Very cool new 3D History Browser Plugin For Notes

March 1 2010 09:00:00 AM Add/Read Comments [5]
As reported on Niklas Heidloff's blog, Hiroyuki Okamoto has created a very cool 3D history browser for Lotus Notes.  It currently only works on Windows, so even though it emulates the carousel feature made popular by Apple, it does not yet work on Macs.



I don't know anything about Eclipse plugin development, but I thought the point to moving to Eclipse was for cross platform support?  What is it about certain plugins that cause them to not work across OSes?
Also, is there anyway for the installer to know you are on unsupported platform, and tell you that? (and prevent the install)
  1. Carl Tyler
    1 | 3/1/2010 9:32:31 AM

    Yes the developer can make the install so that it only installs on the correct supported version of Notes and OS etc.

    Concerning why this stuff is not cross platform, well within eclipse you can still get access to native OS functions, if the developer does that then it won't be cross platform..

    My personal peeve with plug-ins, is that IBM often breaks them between releases, for example some plug-ins that work fine on Sametime 8.0.1 break in 8.0.2, things like that are very irritating.

    So this plug-in isn't really a history right, it's more a view of your open tabs at the moment?

  2. Alan Lepofsky
    2 | 3/1/2010 9:41:28 AM

    Hey Carl. Thanks, "making native OS calls" makes sense, I get it.

    I don't know if it is history or currently open, as I've not been able to use it yet. :-)

  3. mdmadph
    3 | 3/1/2010 10:49:40 AM

    Yeah, it's usually anything to do with 3D or any kind of composite rendering -- I have the same problem with certain Firefox extensions. They work only on Windows.

  4. Hiroyuki Okamoto
    4 | 3/1/2010 7:43:26 PM

    Alan,

    Thank you for introducing this app.

    The app renders graphics using OpenGL to utilize hi speed hardware rendering. (OpenGL is used in many 3D graphic games such as Doom or Quake.) The app uses Sun's JOGL - Java API for OpenGL, that consists of a couple of java .jar files and dll files (or shared libraries). Currently the app contains only Windows dll files. Now Im testing Mac and Linux version of the app. (I needed to modify my source code a little bit to support those platforms.) and actually the Mac version is working on my Mac. So give me a week or two. I will update the version. This app is still young. Please feel free to visit OpenNTF.org and post any questions or comments. I would like many people to try it out, and need to fix bugs and improve the app. That's how the open source project work. :)

    Carl,

    > Yes the developer can make the install

    Yeah. actually that's a bug. Eclipse in Notes has a mechanism to install/update plugins. All I have to do is to fix the feature.xml in the zip file, then should be ok.

    > So this plug-in isn't really a history right, it's more a view of your open tabs at the moment?

    It displays a list of the application tabs you have selected/switched before (rather than opened) on the current tab. (The app is not a separate app tab.) When you restart Notes, the app still remembers the last 30 tabs you have selected before. (see the animation on { Link } )

    mdmadph,

    probably there might be many reasons. In my case, I could not include Mac version in the initial release, because the Mac version had a crash problem somewhere in JOGL layer. (Now it is working on my Mac, but Im still testing the app on Mac.) Also, Im still testing the app on some Linux machines. After finishing the test on Mac and Linux, I will release the new version of the app (for Mac and Linux).

    Thanks,

    Hiro

  5. Alan Lepofsky
    5 | 3/1/2010 8:48:14 PM

    Hiro, thank you so much for the responses. I can't wait to try out the Mac version. Keep up the excellent work.