Show ‘n Tell Thursday: Removing the slash screen from Sametime 7.5 (5 October 2006)


Since Sametime 7.5 is built upon the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) you can hack it as such. In Eclipse RCP programs the slash screen is a configurable component which led me to believe it could be removed. And I was right. The below guidelines are for Windows but should be applicable to other platforms as well.

To not display the slash screen at startup do as follows:

  • Open your Windows Explorer and navigate to your Sametime 7.5 installation directory (C:Program FilesIBMSametime 7.5)
  • Open the “configuration” directory
  • Open the config.ini file in your favorite editor
  • Remove the second line of the file (the one starting with “osgi.splashPath”) or comment it out by inserting a #-character at the start of the line
  • Save and close the file

When restarting Sametime the slash screen should be gone.

Happy days! Please note that this approach probably isn’t supported but hey – shouldn’t it be a configurable option in the first place? 😉

Domiclipse

I know I’m quite late to the party but I finally got around to downloading and installing Domiclipse in Eclipse due to Bens post and I must say that it is very nice! There was a little caveat in the the installation via the Update Site in that I had to uncheck the “Ignore features not applicable for this environment” setting on the second page of the dialogbox to have all three components show up. Otherwise I would get a “missing required component error” during the install. In my defence it wasn’t the most logical setting to disable. 🙂

Anyways – it’s up and running. Nice!! I got to go grab the source code I think.

Notes 7.0.2 doesn’t seem to solve my tiling background image issue… :-(

As reported previously we have been having some problems with form background images tiling across the form in Lotus Notes 7.0.1 for a certain application. Unfortunately the issue is still present in Notes 7.0.2 while the issue doesn’t appear in Notes 7.0. While Notes still has this issue we cannot recommend our customers to upgrade their client to 7.0.1 or 7.0.2. Bummer!

Bruce, Vince and Chris also had the problem in Notes 7.0.1 – does 7.0.2 solve the issue for you guys? I would very interested in hearing from you.

Disapointing news on the timetable for Hannover – release date pushed back?

I got quite disapointed when talking to a former IBM colleague of mine yesterday when he said that the public Hannover beta had been pushed back to 2nd quarter 2007 and the gold release pushed back to end 2007. From comments on Ed Brills blog I had gathered that a public beta would be available start of November 2006 (60 days from 1 September 2006) and from other discussions online that the gold release would be available mid 2007.

Does anyone have any credible info as to release dates? We need some solid information to tell customers.

Show ‘n Tell Thursday: Don’t rely on the default font-size (28 Sept 2006)


You should be aware of relying on the default font size of the Lotus Notes client when doing richtext programming via LotusScript. I found this out then doing an application that does the following:

  1. Grabs a document with a richtext item.
  2. Makes a copy of the backend document to do a reply-with-history style function.
  3. Remove some items in the backend and bring the document to the UI.
  4. Move focus to the richtext item and add a text like “User did function xyz at 07:41PM on 28 Sept 2006” using the InsertText method.

The problem here is that if the user just wrote an e-mail using the normal e-mail functionality where he ended the e-mail using a larger font, the text you add via LotusScript will be added using this larger font-size.

So when doing richtext programming be sure to always set the font-size or take some counter measure to avoid this behaviour.

Re: What’s up with Sametime 7.5 spellchecking?

I was made aware by a coworker that the UI language and the spellchecking language doesn’t go together as started previously. The only available spellchecking language in Sametime 7.5 is English. The dictionary for the spellchecking is located together with the IBM “langware”-plugin (see the “pluginscom.ibm.langware.v5.dic.en_US_5.3.1.9-20060714” directory) in the Sametime 7.5 install directory.

I wasn’t able to find any additional dictionaries but found a post in the Sametime forum on LDD requesting the same thing. I do not however think I would be well of by finding additional dictionaries since there is no way to specify the spellchecking language in the Sametime client UI.