Jelle Druyts

Take it from me: Lotus Notes is a product that deserves a quick and silent death. I'm currently on a project with a large company, the first I've been where they're using Lotus all over the place. And we hates it, don't we? Yes we do... Let me elaborate for a second or 2(000)...

<rant>

You launch the program. You get a password box. Fair enough, Outlook users are spoiled because it uses your Windows account to log on. But the fact you have to log in every time eliminates the possibility for me to launch it only when there's new mail (there's a separate little tray app that can check your email) because it slows down the process of quickly checking your email too much. Ok so the program is always running, and always taking space up my taskbar. I'd minimize it to the tray (sorry, notification area) using PowerMenu, but then the icon gets turned into this default windows app icon (same happens to Opera by the way, so I can't see the difference).

But anyway, once you're actually logged in, you want to go off and send an email of course. Just to make sure this thing really works. So you're sweeping the screen for a "New Email" button but you must have missed it. Sweep again. Then you start thinking, it's not gonna be that "New Memo" button is it? Click it. Now that looks remarkably like composing a new email. Come on, "New Memo"? I'm not creating a memo, I'm not gonna print it out and put it on the freakin' fridge. What's wrong with "New Email"? Except when they actually do use the word (consistency is not their middle name) they still call it "eMail" (note the casing) - as if it's still an enhancement to regular mail. It's an actual word these days guys, please.

Now let's talk GUI conventions for a second. You know, that's the user interface stuff that everybody does more or less in the same manner so we get a consistent (whoops I said the c-word again) look and feel across the entire platform. But I've been told that IBM made up its own set of GUI conventions over the years and clings on to them like hungry mice to a hairy piece of cheese. Just a few examples:

• Notes behaves sort of like a tabbed MDI environment: you can have multiple "windows" open but they're on separate tabs. You can click a tab header to switch to another window, and you can close it by clicking the 'X'. Great, except that the 'X' is on every tab header itself, in stead of one 'X' on the right of the tab header so you can just keep clicking to close multiple windows.
• Getting help when you hover over something is really nice, and that's what status bars are used for normally. But in Notes, they conveniently use the title bar of the window. Well, 'use' it is an overstatement: they just paint a grey box over it and put the text in there.
• If you look at the Inbox, you see a list of emails - sorry, memo's. Selecting multiple emails at a time is possible, but not with ctrl (single select) and shift (multiselect) like you're used to: shift is single select, ctrl does nothing. Dragging in the list to select a bunch of mails also doesn't work.
• The calendar is buggy when you're scrolling with the wheelmouse: in stead of moving to another month (or something else that makes sense), it just moves the calendar up and down. And fails to redraw correctly.
• The menus are totally screwed, I'll just walk you through an example for the hell of it. Say you want to create a new folder in your inbox, you right click the inbox folder and expect a context menu, right? Wrong! That would be too easy, in stead you have to go to the "Create" menu and choose "Folder", and then the place where you want to create it in. To delete a folder, it gets even more complicated. Select the folder, go to "Actions", choose "Folder Options", and then "Delete Folder". Note that it's a related task but it winds up in a totally different place. What does that "context" in "context menu" stand for again? Another example: if you'd ever want to mark an item as unread, again don't go looking for a context menu (well there is one but it would make too much sense to put the command in there of course). You have to go to the "Edit" menu, select "Unread Marks" and then "Mark Selected Unread". Rock on.

You want some more? As long as I'm ranting...

Well it's just not an intuitive program to work with. For example, there's a Trash and an Autotrash button. What's up with that? I don't even want to know the difference, I just want to get some item out of my sight and have it be done with. For all I care autotrash seems to work in my inbox, and trash works in my outbox. Whatever.

Moving items is possible (whew) but sent items cannot be moved, only copied. Ok so you copy and trash the original, right? Works great until you find that the copies are also deleted - that is sooo not funny. Same goes for calendar entries, meeting requests should get out of my sight when the meeting is scheduled but they sit quietly in my inbox. Until I delete them - but wait! That removes the calendar entry! The joy of missing a meeting... And alarm options, really, what's up with that? By default, a calendar entry doesn't have an alarm set to remind you of it. In stead, you have to open the calendar entry, edit document, click Alarm Options, enable alarm, close dialog box, save document. Holy crap how productive!

Replying is funny though, really. You don't actually reply; I mean, you could but you'll soon find out that's not what you want to do. The Reply button is still there for when you want to save a few bytes for your 14k modem actually (what, some people have broadband these days...?) because it omits the original message altogether. So you press "Reply With History" (ah so now we're getting lessons in history?). Great - except if you want to reply to everybody. Then you have to press an additional Reply To All button in the new window. What is this, are Lotus programmers paid by user mouseclick or something?

Finally, to make sure nobody goes off using a competitive product, they've made very sure that you can't export anything out of the program in any useful way. Well there is some kind of crappy text format, but don't even think about importing that into another program. So there's no separate email files (.eml), no Outlook personal folders (.pst), no nothing. Except if you buy expensive third-party tools of course. (They rub each others backs just to make sure their little eco-system holds together I guess.)

Oh, and 16-color icons really, really give an enormous performance boost on my system. Thanks for not overloading me with all this shmancy-fancy 32-bit color GPU-eating overkill.

We wants Outlook back, Outlook, my precious!

</rant>

Aaaaah that felt good. (Bear in mind that I've been using Outlook for years so you might say I'm slightly biased towards the Microsoft way of using a computer and an email client in particular - but in the end, aren't most of us? Really?)

Update: I really wonder what they're going to do when Avalon comes along. With all this rich functionality and user experience goodness that gets unleashed - will they make the switch? Or will they stay behind and (random prediction) lose their market share to remain only in the companies where NT4 is still running by the time Longhorn ships? I really wonder...