IBM makes a liar out of me
A few weeks before Lotusphere I was on a call with some of the key folks at Lotus working on Notes 8, doing what the design partners are supposed to do -- give intense but private criticism on what we see in the pre-release code. There were many things discussed during that call (a number of which would have been dropped if they'd been able to just tell me about Quickr, but some access <> all access. hehe ) but I kept trying to avoid talking about the feed reader. Finally I just blurted out "it's not that I don't like the reader.... it's that I hate it."
Why, you ask? Indulge me with a little Socratic method...
Lotusphere attendee: "I really like the feed reader in Notes 8."
Me: "You won't when you have it. It's an exercise in frustration."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, the reader gets the entire content from the source feed, just like you'd expect. And it writes it to a local Notes database, just like you'd expect, where every article is a document. And it stores the complete HTML in that local document, probably like you'd expect. However, when you double-click an article in the reader, it launches the URL in your browser of choice. So even though you've already got a complete local copy of the data, you're forced to go out to the 'net and pull it down over the wire again. And if you don't have a 'net connection, even though you already have the complete HTML from the article in that local database, you can't READ it."
"Wow. That sucks."
"Pretty much, yeah."
(This issue was also touched on at Ed Brill's blog.)
Well, Jeff Eisen apparently considers "hate" a strong word. In a quest to make me eat my strong words, someone on the team checked in code for the feed reader to actually surface the local content. Which means now Notes 8 has an offline feed reader capability!
I love it. It's not perfect, and I'm sure there will be hundreds of requests for feature adds. But it's just the exact step that puts a Notes signature on this tool. NOW it acts like it belongs in Notes 8. Kudos to Jeff and everybody on the Notes 8 dev team involved in making this happen! If you guys keep making a liar out of me whenever I have a complaint about your products... well, I don't know what will happen to your product sales, but I'll come to Westford and stand in the hallways, clap my hands and scream "Ready? O! K!.... Gimme an N!" (You get the idea.)
Comments
Posted by Bruce Elgort At 08:58:46 AM On 02/07/2007 |
Posted by Rob McDonagh At 09:57:01 AM On 02/07/2007 |
Posted by john head At 11:40:46 AM On 02/07/2007 |
In Firefox, if you middle-click on a link or right-click and select "Open In New Tab", you know what happens. Any chance something similar happens when doing the same thing on a document in a Notes view? I would use the heck out of that.
Posted by Timothy Briley At 03:23:52 PM On 02/07/2007 |
Posted by Duffbert At 05:12:11 PM On 02/07/2007 |
Posted by Duffbert At 05:12:12 PM On 02/07/2007 |
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 07:56:18 PM On 02/07/2007 |
Interesting that IBM took more issue with one word on a conf call than the many many comments on Ed's blog at the time of that discussion...
Posted by Stuart McIntyre At 05:23:11 AM On 02/08/2007 |
Posted by Ed Brill At 09:11:09 AM On 02/08/2007 |
To translate this to Notes, imagine double-clicking on a doc at the view level with your middle button instead of the left button and the result being that although the doc opens in a new tab, the view remains the current tab.
This behavior would be handy for those times you need to open several docs in the same view.
While this may seem trivial, I'm sure that many thought the same thing about this behavior in Firefox and it's one of my favorite features.
Posted by Timothy Briley At 10:17:32 AM On 02/08/2007 |
Now, in 8, you can turn off the default items in the right-click. And therefore, it's easier to stomach adding your own. And it wouldn't be terribly difficult to, with your own code, open a document, then switch back to the view you started from. In which case, you can create this behavior yourself.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 10:36:38 AM On 02/08/2007 |
Posted by Chris Whisonant At 11:52:46 AM On 02/08/2007 |
No, I think the zdnet one just happened to be a post in someone's Notes blog (I forget which one -- can't find it now). The icon comes from the site of each feed
Posted by Jeff Eisen At 08:54:37 AM On 02/09/2007 |