Thursday, February 09, 2006

Slow News Day

Today The Guardian published an editorial bolstering the claim, yet again, that Notes is the most hated software product ever. The editorial quoted my I Love Lotus Notes post from last month.

Ben Rose, founder of the UK Notes User Group, was also quoted in the editorial. Ben has already questioned both the data and the "research" behind the article. Ed Brill has responded too. I can do no better than to point you to Ben and Ed. I think they both got it right.

But, of course, I have an opinion too.

When I first heard about the piece in The Guardian, I was prepared to hate it. I feared being quoted out of context and expected I'd have to write a scathing letter to the editor. In fact the editorial didn't twist my words. To be honest, my reaction is closer to a yawn.

This whole topic has been rehashed many times over. Some of it is really old news. For example:
When new mail arrives, you get a message saying "You have new mail". But the mailbox display doesn't update; you have to press a key or menu item to refresh it. So the program is smart enough to know email has arrived, but not to show it - something the clunkiest free email program does routinely.
That problem was fixed years ago in Notes 6!

The rest of The Guardian piece is mere speculation about who hates Notes, why they hate it, and what percentage of users hate it. There is no actual research to back up the claims and many of the facts are plain wrong. Round over. The Guardian didn't lay a glove on Notes.
 

1 comment:

Paul Morriss said...

I use Notes 6.5. My inbox doesn't automatically refresh. I've just checked the knowledge base to see if there's a solution and there are a couple of things I can try, when I get back to work. So although it may be fixed in Notes 6 it does seem to be quite fragile. So a badly researched article which says it doesn't work isn't good. It should say it now works for most people most of the time if you've got a more recent version, but still may go wrong.

Another frustration I have is that things keep breaking. When we had notes 4.6 repeating alarms would forget to go off after a while. The knowledge base said it was fixed in a later version. We have just gone to 6.5 from 5 and I find it has been fixed in 6.0.5, because presumably it broke in 6.0, and in 6.5.4 because presumably it broke in 6.5. I'm a software engineer, so I tolerate bugs, but for a bug in such a basic function to keep on reappearing is very annoying. Can't it be a test in each new big release to see if the new code has broken repeating alarms?