Is it possible to love and hate something at the same time

Tim Savigar  December 8 2011 09:16:09 PM

I recently had to say goodbye to my Nokia N97 - it is very difficult to use a touch phone with a smashed screen!

I counted myself as a fan of the Nokia - granted it was buggy and did sometimes decide to reboot itself for no reason - its battery life was also pretty poor - there was not the huge selection of apps you would get for an iPhone or Android - but I found the phone excellent, used it for VOIP, the maps application was good and allowed you to pre-load maps and I loved the keyboard.

So my decisions were - new Nokia, iPhone or Android.

With Nokia self imploding this left me with a straight forward iPhone v Android decision. In the end I went for Android as I wanted VOIP and I wanted the keyboard.

So I have ended up with a HTC Desire Z - so here are the things I love

• Internet browser with Flash (though it doesn't seem to work for all content) - it is miles better than either Nokia or iPhone
• 7 Homepages
• The FriendStream - I finally get facebook, twitter etc
• Linkedin App
• Pulse - Having news widets on my homepage
• The integration and linking contacts details and birthdays in to the calendar and address book.

Here are the things I don't like:-

• Large internet usage bills - even though I had a data plan - the phone blew the limit - it seems it would download half the internet if it was allowed. I don't want to download all of European maps - I only want UK - I would like to do this off-line like I could with the Nokia.
• It is slow - can wait 30 seconds for phone to get in a state where I can make a call.
• Battery life is poor
• Travel mail and calendars appear as separate applications and do not link to the facebook calendar for instance - I would like to see all email and texts in one place and facebook birthdays and Lotus Notes calendar entries through one interface or widget on my desktop.
• No Traveler tasks - I used these quite heavily - ....please add this soon.
• I now realise how much I used the old slide switch on the side of the N97 to turn the screen off - keep calling people by accident.
• No multitasking - ie on the internet/email - need to make call - get back on internet/email - think the app closes

So do I like the new phone or not - don't know still trying to work it out!

• Comments [0]

IE 9 / Workspace

Tim Savigar  April 15 2011 02:46:32 PM

From the IE9 documentation.......anyone recognise these.....


Thinking about it what about this....


It seems as if the old fashioned Notes 3 workspace is making a come-back.

Now a suggestion for the next version of Notes. Why not take a note from Nokia's "workspace"


.....Allow developers extract information from the db other than the number of documents - show mini views, tickers etc etc. Allow users to change the size of the icons.....

.... the workspace is back...

• Comments [1]

Policies are suppose to mame life easier!

Tim Savigar  February 11 2011 02:23:31 PM

Rather than have all my Notes users have different user experiences I thought I would try to implement policies to simplify my admin overhead.

Well it has not been simplified to date. After a fair bit of thought about how to set the organisation so laptop users had different experience to desktop etc all was set up - however  I was not in the correct user roles the policies did not apply. After the initial implementation I thought all was well by was informed users had lost their Type ahead drop downs.

I made changes to the desktop policy but this did not seem to implement correctly - deleted the docs from $Policies view in my NAB - then no new policies for ages - could not figure out why! Then when policies were in no desktop policy - eventually I looked in the Address book and it had gone! Don't know where it went to but put it back and I now seem to be back up and running.

After much searching and scratching of heads this appears to be controlled firstly by the preference "Disable type-ahead for all name fields and use the Notes Basic type-ahead:" - which in turn sets the DISABLE_TYPEDOWN ini setting 0 is Drop downs on 1 Drop downs off - but there is some strange behaviour - just implementing policies appears to put a $DISABLE_TYPEDOWN=2 in to your ini file which has the same effect as DISABLE_TYPEDOWN=1. This policy does not seem to be implemented correctly as the other properties are - as the lock symbol is not shown.

All eventually fixed by putting the following in to my ini tab

$DISABLE_TYPEDOWN=0, Enforce
DISABLE_TYPEDOWN=0, Enforce

Lets hope this is fixed in 8.5.3 - I may have chance to get to looking at customising  my blog by then!

• Comments [1]

Off skiing

Tim Savigar  January 28 2011 08:10:10 AM

Coming to you from 10,000 feet. Off on a skiing trip with the Cobham Rugby Vets team - wish me luck! So after 3 hours sleep it is off to Gatwick - Lyon and then the slopes.

One of the things I love about Notes is the ability to take applications off line easily and grab a few minutes updating things. Replication is something others haven't really got - the lasted version of Outlook is slowly getting there with its caching ability - but still that only works for your mail file - I could not update my blog using Outlook now could I.

Now lets see if I can customise this blog......

Well after saying everything about being able to work off-line it appears that the domino blog is not able to do web previews off-line - as the system generates the html from the configuration documents - and file paths the generated html points to thin air!

Looks more and more likely I will be spending my time customising the blogshere app.

• Comments [0]

Customising blog

Tim Savigar  January 27 2011 10:02:14 AM

Spent some time yesterday trying to customise the blog - while Steve has put some useful information on his blog re updating the look and feel I am finding it slow going.

I have managed to add a nice RSS logo to the right by importing a image file and adding the following HTML to the RightSideBar Template block



But  trying to add more than the simplest of additional items proved a bit more demanding - tried adding a new banner to mirror our website - got it to work but the rest of the page did not move down - it appears that there is a lot being controlled but the CSS - tried to change the font without much success - so I have started looking elsewhere!

One of the reasons of taking this on was to try to learn xPages - it appears as if the domino blog does not use them - so I have found Blogsphere on OpenNsf - this does use xPages - but is a bit raw and does require you to install the XPages Extension Library on to the server - so not quite as simple as it looks.

First impressions of blogsphere are OK - I have read that graphics do not appear on the page yet - will have to investigate that - there does not seem to be many downloads or activity on opennsf so the jury is still open there. The interesting thing about Blogsphere is that it is 100% xPages. While I get the theory in practice it means putting up with an inferior editor than you would get with a Lotus Notes application. Why would you want to loose your notes client features?

• Comments [0]

Implementing the domino-blog

Tim Savigar  January 24 2011 05:00:00 PM

So here I go in to the brave new world of blogging.

I have downloaded the dominoblog template from OpenNTF

The first issue was working out how to download the file (click on releases and then on the name of the file)

(Update - I subsequently have found a later version on our 8.5.2 server - so did a design re-fresh)

Once I had the file - I created a new file based on the design, updated the ACLs and signed the database - then uploaded it to the server.

I have managed to customise the image - following Steve's blog

Basic functionality seems to work out of the box - content feed and comment feeds were not working out of the box - missing the encoding from the configuration - Syndication - RSS feeds tab....had to add "iso-8859-1" and then it works.

Web access was also not working - had to update ACL to give me [webcompose] role.

So now I have a basic blog

I now want to customise it to fit in with the company look and feel but before that some observations.
Versioning - does not appear to be implemented - have wasted quite a bit of time trying to get the get a new version of the page to display - but from looking at the code I do not think this has been implemented.
Updates - It can take a few minutes for small tweeks to displayed - not sure why - I am working off-line and replicating the db up to the server - It appears that there must be some kind of caching going on somewhere on the server/code or browser - not worked out where yet - but beware - your changes will not show straight away!

• Comments [0]

Hello world

Tim Savigar  January 24 2011 04:15:21 PM

So the traditional starting point for any new enterprise - the "Hello World" post!

• Comments [136]