Jan Schulz

After reading Chris Toohey's Quickpoll about Framesets vs. Web I started to think about rewriting a typical Notes Interface (outline to the left, views on the right) to be more "web 2.0" friendly with a landing page. To complete the challenge, the UI should be translateable and, of course, nice looking. The first problem: the typical landing page has "call to action" buttons: big, shiny buttons with an icon and some text. So, how can you do that in Notes? My tries:

• Buttons: can be translated via onLoad events and "document.forms[0].Button.value = document.forms[0].cfdField_LabelForButton.value", no icons possible
  
• HTML pass thrugh Computed text (=translateable) with <input>s -> just plain ugly.
  
• HTML pass thrugh Computed text with <button>s -> Does not work, as the notes internal html parser does not recognise the button tag
• Notes Table (with nice looking background + rounded corners) and a hotspot -> does not work, as the hotspot can't be set around the table and also because I haven't found a way to vertical center text in a table cell.
  
• Outline with one entry, styled with rounded corners, translateable the UI (lables are computeable), mouse over effects for the text. Only problem: setting width to "fits to content" has no effect, which means that the translations must be as long as the original text (seems to me that this is a notes bug).

Here is a screenshot:


The last one with the styled outline entry seems to be the best idea up to now, but the "fit to content" problem is bad :-(

Anybody with some ideas how to get nice, translateable, hover aware buttons with icons on it in the notes client?

Here is the demo DB...