The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

I think I agree both with those who say LN sucks and those who say it is great. The reason why, in my opinion LN is really a development environment, not a finished piece of software. Yes, you do have a mail client, but it is cumbersome and bloated. But what I remember from the brief time I frequented Notes users groups, the people who came to Notes users groups were predominately application developers. And someone said their company just uses the standard templates and mail client, and says users hate it (just like people in our organization).

But in the innards of Notes/Domino, it knows about security, and authorizations for individual users, so I can see it is a powerful tool.

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Lotus Notes 7.0 will support Mac OSX. The date given was approximately 6 months after 7.0 shipped, I expect we'll get an update at Lotusphere this week in Orlando, FL.

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My university uses Lotus Notes, it sucks, but hey, whatever makes them happy.

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In our company, the fact that Lotus Notes releases for Mac lagged those for DOS or were less complete seriously and perhaps fatally doomed Apple as an approved vendor. I have seldom seen this issue mentioned as one of the principal reasons that Apple has not been allowed within corporate America. Most large national and international financial, accounting and consulting firms with which I am most familiar use Lotus Notes for email exclusively. It's simply a security issue. Notes email is quite obviously more secure than any email offering from Microsoft.

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I think you are slightly confused. Notes version 6.5 supports 10.4 as well. I am using version 6.5.5 on OS X 10.4.4.

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I work in a health-care research company. 1% of the computers are macs in the company's research department, and they have absolutely no influance on the software decision for the rest of the company.

I find their logic hard to believe.

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I use Lotus Notes at work - as a matter of fact, I am the Lotus Notes Administrator and Developer for my company. Lotus Notes is not only "still around" it's awesome. We use it to **securely** manage our email, web site and groupware applications. The fact that IBM might support it on Macs more than they do now it good news. Hopefully they will bring back the designer and admin clients that someone like myself needs. They pulled those with Notes 6 and only offered the standard client, and even then it was a poorly ported app. Hopefully this means they'll actually develop something for the Mac instead of do some sort of wrapper port of the windows version.

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The reference to "pink" deserves some comment. I'm not entirely sure if you are describing the same thing or not, but there was a joint Object Oriented operating system project undertaken by both Apple and IBM back before OS X. It was code named "pink". The name "pink" came from the pink 3x5 cards the project design features were written upon by the project manager. As I remember it, there were blue cards too but these features were left out of scope.

It was an internal project name.

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I use lotus notes at work. I work for an insurance company called Humana. Lotus Notes sucks incredibly.

We use it they say for security. People leave their work stations unlocked all the time though.

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Joseph Matt said : "My university uses Lotus Notes, it sucks.."

portorikan said : "I use lotus notes at work. I work for an insurance company called Humana. Lotus Notes sucks incredibly."

You seem to agree. Which way do you think it sucks? Could you align a few reasons ? I do not have any practice of LN and will soon have the choice to get into it.

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We use Lotus Notes 6.5.5 at work and it does suck. I think the biggest problem is with the UI. It is not user friendly at all. I have never seen a program so dependent on "agents" to run to perform basic tasks. Out of Office for example...an agent has to run. If it gets stuck then your Out of Office won't work.

NSD errors are also alot of fun. Get those everyonce in a while when just trying to perform basic email functionality. Have re-loaded Notes multiple times.

If you are stuck using the horrible Notes UI - go download the Outlook 2003 plug in for Notes. It lets you use Outlook 2003 to connect to Notes. THANK YOU MICROSOFT for putting lipstick on this pig.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8EBBBA59-5F17-4E52-8980-C4F0DFA92D65&displaylang=en

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I used Lotus Notes at my last workplace. In my 20 years in front of computers, I have NEVER used a bigger piece of garbage than Lotus Notes. It's software that should've been put to death a LONG time ago. I almost cried when I read the headline.

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Lotus notes still exists.

And it sucks

The only software I'm forced to use at work that I hate more than LN is SAP.

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Such hard words for Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino is actually a very powerfull development platform that in certain areas can outperform any other platform out there.

I am co-owner of a small Lotus Domino development house. We've been blowing the doors off of nearly every competitor we've been alowed to go up against and Notes just keep getting better despite IBM's bumbling of the product. (Lotus was a lean-mean company before IBM purchased them)

Sometimes we throw stones at things we don't understand.

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"Such hard words for Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino is actually a very powerfull development platform that in certain areas can outperform any other platform out there."

The user interface is crap.

Its slow.

My company uses it for just about everything that would be better designed & implemented with simple HTML.

Not only that, but they also pay a LOT more for LN dev than they'd ever have paid for a faster, easier to use, and more portable web interface.

I'd like to see something done in LN that couldn't be done somewhere else.

Hell, I'd like to see something done with LN that doesn't suck.

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I have to use Notes at work (5.0... I dream of 6.5!) and it is without doubt the worst piece of software I have ever used.

It is so bad it both sucks and blows!

The UI is truely awful - 'standards' such ast Ctrl-A don't work, it looks like shit, there is no indication on an email in your inbox as to whether you have replied or forwarded it, and on and on...

It is horrible!

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I use 6.5.4 at work and it has icons to show whether or not I have forwarded my mail etc. We've been using Notes since R5 and to be honest I quite like it. An added advantage is that most email borne virii don't know how to deal with your notes address book so what affects outlook users bypasses us.

ctrl-a in notes selects all documents.

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i just left a job with lotus email (on a mac) and am using exchange-based mail via entourage for the first time (on a mac). evey day that i log in, i am happy to be free of lotus notes. every day that i go home and simply log onto my mail via browser i'm happy. i always hated using lotus, but never realized how much i hated it til i used something else. we used to always joke that the whole reason we were enduring this awful software was security--like anyone cares what we're emailing! we're not the fbi!

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Here is the actual meaning of the index cards used in the late 80's to define apple's goals for the coming decade in the 90's. It was the red cards (R&D) not the blue cards (next release) was the set left "out of scope" in apple's development plans in the ninties.

Herewith a small reprise ...

* the blue cards were for ideas that would be immediately implemented in the next product (System 7). It was an impressive achiev ement in catchup. Blue back-filled the many of the features which had been dropped out of the orginal Lisa (which was down-sized to create a consumer-oriented platform, ie the Macintosh) and to try and recover some of the features left out of the Lisa from xerox STAR calibre of platforms.

(eg crucial system-level features like Publish & Subscribe, which extended the historical, modular unix process model of, inter alia piping ... the goal of this feature was to automate the manual drag n drop operation as the mechanism to connect parts of a task, by defining a general purpose representation that allowed data to move transparently (without user commands) from one state to another. Stationary was another important, forward looking technology - its goal was to allow the user to adapt pre-existing objects to his own use (without having to be invloved in the internal implementation details); this follwed along the general, core apple design philosophy of having the machine 'imitiate' the user rather than the other way around).

Its successor, known as Copland (System 8) was supposed to be a transition platform between great object-based abstraction of a procedural paradigm (Mac) to the next generation of a pure object-oriented system. The bridge technology between procedures and frameworks in Copland was the idea of interchangeable components (known as OpenDoc). But Copland was derailed because of internal management failures. The "classic" mac OS basically continued without any profound improvement for another decade until OS/X arrived.


* the pink cards were for those feature which could not be implemented in the immediate future in System 7 because they required a fundemental new engerring architecture. This team worked for a couple of years in-house (growing to nearly a couple of hundred staff) before the project became a joint venture with IBM, called Taligent (as in 'Talent' + 'Intelligence').

The pink project remained on course for another 3 years until politics inside IBM and finances inside Apple made it nearly commercially impossible for Taligent fight the sudden juggernaut of microsoft in the mid ninties. By the time Taligent did start shipping a deliverable (a nice runtime called CommonPoint), it had lost the support of its sponsors

(which now included HP, who had joined apple & ibm as equity partners in taligent ... ironically, in an attempt to cover its bets, HP had recently acquired a license to sell NextStep so it could sell whichever platform customers wanted. IBM has previously also acquired a license for NextStep for $10M, but it was never deployed because Steve Jobs resisted the kind of control that big blue wanted to excert in order to avoid a a repitition of its debacle with microsoft, in which a supplier hi-jacked a platform).

The fate of taligent was not a pretty one. Apple sold its stake (in its own crown jewels), leaving it high & dry for years afterwards - there was no transitional platform (copland) and no destination platform (taligent).

In despration, it looked at BE/OS as a replacement but ex-apple (and egoist supreme) de Gasse wanted too much money for a nice but immature object-oriented platform.

It was a chance conversation between mid-level managers at Next & Apple in late 1996 that led to the decision to purchase Next as a last-ditch replacement (there had been not super serious consideration of licensing a modern kernel from IBM (OS/2) or even microsoft (NT - 'new technology' which microsoft essentially had hi-jacked from their collaboration with IBM on OS/3 in the early ninties); and the mac runtime for unix even, er, sparced some consideration of a deal with SUN.

Of course as it turned out, the political 'failure' of taligent set the stage for brining steven jobs back to apple - which was about the only thing that could have any chance of saving apple from a decade of mismanagement by a sucession of bean-counters, marketeers and chip functionary CEO's. So sometimes bad things happen for a reason -;)

Little bits of Taligent did survice; an intellectual property licensing company was set up to moneterize stuff (eg SUN purchased unicode to be used for java; microsoft also purchased stuff). IBM's approach to retrieving something from a great investment that it had mind-numbingly run into the ground, was the same as the appraoch used for converting to java some of the techniques in its wonderful CORBA platform (SOMobjects) as well as continuing 'Workplace' ideas started in OS/2 -- namely it refactored the CommonPoint runtime to become the IBM foundation classes, OpenClass, which underlay IBM's first cross-platform attempt (before trying java) to port its application (and middleware) stack across all its platforms. For this purpose, the ibm mission at Taligent became the narrow one of 'api design' (though god knows, with all the crap out there, we should be grateful to get just that).


* the red cards represented adavnaced concepts, often using artifical intelligence and 3D visualization - which is the one that was never completed.

Even to this day, decades later, Apple has not moved beyond the narrow remit of creating superb platform for _information_ design, into the realm of creating _knowledge_ design.

Apple has been singualrly unimpressive in introducing agent-based languages (though it had a start with its investment in General magic's telescript), or knowledged-based databases (FIPA and a series of successors to kqml).

With the semantic web unfolding in this decade, the irony is that (once again) is that apple is letting another decade drift by as it did in the nineties with perfecting the best machine abstractions. It is ironic because the first web was created by tim berners-lee on a nextstep platform (the basis for os/x), using an apple technology as its explicit model for the web (ie hyepcard -- it is directlky cited in the memo to his boss!). The irony continues because somewhere there are people who are again using the mac to craete things like KIF (knowledge interchange format) that will be so important for the Web 2.0.

So, in conclusion, not only did apple not deliver its 90's nexgen mission (pink), it is now failing to deliver the nexgen mission for the 21st century (red).

The more things change ... the more they stay the same.

Sigh.

ps: this reprise did not touch on another projects which were crucial to apple's success in the 90's but were either sabotaged by the microsoft traitors inside IBM management or by the blunders of apple mismanagement - eg the PDA that started it all (the Newton), and the multimedia joint venture (Kaleida).

pps: this reprise also does not touch upon the Lotus aspect of Apple lore ... namely the Bento structured storage mechanism which lies at the heart of Domino. It was co-developed with Apple, and was one of the 4 foundations (along with IBM's SOMobjects and the event engine from Apple's OpenScripting Architecure - osax) for OpenDoc, mentioned in passing above.

It is noteworhy that in the next verion of Domino, IBM will finally replace a transitional (lightweight) mechanism for representing compound relationships with a more robust, SQL database that allows for a formal represenation of semantics. In other words, with generic sql2 (nopt even sql3 like postgress), IBM will get back _some_ of the features it already had waiting for it in the Taligent days TEN YEARS AGO! (there were a variety of OO db's which plugged into taligent, like POET, which could deliver instant support complex BOM's that exceed the core 'people places things' base tupple in taligent).

And, even more perversely, considering that Taligent lost mindshare in IBM against the perceived threat of microsoft in the mid ninties, it should be noted that microsoft has now rescheduled WINFS (the embedding of a SQL engine into the OS) to be delivered towards the end of this decade, in the next, post-VISTA release of windows (now renamed VIENNA from blackcomb). note: the represenation mechanism per se is not important (so, yes, Notes 8 with SQL is not as effective as Blackcomb with WINFS - one is an OS, the other is middleware ... though at one point ms has said that WINFS will be mapped backwards onto the NTFS, so its not entirely clear what is 'OS' and what is 'middleware' ... but the precise equivelence is not my point: which is, rather, about the lost opportunity at ibm and at apple for not being able to stick to a project for more than 4 or 5 years. Microsoft triumphs because they will spend (must spend!) more than a decade to imitate their competitors before they get it right - just look at Win 1.0 in 1985 vs win95 over a decade later.

Apple & IBM fail, when thery do, not because they adapt _too little_ but rather conversely because that dont adapt _too much_).

=== sorry for such a long ramble ===

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If you guys truly think Notes apps can be easily replaced w/ trivial web apps, you've never done Notes development. The reason so much of Notes mail is done w/ agents is because it's just another Notes application...if you don't like how it does something, you can just reprogram it (something you can't do w/ Outlook).

The Notes infrastructure lets you do stuff like electronically signing documents, workflow, etc. so you don't need any paper documents in your company. The Notes client is also very programmable and you can talk to Java libraries, COM libraries, etc. to integrate with other applications, and you can do all this while being disconnected from the network.

While you can do this with web applications (I've done a few Notes to web ports), it's non-trivial to come up w/ a framework to do all of it...and it's pretty painful doing the development...

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