Beyond The Yellow Bubble

For those of you who took yesterday off and missed all the excitement generated by the posting of the following YouTube video about a new product code-named bones developed by Lotus911

If you are a Notes developer and you have not yet watched this 20 times please do yourself a favor and watch it closely. Not because you may ever be in the market for, or find yourself developing. applications for the healthcare industry but for the way this should challenge your thinking about what a Notes application is and how a Notes application should look. I was already excited about my company upgrading my work environment to Notes 8.5 next Monday. But this video, and related information posted about it, has completely challenged my thinking yet again about what I could/should be striving for with my own Notes applications. Something Mr NTF (Nathan T Freeman) has been known to do on a regular basis! When I first watched the video I was in the office and had the sound on my workstation turned down, so I missed the introduction. As I started to watch it I was quite impressed with the application but was a little displeased that Nathan had clearly moved on from Notes development into the traitorous world of Non-Notes development. What on earth was he doing???? Oops I may have been a little wrong there....

This application is simply brilliant at a number of levels:-

1) User Interface
The effort that has gone into the visual display and the human interface is amazing. In my opinion it is right up there with some of the slick things Apple have done with the iPhone. That device is an iPhone on steroids. Even without the plugin.xml tweaks to hide components of the Notes client, it is hard to recognize the Notes elements which have been so nicely rendered using Eclipse SWT controls. I am sure I will be racking my brains for the next 12 months trying to figure out how to do some of that stuff.

2) Software Engineering
This is so unlike any Notes application I have every seen before, I can't help but think that it took the collective minds of a lot of the gurus over there at Lotus911 to actually put this together. (and perhaps access to the 8.5.1. Notes client beta to make it work?). I can't wait until Nathan and others start to share some insights into how some of this was done. I suspect over time the Notes Development community will learn a lot from the snippets of information that are made available about how this was done.

3) Complete Solution
This application was way more than just a Notes database with an awesome UI stuck on top. Nathan had already done that before with Carousel. What I really liked here was how some of the key strengths of Lotus (Composite Applications, Eclipse, Data Encryption, Replication, and Foundations Server) were combined into an awesome low-maintenance SMB solution with an equally impressive piece of hardware with which to interact.

4) Productivity
"1 visual designer, 2 full-time devs, 2 part-time devs. 90 days so far."
I am dying to learn from Nathan why this application was being developed in Notes and not some other platform. I suspect part of the reason is that no other platform would allow something this slick to be developed in anywhere near this amount of time. And no matter what Lotus911's hourly rates are, I am sure the $$ cost is also quite impressive.

Congratulations to Nathan and the Lotus911 team for not only a great product but also helping to create a few cracks in the glass ceiling that has for so long prevented Notes application development from being taken seriously by IT executives as a real kick-arse application platform.

Disclaimer: Bones was developed by Lotus911 who sponsor bleedyellow and provide this blog site. If any of these comments look at all like serious sucking up to the sponsors of my blog --- this is purely coincidental (as I do all my sucking up in private).