Boy Am I Bad At This Blogging Thing (and Notes 8.5)

Yep, I'm really bad at it. Sorry to my one reader out there. I've been terribly slack and I have no excuse other than it was Christmas, and I was on leave, and then I came back and I got the flu and then I went away for a couple of weekends, and it was Lotusphere (don't get too excited, I didn't get to go, I just played voyeur from afar) so I spent lots of time reading and not a lot writing.

Anyway, the big things that have happened (to me anyway) from a Domino perspective are:

iNotes Ultralite for the Apple iPhone 3G and

Notes/Domino 8.5

So, I, along with many of you I'm sure had been working with 8.5 through beta 1 and 2. I liked it, a lot. Obviously there were some issues, it was beta code after all. Anyway, as soon as it went to release I grabbed myself a copy and upgraded my clients.

My production client machine was running 8.0.2, and I went to do an upgrade. Initially it all looked fine, but in the end I had the same problem that I had on my test machine when I upgraded it from 8.0.2 to 8.5 beta 2 in that it just didn't seem to want to run. The splash screen would come up, but that was all. I waited and waited, but didn't get anywhere. So, nsd -kill, then Add/Remove programs and blow it all away, reinstall, fire it up and "Bob's your uncle" away we go. That was a few weeks ago now, and I have to say, every day I find more little things that I like. Of course there are also some that I don't, but overall I'm pretty happy. 

Obviously, the biggest change (for me anyway), is in designer. It's taken me a while to get used to it, but now I'm pretty happy with it. The only thing I've found irritating is that sometimes it seems to misplace my cursor. It's still there, and still responds (even though it's invisible) to the mouse and the keyboard, you just can't see it. Other than that though, as I said, I'm pretty happy.

xPages rock. I know a lot of people have been saying it for a while, and it's all a bit late, but they are fantastic. Anyone who does any web programming in Domino (and even notes programming in 8.5.1 apparently) will love them. They are really flexible, really easy and really good. If you haven't gotten there yet, ramp it up and have a go, you won't look back.

The other thing that I really like (mostly because my customers will love it) is the federated calendar stuff in the new mail template. I can't wait to upgrade the mail servers and the clients and get that out there. It's something that I've been getting asked for for a while now. The only disappointment is that I can't seem to work out how to federate a Quickr calendar and get that in there too. I'm not sure if it's just me, or whether it's just not there yet. I'll do some more investigation and let you know.

I'll post about Ultralite soon.

I promise I won't leave it this long next time :-0