81–90 of 113 posts
It got so popular - you could do your work using Thunderbird instead of Notes - that Windows users wanted to run Linux VMs to run Fetchnotes and not have to use Notes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lotus Notes as a thick client application was a dead end but the Domino server could have lived on as a back end database for web applications, if IBM had any vision. The core technology of a fast, secure NoSQL document database with multi-master replication actually worked really well (at least after they fixed the index corruption race condition bug that I found). But it had a weird stupid limit of (I think) 64GB p…
Look at the history of Lotus Notes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes#History )Development began in 1984. 64MB was large back then, maybe 64GB total was seen, but multiples of 64GB? I guess Lotus/IBM decided to stop upgrading Lotus Notes as computer limits were increased. Obligatory Damien Katz Lotus Notes Formula Engine Rewrite (it is a great story but also shows the limits the original devs had to deal with;…
Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model.
Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.
I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…
There were many reasons Notes died. It was very hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export. Internet email killed Notes early advantage as one of the first email systems. It was a very closed environment hard to connect or program outside its own sandbox. Sharepoint was a full on assault by Microsoft on the groupware category and its enormous success was at the expense of Notes. Th…
Lotus/IBM took an extremely flexible, encrypted, document-oriented database with a powerful RAD client platform and tried to sell it as a competitor to Outlook-Exchange. And Outlook-Exchange won, because as terrible as it was (and it was much worse then than it is now) it still had a better user experience than Notes Mail. Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular…
I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…
With everything as a note, how was it so performant? How did it scale so well?
It was bad. There was a dedicated site called lotusnotessucks.com or something like that. It does not exist anymore but here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...
Same. There was a running joke that there's exactly two people who love Lotus Notes: The boss, cos they signed off on it and can never be wrong and it shows commitment to productivity increases and nobody got fired for buying IBM and bla bla bla. The other person was the guy implementing it, cos money, money, money! The boots on the ground cried "ugh, Lotus Notes!" in unison and just had to deal with byzantine key co…
I don't recall the client having much crashing and unresponsive issues, but I do recall people finding the UI unintuitive compared to MS products, and of course the custom products built with Notes could vary quite a bit. But so does the web, particularly the early web.
But then you can say the same thing about people building Excel apps and that has been a selling point. Or Powerpoint presentations that people complain about but keep using.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't entirely buy it, If true that should have killed the web, perhaps the web survived because it was not a product.
There were UX horror stories on the web as well. I guess it is the physical connection of having to start up your Notes application in work and being forced to use poorly designed apps.
Whereas many Notes applications were internal so there was no "survival of the fittest" and the UI toolkit was passable at best. As a result, many Notes users never experienced a well-designed Notes app.
One such contract was to exfiltrate a Notes based application and it's data in to a new application. Apparently integration was the real issue at hand and I can understand why after just dipping my toes into Notes. I can see how easy Notes is to create things, It was nicer than MS Access IMO. But trying to reverse engineer from said apps was painful to say the least. It turns out that the app in question ws so broadly hated, that 3 different groups had already been doing the exact same thing, with 2 others looking into it. They decided to look at the different teams in place and pick one to move forward. It wasn't the team I was on that was kept and so ends my experience with Lotus/IBM Notes.
As a pure employee a few years earlier, Notes was pretty nifty, it was used to integrate just about everything in the company. Definitely gives insight into where a lot of Dilbert jokes came from, definitely from Notes. Though allowing JavaScript in HTML email with early Outlook was a really bad design decision as well.
I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…
Notes isn't exactly dead. A couple of years ago I helped a swedish county extract social services data from a system built on it, which is still in use by quite a few other counties. Among other things I wrote a batch converter from the XML based export format to PDF files packaged according to a standard for digital archives, and we brought on a specialised consultant to help us out inventing an export for system lo…