The story of a laptop

It takes a LOT to annoy me – but I am officially annoyed.

My laptop has gone belly up. It has a history of sorts.

It was bought in the past year – by my employer – before I was able to insist on XP. Yep I got a Vista machine – I HATE Vista by the way.

So after much mucking around I got XP on it and it worked really well too.

Two weeks ago I got a nice attack of spyware, which seemed to appear after a boot up – and couldn’t be removed. I don’t recall clicking anything outlandish. Oh well, a re-build was required. I did that 2 weeks ago. All seemed to be fine until this morning – and Blue Screen of death. And no way around it. Safe mode, last known good, nadda.

So thanks to my saviour Joe I got the files of the hard drive and now I’m faced with a few hours of re-build and all I have is my initial Vista recovery disks.

So I’ll have a Vista laptop tomorrow.

I am annoyed.

Having an argument…….

All,

I saw an article on Macworld.com ( http://www.macworld.com/article/137032/2008/11/iphone_push_email.html ) listing 7 ways to push mail to the iphone without Microsoft Exchange ….. and didn’t mention Lotus Domino! After a comment was added pointing this out, an obviously biased anti-domino reader decieded to add the following:

“What are we missing? Notes? Domino? Slow applications with a UI that looks like it was designed with Visio 1.0?”

So, I decided to take the Pro-Lotus Domino side and take him on. Can’t stand people who have a gripe without knowing anything about the product.

If any other Domino people out there want to help me slam-dunk this guy – please feel free.

No truth to the rumor….

That Darragh is auditioning for a role in Killinscully.

NFL.com shows the way forward

Whilst wallowing in the New York Giants’ 4-0 start to the regular season, I drifted onto NFL.com this morning, and received a pleasant surprise.

The NFL.com site really fills a PC screen with images, flash and automatic Ajax calls to update content -not usually a good site for the iPhone.

However, the site detected my iphonne safari browser and through their wap.NFL.com URL, provided an excellent stripped down version of the site that felt like the MLB’s superior ‘At-Bat’ iPhone app (highly recommended for baseball fans).

A lesson in simple yet extremely effective design for all us web developers!

And the Giants give a lesson to the crowd-noise-piping Seahawks!

iNotes on iPhone – after a few hours….

iNotes on the iPhone

 OK, I spent a few hours last night looking at iNotes Ultralite on the iPhone, so a few initial thoughts….

The Good Things…

1) It’s fast! Over broadband it’s as fast as my native Gmail account on the iPhone. 3G is not far behind – if you can get O2 3G in Ireland (that’s for another blog entry).

2) It’s a LOT better presented than native Gmail, where the folders are all listed with no icons – I prefer icon views! The presentation of the mail views and the mai form itself blows the native email apps away.

3) It’s more secure than native Gmail on the iPhone as the username and password are not stored on the phone itself. No mails are stored on it either!

4) I like the refresh icon on the mail views.

5) The badge on the Inbox showing how many unread mails I have is very iPhone!

6) Attachments icon is present and attachments do open – though in a new Safari window! This means that you can flick from one to the other (which is really nice) but there is a limit of 8 safari windows on the iPhone AND the attachments cannot be edited. Mind you they can’t be edited on native Gmail either.
What it doesn’t do…

1) Allow you to attach a file to a new mail. Native Gmail on the iPhone doesn’t allow this either (images can be emailed, but only via the photo app on the phone). It’s time for the iPhone to have a finder application on it – I have file storing apps on the iPhone but they’re limited.

2) Allow you to move emails to folders. It does allow the deleting of emails – but not more than 1 at a time. Native Gmail allows this.

3) None of the iNotes preferences are supported. I only really use ‘Out-of-office’ and password change on my iNotes – it would be nice to have these on it especially as gmail does not have this functionality.

4) Can’t add or edit or delete a calendar entry.

5) The address fields don’t automatically pick up contacts in that nice ajax way that the Notes Client does. The little address refresh icon in full iNotes is not present either. There is a ‘Contacts’ list available seperately – but you get the feeling that an ajax-like pop-up would be much better. However I did send a test email to ‘Barry Hughes’ and it got to me no problem.

INITIAL VERDICT

Overall, It’s a very impressive way to access, send and view Notes mail and though it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, it has enough to make it essential for any iPhone-Lotus Notes users out there – and gives Lotus Notes mail a LOT more business appeal.

iNotes on the iPhone

Just ‘installed’ iNotes Ultra lite on the iPhone and it’s actually quite impressive.

I read a Macworld article published today, that IBM have just released a Lotus Notes client for the iPhone – as a FREE download from the Apple App Store!

As a Lotus user and an iphone owner, you can imagine that got my immediate attention.

As it happens, it is NOT available from the App Store. Instead I had to open my work mail file with Safari and when I get the “This browser is not supported page” (Could someone in IBM change the look of this page – It screams “go away!”) click the Notes Ultralite button.

The resulting web page should be saved to the Home Screen on the phone. Instead of a webclip, you get a Lotus Icon – though it still works like a web clip via safari.

Obviously you need a mail file on a domino server for this to work. Obviously (# 2)Native support on the iphone for Domino mail would be a lot better, but my initial reaction is good – though I think my work log-in screen will have to be more iphone friendly.

So over the next week I’m going to give it a good whirl. I’ll report back.

3 Months Old Today

The Dude with the Hood!

Current Podcasts

A quick list of the podcasts I subscribe to:

Ian Dempsey breakfast show

Colm and Jim-Jim breakfast show (duggie and gitsy are class)

Taking Notes (the last one with Ed Brill and Dwight Morse was excellent!)

Stephen Fry’s podgrams

Apple Gazette Daily

San Francisco Giants – Chronicle podcast

New York Giants official podcasts

Discovery channel video podcasts

Talking History – Newstalk 106

Macworld video podcast

Official LOST podcast

RTE – conversations with Eamon Dunphy

All Finished Operations Window

Just noticed a new pane in the Domino R8.5 BETA 2 designer client that is VERY WELCOME!

It seems to be called the ‘All Finished Operations’ pane and it gives you information on the progress of tasks being run by the Designer client itself.

Domino Designer R8.5 BETA 2 - All Finished Operations Pane

Now maybe I just hadn’t spotted this window in previous versions of the client and it’s not new – it’s just new to me! It seems to give information on process that are happening in the background of the designer – like “Yes I’m opening that huge database on the company server that ain’t exactly next door – hold your horses!”

A very welcome addition to the client. It certainly beats the flashing lightening symbol on the bottom right on the client telling us very little.

8.5 (BETA 2) – A Clarification

First things first, my thanks to Paul Mooney for letting the Domino community know about my blog – I’ll have to write stuff for it now!

On my last 2 posts, I have been telling people about my experience with Domino 8.5 BETA 2. I explained where I was coming from on the first post on the subject and that I am using the beta. However, on my last one – where I was pointing out a problem with the working sets functionality I didn;t make it clear that it was a BETA.

Apologies for the confusion. I did say in my first post on the subject that I am using the beta 8.5.2 release. I have added the word BETA to the title of the confusing post.

Overall it has been a positive changeover to eclipse, but as a 10 year Domino developer, I’d like people to know how I’m getting on with the new environment and if any IBM people get this feeedback and fix these minor gliches, it might allieviate a future headache or two for us all.

On the upside, I’m getting visitors and causing controversy. Huzzah!