Okay, we use Lotus Notes at work because our client uses it. I remoted into my machine which I hadn't been on in a few days because of taking time off for the birth of my newest slave, err... child. Lo and behold, Notes has crapped out, requiring me to click a good fifteen-plus OKs! (I stopped counting at fifteen and had a few more). Even better, now it won't start up, because "Notes encountered an error when opening a window".
Good God. How can a program encounter an error simply opening a bloody window? Have we not figured out the windowing paradigm and proper and useful error handling over the last fifteen years?! A window should open, even if it will be blank due to an error. It shouldn't just crap out and give the user only the option of clicking OK on a completely ambiguous message box.
In short, GGRRRR!!
Good thing I didn't need that junk for my time entry (pats trusty pile of paper-copies of activities).
Yes, Lotus sucks far worse than any other "productivity" client I have ever used.
I hope they never discover that Lotus also has an instant messaging client (can't remember what it's called)...
LOL -- What you described is not specific to Lotus Notes I am sure, unless you're using an old client (version 5 or less) but as a Lotus Notes/Domino web/client app developer (going on 6 years or so) I still admit it can be a non-intuitive annoyance-ridden resource at times.
Many strange design/conventions in Lotus products, for sure, but as a rapid app dev tool, especially for unstructured data etc. it's a wonderful technology that I am glad to be an upper-percentile skilled worker in. And the tons of Notes dev blogs and such agree with me -- it's not "dead" but it's certainly not "popular with the masses" due to its quirks.
I also understand many of the complaints of those who use it primarily as an email client ::) and therefore don't have experience with custom applications built with Lotus Notes/Domino ... so I won't get into a big " In Defense Of Lotus Notes " rant or anything.
Just something to consider: Groove Networks was founded by the primary "inventor" of the Lotus Notes data model, Ozzy something (or is it Someone Ozzy?) and recently M$ has been putting a lot of weight behind Groove due to its flexibility (essentially it's the benefit of the way Lotus Notes handles data, without the headache of dealing with IBM and/or mostly unchanged design/conventions...)
Anyway, that's all I have to say about that. :)
Quote from: Darren Dirt on June 13, 2006, 03:51:01 PMWhat you described is not specific to Lotus Notes I am sure, unless you're using an old client (version 5 or less) but as a Lotus Notes/Domino web/client app developer (going on 6 years or so) I still admit it can be a non-intuitive annoyance-ridden resource at times.
We were updated a week or so earlier to 6.5 (I think - 6.something, anyway, from 5.11). Yay, because Notes 5.11 actually *disabled* Remote Desktop if you had a certain Single User Logon option installed. And of course we did and were not allowed to change it.
But anyway! This is about the new client. The specific situation I described was:
1. Getting a significant number of message boxes (fifteen-plus) because Notes had crapped out while running without me using it (I hadn't logged on to my machine for a couple of days)
2. Not being able to start the program because an error occurred while opening a window
As far as I see, this is a Notes-specific issue. How many other Windows programs have you used that crap out before the splash screen disappears? Keep in mind this is from a professional software company, whose job it is to make quality software. And of the software that does crap out, how many of them quit with an error message so ambiguous that an experienced developer has trouble determining what's the cause of the problem? It "encountered an error"? The hell? That's the kind of error handling we'd throw in at the last moment in school, just so we wouldn't lose points for not having *some* kind of error handling. If it had told me what the problem was, maybe I could've fixed it with the power of Google.
As a mail client, Lotus Notes sucks total ass. As a calendar and scheduling system, ditto. As a platform for creating custom applications with malleable data, I have not yet had the "pleasure" of experiencing this from a developer's perspective, but the few custom apps we're required to use at work look ugly and are counter-intuitive.
A real interesting point here is that you're saying that Notes/Domino is easier to develop for, whereas I'm saying it sucks to use. Now, which would Joel (http://www.joelonsoftware.com) say is more important?
Hah hah, I was looking at lotusnotessucks.4t.com (http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com), and decided to google for other "Notes Sucks" websites. A few links later I came across this little treasure: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000227.html (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000227.html)
Quote from: comment by Andy, posted March 4, 2005
I used to work for a software company exactly like this. They sell 'enterprise' systems for the insurance market. The software is terrible, and riddled with bugs, but they continue to sell it to this day and make an enormous amount of money from bug-fixing. They have no formal design process, do no R&D and have no formal development process. (The application is written in VB6 and is comprised of 1500+ (count 'em) COM components >)
Hence, out of a company with 50+ developers, at any one time at least half of them are bug fixing.
I'm sure glad I don't work where Andy used to work.
* shock at the complete absence of the website section: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/special/Upside * ;)