SWT visual designer


Up to now I have been doing all my Notes 8.5 sidebar UI development manually and coding the UI by hand which is and has been fine. Now getting a WYSIWYG editor is becoming increasingly important both for quick development, demos and for education situations. I went searching for one and found SWT Designer from Instantiations. The editor looks very, very nice (take a look at the demos) and being priced at 239 USD also very competitive from a price standpoint.

My search continues for alternatives but this looks very attractive.

Upgraded to Notes 8.5 GOLD

With Lotusphere 2009 and my session done I upgraded to Notes 8.5 yesterday from the beta version I have been using so far. Upgrade was uneventful and my Notes client is working fine today and my demos today went just fine. Only issue I have is launching Notes from Eclipse. When upgrading from previous beta versions I just had to update the JVM config, the install_id and the rcp_version in my Eclipse launch configuration but after upgrading to Notes 8.5 GOLD I’m getting strange JAAS errors (Eclipse not being able to locate the NOTES LoginContext configuration). I will have to look into this tomorrow when I’m in the office or simply change my Eclipse configuraion to use the Lotus Expeditor toolkit 6.2 instead of my own configuration.

Notes videos

This is way cool as announced by Ed. It will be interesting to see how the service is priced.

“The fastest, most affordable way to learn Notes!
Containing more than 1000 short video clips, the IBM Multimedia Library for Lotus Notes will quickly teach your employees the essential skills they need to be successful with Lotus Notes. New employees will learn key tasks, like archiving and calendaring, and seasoned employees will learn new features and productivity tips. “What’s New” tutorials teach valuable skills and benefits of new features. This is the ultimate training solution for end users, administrative assistants, mobile users and tech support teams.

Lotusphere 2009: A nice session review

Thanks to Andrew Pollack for this one:

This session, delivered by Mikkel Heisterberg — was tailor made for me. I’ve done no plug in development because despite knowing Java and knowing Notes, when it came to plug-in development I didn’t know where to start or what was really feasible. I know the information is out there, but it takes time to go find it and figure it all out. Mikkel put together a session that was absolutely everything I needed to know to start building plug-ins immediately — and not a single thing I didn’t need. This was all signal, no noise and perfectly leveled for someone in my position. Another developer I talked to on the way out called it “three months of head banging frustration skipped over as a result of reading a dozen slides.”

Lotusphere 2009: Lotus changes the game!

I might have been out sick all day yesterday but I’ve seen enough during the week to be confirmed in the fact that IBM Lotus is changing the game when it relates to collaboration. XPages is great and will change the way applications are developed for the platform. This has been discussed online in the Yellow Bubble earlier but to see the XPage excitement by “the general public” is new and very nice to see.

XPages is a game changer. No doubt about it!

Seeing the stuff that Stephan Wissel showed in his Practical DXL Magic session only confirmed this. Remember that XPages is just XML underneath and one of his demos Stephan demoed how to create XPages from Notes view and Notes forms using DXL and XSLT. Now try to do equivalent stuff on any other platform!

Great stuff!