The Domino Effect

I understand Notes 8.5 is still Beta.  I understand that there are some things that take some effort to get right.  I appreciate the amount of effort going into the 8.5 codestream,  with getting things right with the Eclipse Designer client and all.  But sometimes it seems to be the simplest of things that appear on the surface to require so little effort, yet just can't seem to be done right.

My case in point...

Notes 6.x and 7.x

Notes 8.0.1 and 8.5 B2 small  icons

Notes 8.5 B2 large icons

I think the pictures speak for themselves.  Am I the only one who thinks it can't be that hard to design some nice looking graphical icons rather than the over pixellated versions we see here?

NB...these are all actual size screengrabs.

Downloaded, installed and currently waiting for initial load to finish [which is taking quite a while] ....  be interesting to see what's changed from the previous beta.

Blackberry Bold 9000

Have just got hold of three of these to setup. Very nice. Had some problems with two of the devices after being wiped. First one I set up for myself to try for half a day before wiping it to activate the intended user. After the wipe, was confronted with numerous java exception errors, such as:

Uncaught exception
ApplicationRegistry.waitFor
(0x125d69656ffebdd2)
timeout

Uncaught exception
Application net_rim_bb_messaging_app (200) is not responding; process terminated

Second one was because I couldn't believe that a simple wipe could kill the device, so I tried it again.

Reapplying the firmware seems to have fixed the problems.

This is the first entry in yet another IBM Lotus Notes/Domino related blog.

I've no intention of taking over the blogosphere with this blog.  Its initially just a place where I can post my experiences and observations of working with Notes/Domino and the various add-ons to these products.  Occasionally I may touch on non-Lotus stuff .  Who knows where things will lead?

Anyway enough about the blog, what about me?

I have been working with Notes since 1993.  I'm the proud owner of the second oldest Notes certificate in my organisation [a 3000-seat Australian government department].  My experience has covered Notes versions 3 through to 8.5.  I started as just another Notes user.  Eventually I became involved in support for the Notes client, which lasted for many years, including involvement in a number of rollouts of new client versions. I then spent a couple of years in a developer role before reinventing myself as a Domino Administrator about 5 years ago.  Since then, I have also dabbled in Domino MTAs, Domino Web Servers, LEI, Quickplace [not Quickr yet, but soon], Sametime and BES.

So with out much further ado... let's get on with it.