Captain Oblivious

I've been using Beta 3 since I got back from my trip to ILUG/Edinburgh on my production mail database, all day, every day. The experience, as a whole, is very good. I do have a list of issues/bugs/complaints, of course - I'm still me, and I've got months worth of exposure to Notes 8 in general now. It's worth noting, though, that while the list of things I Don't Like, below, is much longer than the list of things I DO Like, you have to incorporate the list of things I liked about Beta 2 as well (it's a long list). I also listed things I LOVE about Beta 3 to make it clear that even while I'm listing issues, I am extremely happy with Notes 8 even as a Beta.

Things I Love about Notes 8 Beta 3

• First: The vast majority of the items I listed in my previous "Things I Don't Like About the Notes 8 Beta" post have been fixed. Aside from the fact that the built-in RSS reader is still lame and there are Sametime menus all over the place (and these are not bugs, they are design decisions I don't happen to agree with), just about every complaint I had has been resolved. Count that as the biggest possible positive item for this list.
• Second: Performance, performance, performance. MUCH better. Really. It still takes 30-60 seconds to initially load Notes 8. But once it's loaded, it's very snappy. That initial load time is not good, though, so I hope the full release is quicker.
• Third: Right-dbl-click preference works (yay!). This was broken in Beta 2.
• Fourth: The Productivity Editors, while not perfect, really are a legitimate replacement for MS Office for many of us. I haven't launched any MS Office apps but Project in months, and I don't miss them. I wouldn't miss Project, either, but it's sort of mandatory for me. More's the pity.
  

Things I Don't Like about Notes 8 Beta 3

• Documents multi-selected aren't marked as read when you're using the preview pane, which makes sense because they weren't actually previewed, BUT also cannot be marked as read by pressing the Insert key when the preview pane is open. Works fine with no preview.
  
• The eclipse Inbox view that allows you to see to two rows of data in the inbox when using the side preview pane is cool, but when using message marking (colors), the bold sender name makes the messages appear unread. I know the icons in the column to the left are different for read/unread, but they aren't visibly obvious or intuitive. Maybe if the "unread" one was in a much brighter or bolder color? Or maybe the sender names shouldn't be bolded when you use message marking/colors - that would be my preference.
  
• The eclipse 2-row Inbox view also doesn't include size, which is a pretty big (no pun intended) loss. Since "Customize this view" doesn't affect this view at all, there's no easy way for a user to add it.
  
• The Productivity editors ALWAYS launch with the Properties Pane to the right - I can't find a way to make that stop happening, and it's really annoying. When you have the sidebar open, and you're not using a wide screen monitor, that pane takes up way too much of your editing space.
• Sametime sidebar doesn't remember "show online only" setting. Ever. Which is very annoying.
  
• Sametime windows don't respect my "show common name only" choice. They DO respect nicknames, though. I'm told by other people that this is a problem they don't have, so presumably there's a bug in my setup somewhere. I do have the full 7.51 client installed, but I'm only running the one inside Notes 8.
• Sametime popups give me a JavaScript error (standard JavaScript "A Runtime error has occurred, do you want to debug?" - then fails with an Object required on a one line script that reads: "window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight)"). More evidence that my Sametime setup is screwy (yeah, that's the technical term).
• Sametime taskbar icon doesn't go away when I exit Notes until and unless I mouse over it.
  
• Home setting keeps returning to the workspace, even though I've set it to various welcome screens repeatedly.
• Calendar with preview open doesn't like new meeting requests. It gets stuck in a loop with nothing to display in the preview, redrawing the same screen constantly. Manually refreshing the calendar view resolves the issue.
• Calendar and Sidebar day-at-a-glance can't have different settings for "show summary". They should, though. Show summary is MUCH more useful in the sidebar where screen real estate is at a premium. In the main calendar views, it's just weird.
• The sidebar day-at-a-glance switches months when you pull up the month calendar and change dates in it - which sort of makes sense, but I didn't want it to act that way. I wanted to have to click on a day in the month before it changed to that day. As it is, I was in July by accident and didn't notice it. I know I'm oblivious, but is that really good usability?
• Development against the Productivity Editors is iffy compared to COM development against MS Office, mostly due to lack of documentation. I think John Head mentioned that this would lag behind 8.0, in which case this would fall under the "expected issues" list - just like Mac support.
  
• Keyboard shortcut to switch open tabs? Anyone? I've tried everything I can think of, to no avail. Is there a standard to switch open tabs in eclipse RCP apps? Please tell me it's not impossible, because with the Document Editor replacing Word I'm losing whole milliseconds of productivity every time I switch between it and Notes (I'm mocking myself a bit there, because the interruption isn't disastrous, but it IS unfortunate) . I'd look in the online help, but:
• The help system won't load for me("Help cannot be displayed. The embedded application server could not run help web application. Check the log for details." - What log file they mean is open to question...). Must be something broken in my installation.
• Which brings up a pretty big concern. This is a monstrous installation process, and I'm a bit nervous about being able to troubleshoot it if/when something goes wrong. In the past, Notes installations were brain-dead simple. The eclipse implementation for Notes 8 changes that pretty dramatically. I'm not talking about managing configurations via policies here, I just mean running "setup" on the client. Desktop support people are *not* going to be happy if the solution to any minor issue is to re-run the whole setup process. That takes a LOT of time on a FAST machine, and doing it just to fix Help is swatting a fly with a nuclear weapon. Hopefully IBM will provide some really good documentation and/or tools to fix or re-deploy small aspects of the eclipse environment by the time we get to the released version.