keithstric.com

I can understand the all too often common perception that Notes is bad or out dated or insert your own complaint or whatever. I've recently moved to an organization that is a very large notes shop. Some of the apps are very old to say the least and badly written. I can and usually do spend hours trying to figure out where an element is getting it's sometimes 5 deep of computed values, value from. This makes the application slow and on top of that the UIs are terrible and there are hundreds of views in some of the apps, further contributing to the slowness.

As I've said before, the perception people have of Lotus Notes is a direct result of the apps they use within Lotus Notes. If they're using an app that is bloated, slow and ugly then they'll think Lotus Notes is bloated, slow and ugly. Even if we as Lotus Professionals know better.

This post over on Ed Brill's site and also over on Duffbert's site is what got me to thinking about this. These kinds of articles that are quoted on those sites are the reason why we as developers need to ensure that we produce quality applications that are functional, perform well, look good and function as a user expects it to function. We all need to continue being Lotus Notes evangelists as much as possible.

Lotus is a great tool that is flexible, powerful and I know of no other product that will allow you to develop with whatever technology you're most comfortable with (@Formula, LotusScript, VB Script, Java, Javascript, CSS, HTML, etc.). Heck, you can even use VB objects within a Notes application if you're so inclined. That's why we love it so, it'll do most anything you ask of it (within reason of course).