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What NOT to do on a Mac with the Notes 8.5 beta

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My SearchDomino story today has had a lot of hits and a lot of comments. As such, it’s not really a post I’d like to delete, and unfortunately I did just that.

You see, on the Mac, F9 is meant for Expose, a nifty little utility that shows all of your active windows on the screen at once. So, it’s annoying when you are in Notes and you want to refresh, and hit F9 only to show all of your Mac windows instead of actually refreshing. So, I wanted to figure out a way to turn that off. Low and behold, I think I find the right setting under the Keyboard preferences:

So I check that box and think it means that F Keys will act as F1 through F9 like their functions. Normally when you hit those keys in Mac they do their special function, for example F1 dims your screen and F2 brightens it.

Anyway, I checked that and while in Notes I hit F9 and still get Expose. So I’m a little annoyed and decide to do the same with F1 and F2 to see if they brighten and darken the screen. I hit them a couple times to realize that it didn’t actually brighten or darken, but rather deleted my blog entries. And I don’t mean mark them for deletion. They. were. gone.

So, not knowing how it happened (and not really caring,) I just copied all of my deleted entries and comments from the server copy and pasted them back into the local copy. I replicated back and then none of the comments showed up on the site… Arrrgggghhhh.

Got a quick code fix from Declan to re-link all the comments and ran it to save the day. So now after much panic and scrambling, I think everything is back to normal (although some comments may be out of order.) Anyway, Thanks to Dec for saving my ass, and be looking for the Re-Link Comments agent to be included with the next release of Blogsphere!

FYI, I don’t know how or why those keystrokes obliterated stories in Notes. Could it be the 8.5 beta? Something weird with that Mac setting in general? I don’t know, and frankly don’t care to find out again. Just thought you would like to know so you can avoid it too!

Liveblogging the Mac Session

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I’m currently in the Mac session and will be live blogging it once it starts in 15 minutes. If you are interested in Lotus on the Mac platform, stay tuned!

Here we go!

Over 450 downloads of the beta since Sunday already. Declan is actually running it sitting next to me. Looks sweet.

Session running WITH Symphony on the Mac.

Giving all the huge stats Apple have released about it’s popularity this year. Apple increased it’s market share to 8% this year. iPhone sold 1 milion units in 74 days.

Significant investments that been made. Providing all major Notes features for Notes 8.X and more on OSX. For Notes 8.5 and beyond, they will sync releases with Windows and Linux! No more delays.

8.5 will have both Standard and Basic versions just like Windows. Both will be supported. 10.5 (leopard) is REQUIRED for both Standard and Basic version. Intel Processor only for Standard. Intel and PowerPC for the Basic client. If you are running 10.4 will still have version 7 support going forward too. Release is targeted for Fall 2008. Had to wait for new Eclipse platform, so that’s what caused them to miss the 8.0.1 release.

Productivity Editors (Symphony) will integrate on Mac shortly. Not available with the current beta download.

Domino Web Access. “Intro of the iPhone and improvements to Safari with 3.0 have resulted in increased demand for Safari support.” 8.5 will support Safari 3.0 when it is released. Not quite there yet.

Sametime 8.0 supports Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5. Adeed point to point video support. Sametime Web Conferencing will support application sharing on the Mac in 2H 2008. Current caveats, No MS integration on Mac, no web conferencing support for app sharing

Symphony will require Leopard and will only support Intel Processor. Beta will be made available middle of year.

Quickr on Domino supports the Mac, but Quickr on Websphere does NOT support Mac. Quickr plug-in support for Mac is to be determined.

Connections supports profiles, communities, blogs, dogear and activities. Connections 1.0.2 supports all of that using Firefox 2.0 on Tiger. Leopard support, Safari support and plug-in support for Notes to be determined.

Websphere portal Server 6.0.1.1 supports Mac-based browsers, Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 are supported, Safari 2.0.3 is supported but limited.

Mac 8.5 beta supports Unicode support, implementation of cross-platform ODS files, runtime support of Composite Applications, Integrated Sideshelf components – Feed Reader, Day at a glance, and Sametime Connect. Updated keyviewer support too (file attachments viewer.) No activities in side-shelf, no composite application Editor support, No embedded browser support, and limited drag-and-drop support. Limited install options. Targeting customizable install options.

Work planned for 8.5 release. Imporved NSD support, spotlight search integration, more mac-like user experience, java agent support, embedded browser support, improved language support. Standard disclaimer that features may change by time of release. Man the lawyers are ALL OVER Lotusphere this year.

Demo time. Wow, the demo guy is really hard to understand… I mean really heavy asian accent. feature parity on the Open button. Dockable like windows. Integrated search bar. Showing off day at a glance. Now mail. Looks just like my windows built. Showing off the unicode support with asian character sets. Showing the unread number on the Notes dock icon. Reply with History only is the default. Preview on bottom or side as well.

New mail form shows threading in collapsable sections. So if you open a mail in a thread, the other messages in thread show up in collapsable sections. In-line spell checking is working. Undo support works, Command-Z works! Dynamic addressing works just like windows.

If you open Apple Mail and in preferences you can define Notes as your default email client. So it will take mailto: hyperlinks from your machine and open up Notes now.

Supports all the nice calendar views and pastel colors 🙂 Secondary time-zone support for the calendar. Business Cards view supported in Contacts, as well as standard views in Contacts (by category et. al) Searching is nice, not spotlight yet though 🙁 Showing a composite app. If you design it, it will work. Cannot edit the app in Mac.

Workspace support too. The chiclets are there.

Q&A now. Former Apple employee asking about Domino on Mac OS Server. Answer is no at this point.

Declan asking question now: Administrator and Designer? Will they happen? No plans to support Admin client. Designer will be moving to Eclipse, so Designer is being looked at for a post 8.5 release.

Support for roaming user? A developer says that he is using despite the release notes saying it’s not supported.

DWA for iphone supported in 2H of this year.

All done!

Mac Users: Strength in numbers!

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For quite some time, Lotus has kinda half-heartedly supported people using Macs. Recently, they’ve gotten better about releasing products that have parity with their windows counterparts. With all of the switchers this year (myself, Declan, Wild Bill, Mr. Mooney, JonVon) and all the longtime Mac-heads (Bruce, The Captain, Ben, Turtle, Vowe) I think we are showing a considerable brain-trust going Mac.

That said, I think we need to fill the Mac sessions like never before. Overflow them. Show that there is now a substantial set of Lotus users who are Mac users only. Showing that sort of thing can help people in Lotus justify investing in Mac technologies. So, to that point, you should hit the following sessions:

  • Tuesday 3:00 – 4:00 PM – ID105 – Big Mac Attack Swan 7-10
  • Thursday 7:00 – 8:00 AM – Notes for Mac BOF Swan Peacock 1-2

And yes, this was posted from my Mac.

Did Apple screw up with iTunes?

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I know that your overwhelming answer will be no to this, but I was thinking about it today. By releasing iTunes for Windows, Apple just gave me one less reason to ever buy a Mac. I’m a hard core PC guy, so I’ll never “switch” per se, but for a long time I’ve considered buying an Apple computer to augment my computing at home. I do like the elegance of the machines, but I REALLY wanted something that would work perfectly with an iPod.

Now I know that you could use an iPod with a PC before, but by all accounts it wasn’t nearly the seamless experience it is with iTunes. So for awhile, I had kind of lusted after a Mac, mainly for the purpose of digital music, as well as buying music digitally through the iTunes music store.

Now if you’ve been reading the meanderings, you know that I have pretty much despised all of the attempts the music industry has made at selling music online. Most of the time it is far too restrictive. Out of all of them, I always thought that iTunes was the best. It has the least restrictions with the most quality. Because of this, I’ve really wanted a Mac. Once again, now I don’t need one. Apple came to me!

So do you think this has happened to anyone else out there? Do you think iTunes being released might keep people away? Also, for those Mac faithful out there, “Why should I get one?” What are the additional reasons I should pick up a Mac. Convince me folks…