Lotus NoteBook

Category NotesIn9
Next week I'll be in St. Louis for IamLUG. I'm really excited about this.  Last year it was a great event and this year I'm honored to be one of the presenters. I'm presenting a session called:

XPages: Beyond the Introduction

I actually reused the title from a Webinar for Lotus Education Online last year, but none of this material was used in that event.  I consider this an "Advanced Intro" session and thought the title fit. Most of this material is brand new and not even been used on NotesIn9 before.

The goal of the session is to try and help you establish a comfort zone with XPages.  It's geared to people relatively new to Xpages but have started using it. There's going to be a lot of little demos.

I'm going to talk about:

• Custom Controls
• Data Binding
• Server Side JavaScript
• Dojo
• Repeat Controls
• Rendering
• "The Big Finish"

It's like 6 LIVE Notes In 9 shows in 1 hour.  What could go wrong?

In the "Big Finish" section, I'll be bringing several XPages techniques together and will demo a new App I'm working on that's destined for openNTF.org.

If you're not coming to IamLUG don't worry, there's a couple of options.  I'll be presenting this session at MWLug later in the month. I'll talk more about MWLug shortly.  If you're not able to come to either of the events, again, don't worry.  I'm sure this material will be making it to NotesIn9 pretty soon.

Also....

This year IamLUG has created a "TackItOn" training day.  As part of that event, Matt White is bringing his XPages101.net to the classroom in a full days worth of XPages training goodness. I'll be there as well assisting Matt and trying to help out throughout the day.  What better way is there to get started using XPages then spending a day with the 2 guys who regularly create XPages training videos?

Hope to see a lot of people in St. Louis!  Please stop by and say hello.

Posted by David Leedy At 5:41 AM Location Lebanon, Pa | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category 1352
Do you remember a couple of years ago when it came out that Comcast was interfering with not only P2P clients but also Lotus Notes 1532 traffic?

Well I guess there was a class action suit and now people who were affected by it MIGHT be able to get $16.  That's about all I know really, I saw someone tweet about this so I wanted to share it.

https://p2pcongestionsettlement.com/Faqs.htm#1

Posted by David Leedy At 8:53 AM Location Lebanon, Pa | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category App Dev
I just wanted to share what I did last evening, as it relates to some of the App Dev discussions that have been going on.

In the "Day Job", I'm just a corporate Notes developer at a transportation related company.  I'm not a Business Partner so I don't have a great "Feel" for what's really happening in the market other then what I hear from the Planet Lotus feed.  In my little corner of the world I know that Notes is "safe" because we appreciate the ability to create custom apps to help our business.  Unfortunately I wish the survival of my company was 'safe' but that will be a post for another day.

Anyway, about a year ago my VP of IT, Don, left our company to go into consulting other companies with transportation and logistics related needs.  He's currently working with an outfit that uses Lotus Notes though I imagine they're not getting the most out of it.  They have a LOT of Lotus Notes applications it seems, but no in house developer or even much of an IT department I think.  What happened to them, I believe, is that all their applications grew independently by consultants.  Each to fill a specific need at the time.  There was no "grand plan".  No one to be "traffic control" and try and get things into an organized and efficient system.  So none of their apps talk to each other. There's lots of redundant data..  etc.  I think you get the picture.  Obviously this causes a lot of frustration to them and a perception that the software might be a limiting factor.

So Don talked to my CEO and got permission for me to, on my own time, demo for his client some of the apps that I've written in Notes.  Specifically my CRM or "Sales System" as we call it. It's maybe up to 15 or so databases now, and uses Axceler's Notrix to pump shipping and billing data down to Notes so our sales force can replicate it and have it available during the day as the go from customer to customer making sales calls in an "offline" state.

So last night was actually the 2nd demo I gave to this company.  On the first demo, several weeks ago, I had some lower level people involved.  But last night I was talking to their CEO and VP of Sales and Marketing.  My impression was that they were blown away by the demo.  They really liked my application, though that wasn't the point as we don't sell it.  But showing them a system that ties data together logically.  That integrates well with an external database.. that was designed from the beginning to make sense and be usable to the end user...  I think that was eye opening for them.  

There were lots of comments about "Didn't know that could be done" or "Is it possible to do this?", or "What if we wanted this?" etc..  

So who knows what will come from this.  For me personally, Don now owes me a case of beer for doing the demos, but I'm pretty sure that his client now has a much greater appreciation for the power of Notes as a Development platform then they did before.

And that's a good thing.

Posted by David Leedy At 8:37 AM Location Lebanon, Pa | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Lotus Notes
I wonder if GMail will ever get to the point where someones says they only had 1 problem in 7 years....

Posted by David Leedy At 9:19 AM Location Lebanon, Pa | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category LotusKnows

Posted by David Leedy At 8:16 AM Location Lebanon, Pa | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category WikiMadness
Sorry this has taken so long.  But here are the "winners" of the bigger prizes of the Wiki Madness Event.  Every person who created an article and sent us their address will get something.

Mark Hughes	iPod Shuffle from Intec
Marcus Foerster	Amazon.com Gift Certificate from  Intec
Keith Strickland	Amazon.com Gift Certificate from  Intec
Joe Hoetzl	Noteman from Martin Scott
Betsy Thiede	Noteman from Martin Scott
Paul Calhoun	Ytria Admin or Developer Suite
Paul Withers	ScanEz from Ytria

The rest of the people who contributed to WikiMadness will get various boxes of really good items.  We have Lotus Speaker Shirts, C.U.L.T Shirts, Lotus clocks and footballs. All sorts of Books and shirts from STS Technologies and Sherpa Software.  5 Licenses for mAddressbook from HughesConnect. CD's of the Taking Notes Podcast...    Enough great items so everybody should be getting something.

Chris and I want to thank everyone for participating in this event.  The sponsors have been simply great and the contributors added some awesome content to the product wiki's that will benefit people for many months and years in the future.

Posted by David Leedy At 9:24 PM Location Lebanon, Pa | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category IPhone
I've been interested in trying to develop for the iPhone for a while but have yet to make much progress on it do to limited time available and not exactly knowing the best way to start.  Sure, I knew all roads led to Objective-C and Cocoa. But after looking at some books and online materials I could readily see that the Objective-C learning curve was high. The announcement of the iPad which introduces a much bigger display to an iPhone like portable device only increased my desire to get started.   But again, where to begin?  Do I just try and grind out Objective-C or is there a better way? I'm happy to report there was.  

SNAPPS, who in my opinion has a reputation not only for the highest quality of work but also being an overall classy organization, put together a 1day jumpstart/bootcamp on how to get started with iPhone/iPad development.  This seemed like just the thing I was looking for.  I knew there was no chance that my company was going to send me and that there was a cost not only in the registration fee but also in needing to take 2 vacation days to accommodate the travel and class.  But there was never a doubt in my investment was at risk.

The goals of the day was to learn about 4 key topics:
Web development
Objective-C Development
Tool kits like Appcelerator's Titanium
Navigating the App Store Process

The day was lead by Julian Robichaux with Victor Krantz and Rob Novak contributing as well. This was not intended to make you an expert in any one topic but was designed to introduce the topics and to give you an idea of when one technique might be better then another. I didn't gain the ability to write Objective-C, nor did I expect to, but we've now been introduced and "hung out" together a little bit to establish a comfort zone with each other. When I get home I'll now be more prepared to get started.

Some thoughts on each of the sections:

1: Web
I learned a lot about not only specifically targeting the screens of these devices but also about HTML 5 which the browsers support.  As primarily a Notes Client developer I found the HTML 5 stuff particularly interesting because of all the improvements thats been made, especially in local data storage.

2: Objective-C
This is probably where I knew the most going in.  That doesn't mean I could write a program but I've spent some time looking at this.  Julian did a great job of showing how you combine Xcode, Objective-C, and Interface Builder to create applications.  He created an application on the spot and some of the pieces that I've been struggling with started getting clearer.

3: Appcelerator
Victor took over for this section and while other tool kits were mentioned he quickly professed his undying love for Appcelerator's Titanium.  It was easy to see why.  Not only can you use JavaScript to create NATIVE applications for iPhone / iPad but it comes with an application called "Kitchen Sink" which contains examples of almost anything you could possibly want to do in a business application.  It seems very easy to get started on any idea you might have.  As a bonus, Titanium has built in hooks to some of the API's of popular websites that you might want to use. So that's one less thing to worry about!

4: Navigating the App Store
In this section Julian, Rob and Victor discussed the App Store and how to handle it.  You're going to want to test apps on personal devices, maybe distribute to beta testers and eventually put them on the App store or possibly distribute internally. The complexity of this process was SHOCKING to say the least.  Dealing with all these certificates and provisioning is confusing and painful.  It took the SNAPPS guys months to figure this out.

The information in this section was probably worth the price of the whole day.  I simply can not imagine trying to figure out how to navigate this process on my own.  I can't stress enough how confusing it is to deal with device deployment and app store submission.  I humbly suggest if you have any interest in this kind of development would be well served to come just for this section.

I left the day with a big book full of all the slides and information. How big? I thought about putting it in my checked luggage but was worried about exceeding the weight limit.  Of course there was also lots of code samples that will keep me busy for quite a while and provide a good starting point for development.  

If they run this again, I highly recommend this for anyone who's interested in iPhone/iPad Development. This was billed as technology agnostic - so Notes integration was not a featured topic but of course it did come up and they might add some Notes content in future sessions.

Posted by David Leedy At 8:39 AM Location Lebanon, Pa | Permalink | Comments (4)

Category WikiMadness
Sorry for the delay in wrapping Wiki Madness up. I'm hoping to have it all finished shortly.  

The goal for the event was to get some of the great blog content onto the Product Wiki's so that the customers who read the Wiki's can benefit.  The second goal was to try and introduce the Wiki audience to the bloggers. Not everybody knows of all the Lotus Bloggers.  

Below is a list of articles that were added to the wiki's from the Wiki Madness Event.  I've also head from a couple people that they saw noticeable traffic increase to their personal blogs from the IBM servers.

I think it's safe to say that we've not only met our goals but have far exceeded our expectations when we started this event.  There's some great articles in here.  Some are mind blowing, some are simple, but now all can hopefully gain visibility and find their way to the customer who is looking for the information.

Chris and I want to thank each and every contributor for the effort.  We also want to thank our sponsors for their amazing donations to this event.  An iPod, gift certificates, Software, Swag....  The response to our call was nothing short of amazing.

On Friday I'll be at the iPhone bootcamp put together by Snapps.  When I get home we'll get prize packs created, assigned and announced.

D D Russel	Directory Links
Declan Lynch	Blackberry Options
Andre Guirard	MultiValues
Paul Bastide	VBA for Symphony
Betsy Thiede	Launch First Attachment
Marcus Foerster	Using Save Options
Paul S. Withers	Favicon and XPages
John Coolidge	Call an External Program
Thomas Duff & Kathy Brown	Forum Etiquette
Joe Hoetzl	Quickr Backups
Kathy Brown	Unsupported Formulas in XPages
Keith Strickland	Using Dojo
Marcus Foerster	Pitfall on NotesUIDocument
Marcus Foerster	PaperColor
Marcus Foerster	Merging Cells
Marcus Foerster	Pitfall with GetItemValue
Keith Strickland	Get Browser Dimensions
Marcus Foerster	LotusScript Article
Marcus Foerster	Speed Up Loading NotesViews
Paul Withers	XULRunner and XPages
Tony Westwell	XPages and Large Notes Forms
Marcus Foerster	Starting Adobe Flex
Marcus Foerster	Formatting Richtext to Excel
Joe Hoetzl	Sending email with custom sender
Corey Davis	Domino Designer Crash Course for Admins
Paul Withers	Built in Formula Tester
Marcus Foerster	Inserting Text
Keith Strickland	Time Differences in JavaScript
Marcus Foerster	Perform a Trim with JavaScript
John L James	Site Certificates
Marcus Foerster	Compare 2 Documents with LotusScript
Marcus Foerster	PickList
Marcus Foerster	Printing a computed footer
Paul Withers	XPages and Dojo Charting
Marcus Foerster	Formula Agent and Prompt
Paul Withers	XPages Date Time Picker
Mark Hughes	XPages Hide When
Mark Hughes	XPages and URLEncode
Mark Hughes	XPages iPhone Tutorial
Paul Calhoun	XPages and Custom Controls
Paul Calhoun	XPages and Dynamic Table
Paul Calhoun	Coloring specific row colors in XPages
Paul Calhoun	XPages and XML as a data source
Paul Calhoun	Awesome XPages code - MUST SEE
Jeffery Smith (IBM)	Quickr and Google Android
Bruce Lill	Search Rankings
Mark Hughes	XPages and Images and Page Masking
Mark Hughes	Create Picklist in XPages (Another Must See)
Mark Hughes	Alternating row colors in XPages

This should be the complete list.  If you properly submitted an article and don't see it on the list, please contact wikimadness@dominoguru.com immediately.

I think we still need shipping addresses from some people.  Please get this in as soon as possible.  Thanks!

Posted by David Leedy At 8:53 PM Location Lebanon, Pa | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category iPad
Today the UPS guy delivered for me my very own iPad.  And to think I came really close to canceling several weeks ago.

After the unboxing and mandatory sync to iTunes it was up and running fine.  The first thing I did was to get my Lotus Notes Email on it.  It works great on the iPhone so why not the iPad?

In Safari I went to my Lotus Traveler URL which I think it typically:

http://domain.com/servlet/traveler

On the iPhone, Traveler is able to auto-detect your device.  However, since the iPad is so new this didn't happen and I had to manually choose Apple and then "iPhone". No biggie at all.  

Once I did that I basically filled in the same screens that I did for the iPhone setup and done!

My Notes Email came right down and I was about to read and send immediately.  Oh yeah, it was "pretty" as well.

My only other impressions until I lost use of this device to my kids to play some of the games I had bought from iTunes....

It's FAST!

It's Beautiful!

The apps that I've seen so far - USAToday, Some Bird Identification App, Flight Control, all seem great.  Netflix instant streaming came right down...  Google Maps was cool.

I'm looking forward to working with KeyNote and seeing if I can use that to produce the slides that I use for Notes In 9.  Shouldn't be a problem really.

The Keyboard seemed pretty good to type on but I've not used it a lot yet.

Already my wife and Mother In Law are lusting after it.

This makes me even more excited to go to the SNAPPS iPhone eventand attempt to get into actually creating apps for this device!  Can't wait!

Posted by David Leedy At 2:12 PM Location Lebanon, Pa | Permalink | Comments (13)

Category WikiMadness
Today is the last day you can submit wiki articles to the Wiki Madness Event.

We've hit 50 articles for the event which I think is phenomenal. I'll talk more about the event after the dust settles on this and NotesIn9 week, but suffice it to say that it's been a great success by any definition.

Several contributors have submitted multiple articles, so there's still great odds to get one of our prime giveaways.  All you need to do is add a wiki article today and submit the URL to wikimadness.com

And what do we have?

An iPod Shuffle from Intec.
2 $40 Gift Certificates for Amazon from Intec.
2 Licenses for Martin Scott's NotesMan Software
1 Dev or Admin suite license from Ytria
1 ScanEZ License from Ytria
5 mAddressBook Licenses from Hughes Connect
Lotus Swag Items including CULT shirt and Books from STS
Swag from Sherpa Software
Lotusphere Bookbags from NotesIn9 and Domino Guru
     (Note - These can be CUSTOMIZED to add your OWN web address if you like!!!)
CD's from the Taking Notes Podcast
Various custom gifts from Beckys Engraving
Programming assistance from Domino Guru

We have a lot of great stuff.  And since many of our contributors have posted more then one article your odds of getting something are EXTREMELY good.  For full details see Wiki Madness.

Posted by David Leedy At 8:24 AM Location Lebanon, Pa | Permalink | Comments (0)