Notes 8 thoughts

I've been using Notes 8 Standard for doing development for a couple of weeks. Overall it's not been a very positive experience.

Performance

I tested on three computers:

1. My home PC, which is an Athlon64 X2 5600+, 4GB DDR2-800 RAM, 160GB SATA-II 10,000 RPM hard drive, a nVidia 7600GS video card with 512MB RAM, and Windows XP 64-bit.
2. My work PC, which is an Athlon64 X2 5000+, 2GB DDR2-533 RAM, 180GB SATA-II 7200 RPM drive, ATI Radeon X1650 512MB video card, and Windows XP 32-bit.
   
3. My other work PC, a dual Xeon 2.8Ghz with 3GB DDR2-400 RAM, 64MB nVidia Quadro video, and 72GB SATA-II 7200 RPM hard drive with Windows XP 32-bit.

I turned off the "scan on access" setting in my antivirus client, then did some tests. The startup time after logging into Windows and waiting for everything to load averaged about 45 seconds across all these systems. Once loaded the time to open mail averaged 20 seconds, and often there was no hourglass icon to indicate anything was happening. Opening the Calendar averaged 15 seconds, again usually with no hourglass. Once loaded, switching from Mail to Calendar took approximately 1.5 seconds.

To me that's not acceptable. I shouldn't have to wait for anything on any of those machines, but I can actually watch Notes 8 Standard paint the screen on all three. The client machines I support are mostly in the late P3 and early P4 range, many have 256MB RAM, and nearly all have shared video memory. I didn't even bother testing on any of those.

Missing functionality

A few things got lost in the shuffle of moving Notes from a traditional C or C++ binary to a framework that is based on Eclipse. Here is a short list of the things I know are missing from Notes 8 Standard.

• Roaming users - not available with Notes 8 Standard, and there are "issues" with roaming users in Notes 8 Basic that prevent you from creating new ones. The solution: don't register roaming users.
• Citrix / Windows Terminal Services - not supported with Notes 8 Standard. You'll have to wait for 8.01.
• The Productivity Editors are not integrated at all. You can access them from Notes 8, but I could just as easily add a shortcut to Word. That doesn't make it integrated. Actually, Word is better integrated since I can do Send To > Mail Recipient from Word, but I can't from the Productivity Editors.
  

I probably missed a few, but those are the biggies that people keep bringing up.

Stuff that changed

There are a number of things that don't work the same but the official response is that this is the new way it works (darkness is the new standard for light?), or it is being considered for a future release.

• Double-click the Sametime icon in the notification area (system tray) and nothing happens. Right-click and all you get are some status options. Originally they wanted to do away with the icon altogether so I guess this is progress
  
• The immediate Inbox refresh no longer works. You have to wait for your refresh interval to kick in and refresh your Inbox.
• Using a custom image for folders is broken in Notes 8 Standard. Your old image gets skewed and looks warped, and you can't change it from the Standard client. You have to do that from Notes 6, 7, or 8 Basic. A fix is being considered for 8.x.

Upgrade issues

Some settings from Notes 7.x are not preserved.

• The Universal Toolbar gets hidden during an upgrade from Notes 7 unless it has been modified. The other toolbars don't adjust accordingly so there's just a gaping hole in the toolbar area. So far the response is "this is working as designed".
• When you show the Universal toolbar it sometimes has repeating icons.
  
• The Chat toolbar gets hidden, too.
  
• "Automatically add Option Explicit" gets turned off in Domino Designer.
  

And then the bugs...

• Toolbars move around on their own.
• "Open in Client" from Domino Designer doesn't work consistently.
• Graphics artifacts when dragging dialog boxes around the screen.
  
• The Replicator page sometimes pops to the foreground when there is no replication interval set. Once it starts happening it happens on 15 minute intervals, and going to the Replication settings, making a change, clearing it and clicking OK makes it stop. This only happened on one of my test machines.
  

Usability issues

I find many of the UI elements much too small. The Sidebar selector is so small I miss it more than I hit it, so I just go through the menus if I need it. The icons in the bookmark bar (docked Open bar) are also way too small for me. I find the new preferences dialog extremely confusing, even bewildering. The layout of the preferences is just as foreign (as compared to other Windows applications) as the old one was, but now it's both foreign and different from previous Notes releases.

Conclusion

As far as I'm concerned the Notes 8 Standard Gold release is actually Beta 4. It behaves so randomly that every time you open Notes it's like Christmas morning... or maybe it's more like Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, and sometimes you end up with the vomit flavored one.