Tag: notes8

Imagine combining this with Notes 8!

I was directed to a site for an interesting product by my subscription to Eclipse news. The piece wasn’t on Eclipse per say but on a product based on Eclipse. The product is called Tasktop and looks awesome. There’s a *very* nice Flash demo as well that I recommend you take a look at.

So what’s so special about this? Well besides being a nice tool with some, what appears to be killer functionality, it’s written on the same platform as Notes 8! (that would be Eclipse for those who hasn’t guessed that) It wouldn’t be a monumental task to bring it into the Notes 8 client. How’s that for a context sensitive workbench? Combine it with the workflow of Notes – you could work wonders. Imagine having context tasks in Notes combined with links to activities, e-mails, databases, views, Notes documents, Sametime transcripts, Quickr documents, documents on file shares… It makes my mouth water!

Wow!

IBM should definitely pick up on this. That would be nothing like my dear old Notes client! It would be Notes on steroids!

P.S.: I know I went a little overboard with the exclamation marks! 🙂

developerWorks: IBM Lotus Notes composite application podcast series

I haven’t listened yet but it sounds interesting. Too bad there isn’t a RSS feed for the series available.

“In this three-part podcast series on composite applications, you hear about the application development benefits and capabilities of IBM® Lotus® Notes® and Domino® 8, about how to integrate your Eclipse™-based or IBM Lotus Expeditor-based applications with Lotus Notes and Domino 8 applications, and about how to create composite applications in Lotus Notes and Domino 8.”

developerWorks: IBM Lotus Notes composite application podcast series

Caveat when converting an Eclipse Java project to a plug-in project

Based on some advise I got in the “Meet the Developers” lab at Lotusphere I converted a Java project to a plug-in project in Eclipse today. This will make it easier to manage my dependencies instead of manually having to export the model classes as a jar and including that. I tried it before but it didn’t work. Today I found out why.

The conversion via right-clicking and choosing “Convert Projects to Plug-in Projects” (in the “PDE Tools” section) went fine but afterwards the classes from the plug-in wasn’t found by my sidebar plug-in in Notes 8. Compilation in Eclipse went fine.

The issues turned out to be caused by Eclipse not automatically adding the compiled classes to the plug-in. To solve this I had to open the manifest (MANIFEST.MF), switch to the “Build” tab and in the “Runtime Information” section add a library named “.” (yes a period) on the top left and the source code folder I wanted to include on the top right.

Once I did that everything went smoothly.

SWT @ Notes 8: Notes 8 design guidelines

This is the first post of what I plan to make a returning series of posts on using the SWT widget library in Notes 8 that is writing plug-ins, sidebar applications etc. I will als include posts on Java issues you need to consider. It’s always good to do a soft start so I will start by pointing to another post. Mary Beth Raven just published a link to the user experience design guidelines for Notes. 

"This white paper describes user-interface design and
interaction guidelines for designers and developers who
are building IBM® Lotus® Notes® applications, IBM Lotus
Sametime® V7.5 or later plug-ins, IBM Lotus Symphony™
plug-ins, IBM Lotus Expeditor plug-ins, or composite
applications (assembling any mixture of plug-ins, Lotus
Notes applications, and components built with IBM Lotus
Component Designer)."

There are a lot of gems such as programmers should refrain from using Question and Confirm dialog boxes and how to capitalize sentences. It sounds like small things but it’s important if we want a consistent interface.

Discovering Notes 8: More default browser woes?


As blogged previously there are more than one way to set the default browser for your Notes 8 Standard installation. For some reason the preferences didn’t take effect on my Microsoft Vista install so web links continued to open in IE much to my dismay. I finally found the solution to the issue with a little help from the trusted Notes 8 forum on developerWorks. Below is an excerpt from the solution.

“Hit windows button (start button), select “Default programs”, “Set program access and computer defaults”. Expand the “Custom” section, and set Firefox as default web browser and Lotus Notes as default e-mail program. If you reopen it, it will seem like your changes was not saved, but apparently they are.”

Thanks to Stein Sebak for posting the solution.

Localized versions of Notes 8 standard

For customers using languages other than English, French German or Japanese. A MUI install is necessary to get support for other languages. For more see the following post on Ed Brills blog (includes link to actual technote). For those speaking Spanish please read the comments on Eds blog as it could be that Spanish will be added to the mix.

Notes Client Multilingual User Interface (MUI) functionality changes for Notes 8.x

Apache Directory Studio

I’m currently on a Lotus Connections project and needed a LDAP browser to test authentication and searching. Previously I have been using a Java LDAP browser with a UI that really was lacking. Today I discovered Apache Directory Studio which is built on the Eclipse platform. The application is free and a really good LDAP browser. It also contains a LDIF editor.

The application is a full fletched LDAP browser and is made up of a couple of Eclipse features. You can download the application as a standalone RCP (rich client platform) application, as features for your existing Eclipse IDE but should actually just as well be able to use the LDAP browser directly from Notes 8 Standard. The LDAP browser ships with a perspective so it should be doable.

If it ran inside of Notes 8 it would be a killer admin. tool and easily distributable inside your organization.

I tried to install the perspective in Notes 8 but it isn’t possible since the features depend on the org.eclipse.search feature which isn’t shipped with Notes 8. org.eclipse.search is however supplied with the standard Eclipse 3.2.1 which is the same version as Expeditor 6.1.1 builds upon so it should be possible to download the Directory Studio source code and repackage the perspective to do a perspective which is installable in Notes 8.

For now however I have to run the application in Eclipse or as standalone.