A number of people have emailed me to make sure I saw that Notes 8.0.2 includes the first pass at the iNotes/DWA ultra-lite mode AND that there is now an application available on iTunes called NotesCal that delivers your calendar to the iPhone.
Yes, none of this is the “golden app” us iPhone/Notes fans have been dreaming about; but, do they come close?
DWA ultralite is surprisingly good. I think Lotus did a GREAT job with the UI on this thing. However, the fact of the matter is that you’re just being pushed around web pages. While most of us haven’t had to “go get” our email on a smartphone for some time (it comes to us via Blackberry or GOOD, etc.), once you do it, its not bad to use it. The contacts are also well done with some nice icons to help guide you and take advantage of the fact that the iPhone is a phone after all (I know – it comes as a surprise to a lot of people). The calendar is OK to look at but I’m surprised how frustrating the lack of being able to create a meeting entry has been.
Enter: NotesCal. For $2.99, you can get this app which gives you your Notes calendar on the iPhone. One small catch: some assembly required. There’s an agent you need to create, a txt file you need to paste in, some potential server and ACL work and a decent sized URL you need to program into the settings. Oh, one other problem (for me): it doesn’t work. They have a short test you can do via the browser to make sure you’ve done things correct, and that worked fine for me, but the app itself didn’t.
I’m going to keep trying through… I’m willing to take a few (err… several) extra steps to piece together my Notes/iPhone worlds.
But all of this is a good sign, right? It means others have the same need and are trying to develop a resolution. To those people I say: keep fighting the good fight!
September 14th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Hi,
Thanks for the article about NotesCal. I’ve seeded v1.1 to apple to fix any issues I’ve had reported so far. Please shoot me an e-mail with what’s going on and I’ll be glad to either let you know it’s been fixed, or fix for the next version.
Expect it in the app store in the next week.
September 16th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Jimmy raises a good point and I want to make sure to expand on his site’s announcement about the v1.1 of the product … that version is expected to correct the exact error message I (and apparently others) have been getting.
As soon as the update hits the App Store, I’ll download the update and post a response on this site to make sure to give him a fair review of the product which looks really promising (and makes me hopeful that there are other forthcoming Notes/iPhone products from others as well … for email, contacts, etc. Maybe even one for Sametime?!)
September 28th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
I am getting the exact same error. I’m looking forward to getting the fix so I can properly review the app; it looks pretty nice.
As for iNotes Ultralite, I’ve been using it at Greenhouse, and so far I’m not disappointed. We all want integration with the native apps, but in the meantime, this isn’t bad. Plus, I would imagine that Ultralite will work on the new Android devices as well (and anything else with a decent browser).
October 1st, 2008 at 8:43 pm
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October 9th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
[...] few weeks ago I talked about an application called NotesCal which looked to be a promising application that would deliver my Notes calendar to [...]