The Challenge Rambles and riff raff about all this and that

Kudos for notes 8

I'm not a notes-lover. If you have read this and some of my previous blog entries you already know this. Replication is a pain, the system becomes very slow when you replicate large mail and the space restrictions are a pain in the neck; 100MB is just a joke when you work with PSDs, large Flash presentations, videos and multimedia in general (although that particular thing has more to do with the admins than the program itself).

As part of my migration to Linux I signed up for the Notes 8 beta program. Although it still has quite a lot of "betaish" things going on I must admit it runs quite smoothly. The interface face lift is nice, and some features like built-in RSS feeds are a great improvement. When I made the switch from notes 6 to 7 changes on the user-side of things were minor; I'll risk my head and say it even lost some stability. On this instance I can say it seems more stable and fast. Maybe the fact of running Linux on the background helps as well. (I have the intention of writing up a post on the general improved performance of the R50e on Linux whenever I get some free time to run some benchmarks).

Some of the neat and improved Characteristics:

• Sametime actually Works (for those of you who don't know what sametime is: It's IBM's (and Lenovo's) own internal instant messaging system).
• You can now read feeds on Notes.
• Improved "day at a glance" and "activities" tools on the sidebar allow fast access to appointments and "to-dos"
• Reworked UI (Note: the UI had quite some glitches on Beta 1, all of them have been fixed for Beta 3)
• Less "stalling". One of note's worst "features" is that whenever you have it do some heavy synchronization the whole thing will become unusable until the task is completed.
• "Thumbnails" preview of open tabs. Allows quick access to every open tab.

So I still have to crush this thing for the first time (I can't feel comfortable until I have done so!) and I'm unwilling to test it on Windows; I'm afraid the neat first impressions will go down the drain if I do so.

Some thumbnails follow (I've blurred out some things in defense of privacy)

Notes Mail View (I like to use preview):

Embedded Sametime and "Get Started" page:

Embedded Feed Reader (Featuring This blog's feed)