Downloading went much more smoothly than last time as I suspect there are far fewer trying to download it first thing… I fired up the installer right after the download finished and noticed an option to select “activities” when installing, I figured why not so I added it in with notes & designer. After quite a few minutes of installing it was finally done and then a nice eclipse error box jumped up, clicking the box away promptly made the installer begin reverting the entire install… Which oddly didn’t actually revert anything, but totally uninstalled Notes.

The second time around I decided to not fuss with anything extra and just install notes/designer, everything went very smoothly. I also picked a different directory to install to just in-case something in my data directory caused the issue. I’m not quite sure what caused the initial issue, I’ll have to try installing on some other pc’s and see how it goes.

Right off the bat I noticed a pretty significant increase in speed, the beta 2 client ran very slowly on this computer and would take a lot of time just to switch between tabs… I definitely think they made some significant performance improvements and I may actually be able to stick with the standard client for normal use now!!!

Also at a quick glance I noticed that they redid the interface of the address book to nicely match the new mail interface. Also it looks like they moved a bunch of preferences (location preferences in particular) into the main eclipse style preferences dialog (old school location preferences took you directly to the notes document).

Aside from my slight install issue I think it’s really shaping up, and I’m looking forward to playing around with it more.

{“@toplevelentries”: 208,
viewentry: [
...
{"@position": '57',"@unid": '6925F9DFB92E6BB9862572200057745B',"@noteid": '9D6',"@siblings": 208,entrydata: [
{"@columnnumber": 0,"@name": 'Player',text: {0: 'Terrell Owens'}},
{"@columnnumber": 1,"@name": 'Sport',text: {0: 'Football'}},
{"@columnnumber": 2,"@name": 'Team',text: {0: 'Dallas Cowboys'}},
{"@columnnumber": 3,"@name": 'Jersey',number: {0: 81}},
{"@columnnumber": 4,"@name": 'Salary',number: {0: 5000000}},
{"@columnnumber": 5,"@name": 'Created',datetime: {0: '20061108'}},
{"@columnnumber": 6,"@name": 'Last Modified',datetime: {0: '20061108T095514,55-06'}}
]},
…
]}

Notes 8 Beta 2

{“@toplevelentries”: “112″,
“viewentry”: [
{"@position": "1","@unid": "144B24CCC71E3DF18525725E00596ADA","@noteid": "A42","@siblings": "112","entrydata": [
{"@columnnumber": "0","@name": "Player","text": {"0": "Terrell Owens"}},
{"@columnnumber": "1","@name": "Sport","text": {"0": "Football"}},
{"@columnnumber": "2","@name": "Team","text": {"0": "Dallas Cowboys"}},
{"@columnnumber": "3","@name": "Jersey","number": {"0": "81"}},
{"@columnnumber": "4","@name": "Salary","number": {"0": "5000000"}},
{"@columnnumber": "5","@name": "Created","datetime": {"0": "20070109"}},
{"@columnnumber": "6","@name": "Last Modified","datetime": {"0": "20070109T111640,60-05"}}
]},
…
]}

Some newlines have been stripped to shorten things a bit. Anyhow, someone said before that they would be dropping the @ as it doesn’t translate well to javascript (and doesn’t allow direct access to the properties of the serialized object) but that doesn’t appear to be the case. They updated all the attribute names and values to make sure everything is enclosed in double quotes. They also changed the content type from “application/x-javascript” to “application/json”.

Looks like the updates are as promised, and this should not require any code updates for those who implemented code on the 7.0.2 version.

• Jeff Eisen
• Ed Brill
• Nathan Freeman

And many many more…

After some minor road bumps in their servers IBM had things going very quickly, I was getting over 500k/s download speeds! The install went quite smoothly as most Notes upgrades do. A couple of things to note off the bat. If you install the IBM productivity tools it doesn’t give you a choice and makes itself the default program for all the Open Document formats, not a huge deal to fix, but I would probably rather load up open office unless I already had the Notes client up and running. Next issue I ran into was performance, I would really recommend taking their 512 minimum and 1 gig recommended into consideration. My laptop is a lower end processor with 512 and things seem to really crawl. I’m curious to see how much better things are on a decent desktop computer with more memory. Last issue I have is that there was no way (or at least I couldn’t find one) to import any feeds into their reader. I would like to give it a shot, but my current list of feeds comes in at 63… that’s a lot of retyping.

Issues aside, I really like the new interface. I promptly replaced the design on my mail template and am looking forward to playing around with the changes some more.