Friday night, I bolted home with my fresh copy of the new Mac operating system in hand. I grabbed my wife’s MacBook and convinced her that it was the least critical of our machines and should thus be the first one we upgraded.

Two hours later, we had a fresh Mac OS on the machine with no apparent problems. So I whipped out my MacBookPro to upgrade my main machine (the one I use at work, home, coffee shops - everywhere, really). Again, a short period of time later, the entire computer had been updated and appeared to work fine. It wasn’t until about 3PM that day that I realized there was one little app I didn’t test out - one I’ve never had to worry about in the Windows world: Lotus Notes.

I won’t lie. I panicked. Notes on a Mac is a second-class citizen. It’s never out at the same release level as the rest of the clients. It always has some odd things that don’t quite work right. Sure, there have been some improvements, but its never at (or even near) the top of the list of operating systems that IBM seems to put much care into.

All that panicking aside, I’m pleased to report: it works! See for yourself:

What’s really cool is that it actually looks much better in Leopard. Note the red dots that now appear on the tabs at the top (they were there before - but didn’t appear red unless you moused over them). The new grey window frame also makes the application look nicer. There’s a lot of “stuff” that happens in the toolbars in Notes, so its nice to have the window framed in a different color to clean it up a bit.

There’s also a new icon that appears in the dock when Notes is replicating. It doesn’t give you any information - it just sits there bouncing and then goes away when its done. I can see how that would be handy. It would be awesome if it showed a status - but I know that’s asking WAY too much.

I’ve also learned that Notes 8 (on a Mac) will support Leopard when it comes out this quarter (although I haven’t seen a confirmation that it is Notes 8 and not 8.0.1, which would obviously, be much better). That same link confirms that Sametime 7.5.1 will not support Mac - which is a bummer. However, the upcoming Sametime 8 apparently will.