List of some of the noticeable Notes 9 enhancements

The below list outlines what I find the most interesting about the Notes 8.5.4 release.

  • See messages in your Inbox grouped by date
  • Abbreviated dates
    The Mail views now show abbreviated, simplified dates according to the following changes:

    • If the date falls on the current day, then the date column will only show the time, for example: “4:50 PM”
    • Yesterday’s date will have “Yesterday” plus the time
    • If the date falls on a prior day within the past year, then the month and day will be shown with the time, for example: “May 12 3:50 PM”
    • If the date falls on a day in a previous year, then the traditional date/time is show, for example “5/12/2011 3:15 PM”
    • If, for some reason, there is a future date in the Mail view, due to OS settings, it will be displayed the way that the “May 12 3:50 PM” example is shown above.
  • Scroll through One Month view in Calendar. Instead of viewing only one entire month at a time, now you can scroll through the One Month view of the calendar 1 week at a time. Keyboard access:
    • Scroll backward one month. – PgUp
    • Scroll forward one month. – PgDn
    • Scroll backward one week. Ctrl+PgUp
    • Scroll forward one week – Ctrl+PgDn
  • New Weekly Planner in Calendar. 8.5.4 includes a new Calendar view called Weekly Planner. The Weekly Planner shows the days of the week in a two-column format as shown below, which is similar to the Weekly view in the Notes Basic Client. You can scroll within a day to see more entries.
  • Calendar and Scheduling APIs for C SDK
    The Notes and Domino calendar and scheduling API enables application developers to create, modify, read, delete, or take calendar actions on calendar entries and meeting notices in a Domino mail file. The API encapsulates the complexities of Notes/Domino calendar data, including repeating meetings and notice creation, by utilizing the standardized iCalendar data format.

    A preliminary version of the API for the C SDK is included in CD2. Future Java & LotusScript APIs, as well as a REST calendar service may be built on top of this C functionality, but are not included in CD2. Specifics of the calendar functionality contained in the C SDK are documented in the calendarapi.h header file.
  • Social Edition: New Widgets and Live Text support for iNotes
  • Open Mail, Calendar, Contacts, or homepage in one click

A very nice touch from Linkedin

Received this email from Linkedin this morning – very nice touch…

“Seeing a lot of weekly digests piling up?
Mikkel, we noticed you haven’t visited Eclipse Plugin Developers lately. To help keep your email tidy, we’ve unsubscribed you from this group’s digests – we hope this suits you better!”

Decrease in blogging year over year – is it a problem?

I’ve know it for quite a while. I’ve learned to live with it. The amount of blogging The Bubble has been decreasing the last few years … mine included. Spending 5 minutes on it I decided to graph my own decreasing activity by year – it’s very obvious then. From an all time high of 343 posts in 2006 (top month ever been June of 2006 with 47 monthly posts!!) to just 58 so far in 2012. For the entire year – a year where I’ve probably been more busy than ever. Quite a fall.

I do realize that we now have new ways of capturing and sharing knowledge and collaboration is now done just as much using Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Stack Overflow but there is something about blogging. The longer form posts lend themselves much better to explaining topics in a thorough and thought through manner. In other words – the Library of the Republic (lending a reference from Mat) needs to be maintained and kept up to date. Back then we had things like Show’n’Tell Thursdays (remember those) and we all blogged nifty LotusScript classes we wrote. We blogged about console commands and compiles. Redims and updalls. What’s happened to all that. In a quiet moment like this I actually miss it. Is it because we all have been with the technology for so long that it no longer necessary? Is it that the breath of the IBM collaboration portfolio has become so wide that it’s by definition impossible to keep up? How about the elevator – how do people new to the technology ascend?

Or am I just becoming an old fart (I’m 36) and just need to shut up and get on with it?

Year in review 2013

Here at the close of 2013 I’m looking back at yet another great year. It’s been busy both workwise and on the personal front. So much good stuff have happened with the birth of my second child off course overshadowing everything else. Matheo as he’s called is thriving and as a family we’re trying to make ends meet and make enough time for both work and play. We did some major remodeling of our house over the late summer and early fall. We’re almost there and done with only 20 odd boxes being left to unpack but looking back it’s been worth it and definitely better done before Matheo was born than after. On the personal front I’m looking forward to a quiet 2014 where we can lick the wounds and recover in the “new” house. Below is a picture of me with my daughter Milla (now 3 years old) and Matheo (almost 6 weeks now).

Workwise another great year. Again I’ve traveled quite a bit with the US and Japan being major destinations. The US for IBM Connect 2013 where I gave a session and for the IBM Leadership Alliance in October. Japan being our new big and exciting market attracted a lot of attention in 2013 and the focus keeps expanding with lots of new licenses being sold there. We have been very fortunate in our choice of partner in Japan and Axcel Corp. is doing a stellar job at OnTime Group Calendar gaining traction in the Japanese market. I’ve done more projects outside Denmark than ever before with one in particular taking up a lot of brain cycles. Not that the project itself was so big but with a team with members from India, Denmark, UK and three cities in the US from Eastern to Mountain time it’s taking quite a mental toll. A lot of conference calls and headaches. Fortunately we watched the project go live at the end of the year so all is good.

Facebook 2013 year in review

Configure Eclipse 4.2 (Juno) for Notes 9


Yesterday after publishing my updated article on configuring Eclipse 3.5 for Notes 9 I wondered why I was still using such an old Eclipse build. Now Lotus Expeditor and hence Notes is still based on Eclipse 3.4 but since we develop for what’s called a target platform that shouldn’t matter so I wanted to move to Eclipse 4. So I grabbed Eclipse 4.2 (Juno) from Eclipse.org and started configuring (of course capturing what I learned). The steps are actually remarkably similar to Eclipse 3.5 (with some slight changes) so now I’m using a new Eclipse build with all the functionality benefits (the New and Noteworty page outlines many nice features) it provides plus the updated look’n’feel.

I’ve captured the steps into a new page called Configure Eclipse 4.2 for Notes 9. The page also contains a video walkthrough now (rather rough) but it shows what’s involved. The video is about 5 minutes long.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iEndASS9iA&w=560&h=315]

Happy coding.

Configure Eclipse 3.5 for Notes 9

Next after upgrading my Notes client to IBM Notes 9 I updated my Eclipse environment to use Notes 9. The steps are basically the same as previously but for good measure I updates my guidelines. The document is now titled Configure Eclipse 3.5 for Notes 9. For those in the know the only thing to update is the install_id (now “135548059835”) and the rcp.base_version (now “9.0.0.20121130-2130”).

Happy coding.

The IBM developerWorks newsletter has been retired

The IBM developerWorks newsletter was effectively retired on Friday which really bums me out. I’ve using the newsletter as an easy weekly way of following along with what happened on developerWorks and I’m going to miss the ease with which I could do that. The “new way” (for me at least) is to use the social media outlets (Twitter, Facebook) or the feeds available. I’m going for the latter and just added a series of feeds using the feeds page to my Google Reader. RIP developerWorks newsletter…