July 3rd, 2008
Yes, You Can Run Second Life inside Lotus Notes! (or any other Win32 app)
There has been a lot of hype in the Lotus community as of late about the upcoming capabilities of Domino XPages. What follows is always "But what about new features for the Notes client?" In my opinion Composite Applications for the Notes 8 client are one of the coolest things we've ever done, but I'm disappointed that they are not talked about all that much.
Here are four videos showing examples of composite applications:
- IBM Lotus Notes 8 - banking composite application - Part 1
- IBM Lotus Notes 8 - banking composite application - Part 2
- Lotus Notes 8 Composite Application Capability: Lead Manager
- Lotus Notes 8 Smart Assist Composite Application Demo
Last year Lotus released a library of 22 components that developers can use to make composite applications in Lotus Notes 8.
Lotus plans on releasing a big update to that library very soon, and you can have a sneak peak!
A few of the things that the first sneak peak mentions are:
- Update Site and Documentation Site are now separate.
- A lot more than 22 components, and you can install features at a lower level of granularity.
- Includes new components not just for composite applications, but also for the sidebar, and menu extensions.
At 2:40, notice the Export View As Spreadsheet! I want to try that one.
In the second sneak peak you are shown how to run a Win32 component inside Lotus Notes as part of a composite application. The example used is Second Life!
So if you are a Lotus developer, take a look into Composite Applications. Here are some key resources:
- Lotus Notes component development in Composite Applications Wiki
- IBM Lotus Notes composite Application blog
- IBM Lotus Notes composite application podcast series
- Designing composite applications: IBM Lotus Notes components
- Developing composite applications: Composite application assembly, part 1
July 2nd, 2008
Search Scopes
When you want to find something online, search scopes allow you to choose the location you want to search.
On the left is Lotus Notes 8, the right Firefox. Both products let you simply click on the left side of the search box to be provided with a drop down list of choices of search engines.
In a future version of Lotus Notes, I hope it will be easier to develop, install, and manage additional scopes, as well as a catalog of them open to the community, with lots of developers contributing! I believe all of these things are being worked on.
July 2nd, 2008
iPhone 2 has Lotus Notes Like Selection
Watching the new iPhone video, I could not help but notice that the new software pays respect to the long standing Lotus Notes selection model! (yes, it went away in 8, we've learned and put it back!)
The iPhone appears to have an annoying extra step of having to click Edit first though.
July 1st, 2008
Happy Canada Day, eh!
Happy 141st Birthday Canada!
To get your party on, please check out my favourite Canadian band, The Great Big Sea's new album Fortune's Favour.
Also, here are some lists of Canadian actors, athletes, bands, and musicians!
Enjoy, eh!
July 1st, 2008
Lifehacker on Firefox 3
Lifehacker has two good articles on Firefox 3: Top 10 Firefox 3 Features and Power User's Guide to Firefox 3
Before anyone posts it, yes I know about the current lack of support for FF3 and Lotus Connections 2.0.
June 30th, 2008
XPages Round Up
For those of you in my audience that are application developers, hopefully by now you know that XPages are going to be one of the hottest things to hit the Domino world in years.
As defined in the Domino Web App Dev Wiki, "An XPage is a new design element based on JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology that lets developers create Web 2.0 enabled pages for use in Web browser applications running on Domino 8.5. "
The Taking Notes gang has just released a new podcast to help you get you up to speed: Taking Notes Episode 83: XPages and Yellow Water
Several bloggers have been writing about XPages, here are some of the articles I know about: (in no specific order)
- Rob McDonagh - XPages in Domino Designer 8.5
- Nathan Freeman - Why Xpages Are Better Than Cake and Ice Cream
- John Mackey has several blog postings on XPages
- John Head - XPages Comes of Age
- Andrew Pollack wrote one of the original articles, XPages in Domino Designer, and has posted several times about them. 1 2 3 4 5.
Here is the IBM Lotus Designer 8.5 - XPages Hello World sample application. This is part of a getting started tutorial for XPages in the 'Lotus Domino Designer Basic User Guide'.
I heard a rumour that someone might start a blog that aggregates all XPages related content into one place.
June 29th, 2008
Use High Def Stupid!
I wish my television cable converter box could redirect channels the way web sites can for URLs. For example, if I choose Channel X, but I also have Channel X in high definition, I wish my TV would just go there!
I also wish my channel guide would only display shows available to me. I know they show everything on purpose, so that you DO SEE what you are missing, and you buy it, but I can still wish. ;-)
I used to complain that computers should be as easy to use as televisions. You just press power on/off, channel up/down, and volume up/down. Done. Unfortunately now with the combination of cable boxes, DVRs, media centers, surround sound systems, Blu-ray players, etc, TV is becoming rocket science!
June 24th, 2008
Lotus Connections + Quickr + Sametime Bundle
"IBM Lotus CEO Community Collaboration Bundle combines the benefits of the latest releases of IBM Lotus Connections, IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced, and IBM Lotus Quickr, offering a complete collaboration solution at a great value."
June 23rd, 2008
Revisting Accessing Your Mail Locally
A while ago I started a series of tips with the intent of explaining how to access your email from the hard drive of your own computer, instead of on the server over the network. This is called "working locally", or "using a local mail file replica". Working this way provides benefits in speed, searching, off-line access, and more.
I wrote the first two tips
Local Mail - Part 1: Explaining Local vs. Server, and
Local Mail - Part 2: Checking the size of your mail file
but then I got side tracked as I tend to do! Then last week I was helping an IBM colleague with their mail, and we discovered that while they thought they were using their email locally, they actually were not. I bet this is a very common situation, so I was motivated to get back to writing about this.
Here are the topics I plan on writing about to round out the series...
Local Mail - Part 3: Creating your new local mail file.
Local Mail - Part 4: Configuring Lotus Notes to use the local replica.
Local Mail - Part 5: Configuring the schedule for when Lotus Notes will check for new mail.
Local Mail - Part 6: Tying it all together.
June 19th, 2008
Connections Kicks Sharepoints Butt
In case you missed the initial coverage from Enterprise 2.0, the good news is surfacing again! Mike Gotta from The Burton Group has just blogged his summary of the E2.0 Conference: Social Computing Platforms (IBM & Microsoft) session which he moderated. My favourite quotes from the summary are:
"IBM was the clear winner across the board. The storyline and narrative woven around the presentation and demonstrations was near-perfect."
"Clearly, Microsoft did a poor job of showing and explaining why business and/or technical decision-makers should consider SharePoint as a credible solution to meet the social computing needs of an organization."
Anyone working someone thinking about Sharepoint, please read this.
June 18th, 2008
Since so many others seem to be doing it, here is my Wordle
Here is my resume as a tag cloud. This is done using the very cool web site Wordle, created by IBM researcher Jonathan Feinberg, who used to be the drummer for They Might Be Giants and Lisa Loeb!
June 18th, 2008
Lotus Mashups Blog
Here is a great new Lotus blog for your to add to your reading list. Mix and Mash Blog: Musings on Enterprise Mashups
June 18th, 2008
Review: Symphony Sings As Office Clone
CRN has published a great article, Review: Symphony Sings As Office Clone
"Lotus Symphony has a slicker interface, uncluttered menus, and a number of user accessibility options that make it a more attractive option than Open Office."
"Instead of opening up three different programs to look at Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, they can all be mixed and matched in one single window. It's a nice touch, considering how ubiquitous tabs have become in Web browsers, and makes the suite much more memory efficient and simple to use."
"IBM has improved the OpenOffice.org code to make Lotus Symphony more accessible to screen readers for visually disabled users. Keyboard shortcuts are also more systematic and useful under Symphony than for OpenOffice."
"The sidebar never gets crowded, unlike the oft-maligned ribbon in Office 2007."
"The Test Center found Symphony a snap to use, and switching to Symphony after years of using Microsoft Office was painless. While Open Office was a nice alternative, Symphony looks and works much more elegantly while keeping the free price tag."
June 18th, 2008
Notes 8.5 Sidebar Real Estate Foreclosure
Location. Location. Location.
With the introduction of the sidebar in Notes 8.0, a lot of great new features were put conveniently at our finger tips. From the sidebar you can easily see your calendar, start a chat, add a Google gadget (ex: for converting currency), add a view from a Lotus Notes database, or even have coloured fish chase your mouse pointer around the screen! (who says you can't have some fun at work!)
However, when you start adding multiple sidebar panels, you can run out of useable screen space quickly, especially on smaller (or lower resolution) monitors.
There are some things you can do, such as hide the panel, or float them in their own windows.
But starting with Lotus Notes 8.5*, there will be a better way. You can now minimize a panel...
... down to an icon that shows at the bottom of the sidebar.
I really like this!
* Any and all features can change between now and shipped - signed IBM's lawyers!!!
June 17th, 2008
Tagging My Local Files
One of my favourite things about "web 2.0" is the extensive use of tagging to help define an object. Tags on files and tags on people help me find things so much easier than "searching".
A week or so ago, I had a very embarrassing moment where I was trying to find a file on my hard drive that I knew was there, but I fumbled around for 10 minutes to find it! I keep thinking "What directory did I put it in? What is it named? When was it created?" Who cares!!! I knew what it was about, who the author was, and the content of some of the slides. I should have been able to find it easily. The irony is, I knew exactly where it was stored on-line!
So this weekend I Twittered about this pain, and many people responded to me with some options. Go social networking!
At the moment I am trying a program called tag2find on my Windows laptop. Volker provided me some great looking alternatives for Mac: Tagbot, Punakea, Leap, Nifty-Box.
What I really wish I had was a full off-line repository, which synched with my on-line storage, and shared the tags. I sense an opportunity for a future version of Quickr.
