Via Ole Eichhorn, the UK Guardian's Survival of the Unfittest:
This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/02/lotus-notes-survival-of-the-unfittest.html
This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/02/lotus-notes-survival-of-the-unfittest.html
Indeed x 1000
I used to have to use Lotus Notes and I hated it so much. Surprised to hear that it’s still alive.
I have a theory (which really isn’t mine) that most software that is adopted widely throughout the corporate environment is adopted first in the home environment. Windows, Office, Netscape, etc.
Lotus Notes is clearly a counter example to this, and so it doesn’t surprise me that it is seen to suck so badly. (Although I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid it myself) Still, the fact that it has thrived is something of a mystery.
Notes has survived because of one basic thing, the .nsf. it isn’t the most scalable data store around, but it is the most flexible. add a field, subtract a field, change a field’s data type, for the most part notes won’t even blink. some of the other things they have built in, like the security model, just work. they haven’t changed it since, i think, version 2 or maybe before that (i didn’t start coding in Notes until version 4.6).
agreed that the UI sucks. it gets a little better in every version, and the one upcoming looks pretty darn promising. but the UI that comes out of the box can be changed, and in fact you can develop web applications that you would never know are coming out of Notes, if you know what you are doing.
they have some talented people working hard on the UI for version 8, i’ve met some of them. here’s hoping that they pull off everything they are shooting for. if they do, posts like this one might finally go away (no offense intended, i totally feel your pain), assuming people get upgraded.
Don’t make me sick the Notes community on you. I can have you commented back to the stone age.
Believe me, I know.
I like YOU guys – it’s the app I have problems with!
I recently took a contract at a Fortune 100 company and have been forced to deal with what I consider Notes quirks. For example, if I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it, (the key to refresh is: F9). (Not to mention the quirk of actually needing to refresh the inbox in the first place.)
Unfortunately things show no signs of improvement here, the corporate IT machine slogs along so slowly that we are still using version 6.5, so even if v8 is amazing we’ll probably never see it.
As far as the argument that the back-end is amazing so the app is good: rubbish. That would be the equivalent of selling me a car with a steering wheel that didn’t always turn the direction I expected it to while justifying it by bragging that the engine was top of the class. If I can’t drive it, I don’t care what is under the hood.
I appreciate you validating my assessments and the link to LNSucks.
For example, if I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it
That one bit me many times. One of Notes many “charms” is its complete disregard for standard keyboard conventions. Evidently Notes was developed in an alternate reality where no other Windows apps ever existed.
How do I send an email? CTRL+ENTER? Of course not! ALT-1, naturally…
cough Crystal Reports /cough
Agree. That’s the one part of Visual Studio I never opt to install. And J#.
iHow can a program be so bad, yet thrive?/i
cough Crystal Reports /cough
“Notes Sucks” and “The UI is the application” are great slogans. I disagree with the first one. In the abstract, I agree with second one, but the real world is more complicated. If both slogans are true, isn’t it a paradox that 120 million people use Notes today?
BTW, Damien is just plain mean for threatening to send the Notes community here. Those guys are vicious. 
For example, if I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it
That one bit me many times. One of Notes many “charms” is its complete disregard for standard keyboard conventions. Evidently Notes was developed in an alternate reality where no other Windows apps ever existed.
How do I send an email? CTRL+ENTER? Of course not! ALT-1, naturally…
At least the shortcut is consistent between versions and language versions… In Windows you use CTRL + F to search (unless the system is Danish) - then obviously enough you use CTRL + B…
And here is the big surprise… which shortcut do you use in Outlook 2003 ??? F9
Finally ALT+1 is an option, but you could use CTRL + M as well… Of course CTRL+M works everywhere in Notes, so why use that.
Forget shortcuts for a moment (and yes, I have no idea why Outlook 2003 changed from F5 to F9).
Let me ask a simple question. Why do users need a “shortcut” that locks them out of the app. What useful purpose does this serve? And why does it ned to be a hotkey? What next? A “boss key”?
In a way, the F5 functionality is perfectly emblematic of Notes. Completely user-hostile, and on top of all that, completely insane.
Notes ain’t that bad unless you really pledge to think otherwise.
Touche. However, Notes ain’t that good unless you vow to think it is.
I don’t have a problem with the app providing a security feature to lock out unwanted folks, I just find it quirky that it chose F5 (I know, it was probably using F5 long before any other app stole it and made it mean refresh to me and every other browser user). It only caught me a few times and I can easily press F9 to achieve the result I want, which is why I only consider it a quirk.
That being said, since I am currently shackled to Notes, and I have the ear of a few Notes proponents, maybe I can glean some tips that will make my experience a little more pleasant.
For instance, when I receive a new meeting invitation, I’d like to right-click on it and see a choice for ‘Accept’. Or at least a button at the top of the Inbox that lets me ‘Accept’ the meeting; all I see now is a ‘Respond’ that sends a note to the sender. Best I’ve found is opening the invitation, then I get to see a button with an ‘Accept’ choice. Am I missing something, seems like a lot of steps to just ‘Accept’ a meeting?
And, if I want to move a group of messages from my inbox to another folder, shouldn’t I just click the first one, hold the shift-key, and then click the last one to select the ones I want? Best I’ve found is shift-clicking each one individually to get the little check mark next to them before I drag them away. Is that a little quirky, or am I just missing something?
Granted, I’m on v6.5 so some of this might be old news, unfortuneatly for me it is my present day reality.
Forget shortcuts for a moment…What next? A “boss key”? Completely user-hostile, and on top of all that, completely insane.
Notes ain’t that bad unless you really pledge to think otherwise. Security shortcut for locking off the app is essentially similar to “Logging Off”. And I presume you understand it’s importance.
Notes survives because once a corporation spends the insane $$ it takes to install it, and the $$ for salaries and overhead, it would cost too much to replace it with something else.
The corporate suits that make the purchasing decisions don’t understand that the Lotus Notes interface sucks beyond belief. IT depts tend to purchase products that make their job easier, not the users. My employer’s got so much security that employees have to write on paper the tens of user IDs and passwords they have.
If you were in upper management and voted for Lotus Notes, would you be willing to admit that you were wrong? You should, but that’s a career killer.
Lotus Notes–what a mess.
-G
The F5 key resembles the Lock-Workstation on your Windows PC…
It enables you to protect your identity in Notes when you are away from your desk… Not too important today since W2K and XP can do this, but Windows 98 and earlier couldn’t.
I know I wouldn’t leave my chair without locking up my system, to protect myself and the informaion I have access to.
Just forgot… you are of course allowed to your opinion 
Jason – A Notes programmer could add a button to the top of the inbox to accept the invite, but there’s no support for adding to the right-click menu in current version. In the next major version, the right-click context menu will be accessible to Notes developers. The real trick will be whether they give us context-sensitive abilities, so that the “Accept” action will only be available if you’re sitting on an invitation. I don’t know if they’ve committed to that or not.
As for multi-select, IBM hasn’t done the shift-click range selection, but there is a simple way. Just click over on the left margin of the inbox, and drag your mouse up or down. The selection will be made as you go along. Another way of doing this, if you’re a keyboard guy, is to select a message, hold the shift key down and press the up or down arrow key. That procedure actually works for de-selecting, too. Shift-arrow is a toggle.
This method for selection is similar to F5/F9, in that it’s been like this in Notes for years - almost 13 that I can attest to. Bear in mind that it was developed for OS/2 and Windows, with Mac as the third GUI platform not too long after; and for a while it was running on SCO Unix, too. Early on, someone made the choice that it was more important for some things to be consistent across all Notes client platforms rather than conforming to each platforms own GUI standards. It’s hard to defend that decision in retrospect, but there was some logic to it. By the time it became obvious that it wasn’t the best decision, there was a very large installed base that would have been ticked off by a change. I suppose they could have made behaviors configurable into “Notes classic”, “Windows” and “Mac” modes (SCO being long gone), but for whatever reason they’ve never chosen to do that.
Some additional useful shortcuts: the Insert key is a toggle for marking messages “read” or “unread”. F2 increases font size, and shift F2 decreases – in both cases this is when editing only, not when reading. Esc closes the current window – whether it’s a message, a folder, or some other application. And both F4 and Tab move to the next unread message.
Gotta love the veiled threats and straw-man arguments presented by the Notes apologists here. Oh well.