Ben Poole

So, like many other Mac-heads, I downloaded the 8.5 beta tonight. Or so I thought. What I actually got was a version of the Domino Server for Solaris. Doh! Nevertheless, awesome FUBAR aside, this spells a new world order, one in which Apple kit does count for something with IBM. Sure, Notes on the Mac is still a bit grim, we don't have proper Java support, and many things are unavailable to us (e.g. OpenNTF login or Lotus Connections blog creation in Safari ;o) ), but times they are a-changing.

Hoorah for Lotus Notes! Hoorah for Macs!

Now play nice.

Lotusphere season is upon us. I'm not attending in 2008, but hope to in 2009. Yet again, it looks like LS08 is going to be a conference one really shouldn't miss. But hey, them's the breaks. This Lotusphere certainly seems to be the most "tease-mungous" I can remember: Lotus911 (many thanks for this Connections site chaps!), Ed Brill and others are all being very coy about what they're up to.

So, I think Monday morning is going to be very interesting, can't wait to hear what everyone is up to.

One thing I will temper my enthusiasm on is the whole Lotus / Mac thing. I'd love to be proven wrong, but hey, I was hearing about Notes 8 on OS X when I last went to Lotusphere (2006), and it looks like the 8.01 release won't feature the Mac just yet. Hmmm.

I installed Sametime 8 on my Mac yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised: it's a whole lot better and more usable than previous versions, so things are definitely moving in the right direction. IBM still haven't got the hang of consistent font rendering on OS X yet though ;o)