DominoKeys.com

Wow. Long title.

Since day 3 of Lotusphere 2008, I’ve been running the Notes 8.5 Mac client beta. Its really nice to have the “8″ experience on my Mac without starting Windows, but it is very much a beta client. There are a number of odd bugs (most of which hover around the Sametime integration for some reason). And my favorite is that when it crashes you get an eclipse error message… that can’t easily be closed. It runs off the bottom of my monitor and there isn’t a “quit” option in my menu. Hmm… maybe if I had that 30″ Apple Cinema display?!

The 8.5beta experience takes a dramatic turn for the worse when you connect to an 8.0.1 server running a current version of your mail file. In short: Notes becomes unusable. The amount of bugs and extremely slow performance means you just can’t get anything done in the client.

So… for the last week, I’ve been spending A LOT of time back in “Paradows.” (Parallels+Windows — can I do that? Can I start a “thing” there?)

The 8.0.1 client is much better and I really like the new UI. I’m still not crazy about the speed. It really seems to be noticeably slower and I worry if our user community will tolerate that in exchange for stuff that’s new. What’s more, there’s just something … wrong with telling them that a benefit is the Exchange-esque 3-pane vertical arrangement of their mail.

But the single most annoying thing thus far is the lack of the selection gutter in my mail and calendar. I’ve always thought that the ability to “check” a bunch of documents easily without using “control” or “shift” keys in the process was an awesome idea that made Notes unique … and now its gone!

That problem is amplified by the fact that, today, the only way I can sync my Notes & iPhone calendar is by selecting multiple calendar entries in Notes and exporting them to an iCal file. Its quite hard to do that in 8.x.