing a lot of Sametime 7.5 plugin development over the last couple of weeks so I can really see the benefit of the miniapp-sidebar. I think miniapps and the concept of the sidebar is going to be a really valuable addition to the application portfolio. I need to look more into this as I explore the client and see how the miniapps are wired into the client and how to make them respond to events in the client such as opening new applications etc.
As an aside I really hope we get to share miniapps between Sametime and Notes 8 without having to recompile… I have my doubts of this though, as the extension point used in Sametime 7.5 for miniapps looks and sounds quite Sametime 7.5 specific but I hope I’m wrong.