J. Keil Wilson

If you had something to add to my posts on "The Revolution" (and I hope you do), you should be able  to do that now.

Apparently I had comments disabled on my blog. Don't remember changing that setting, so maybe that's the default for BleedYellow? I do have a bit of a user interface complaint, if your blog settings have comments disabled, why does the "Advanced Settings" section for individual blog entries have a checkbox for enabling/disabling comments? I would think this checkbox should be grayed out on individual blog entries if the blog settings don't allow comments.

Another interesting UI feature appears to be that the "Allow comments for..." checkbox for my individual blog entries is getting cleared when I go back and edit a post. Am I the only one having trouble with this?

When Nathan Freeman talked about his revolution back in July, I immediately saw the potential to ease my pain with a Notes UI component that I use time and time again in my application design: the Embedded View. I almost always use embedded views for creating and working with response documents. My users don’t want to sort through some enormous hierarchical view to find that one piece of data they need to work with. They want to start with the top-level, basic data and drill down to find specific details. Embedded views are a great tool to allow users to work in this way and build more simple mental maps that allow them to easily navigate complex data structures.

For years, though, there’s been a major pitfall to using embedded views to create and edit these response documents. The UI events and objects of the embedded view cannot be directly connected to the UI events and objects of the parent form. If your form needs to know which response document is selected in the embedded view, that’s a very difficult (sometimes impossible) task. If you change a response document in the embedded view and want to update a field on the parent document, you have to be very careful about how you do that, or an NSD dialog is in your future.

So when Nathan came online ranting and raving about this amazing method he’d discovered for sharing objects and variables across Notes class objects that previously couldn’t talk to each other, I was very interested. Then I looked at his code and my face melted like I was staring into the lost ark of the covenant. What he was describing was really complex and used a bunch of LotusScript language statements and functions I barely knew existed, let alone had ever used before. And since I was hip deep in deadlines and had work-arounds for my immediate problems, I set Nathan’s revolution aside in hopes someone would come along and explain it all so I could understand it. That never really happened.

Earlier this week, I finally had a requirement that could only be met by allowing my parent form to talk directly to the embedded view’s NotesUIView object. From a button on that parent form I needed to know which document was selected in the embedded view. So, I rolled up my sleeves, took some Xanax, and tried to understand what is going on in Nathan’s head. I really did struggle trying to figure out what was absolutely necessary to get object and variable sharing to work for what I was trying to do. As I followed Nathan’s examples and entered code into the different forms, views, and script libraries, I really thought there was no way this could work. A couple of days into the struggle, though, I found the magic. In the end, what I really had to do was to stop needing to understand why this would work and to just have faith that it would. The result is really an amazing leap forward in UI design capabilities for Notes Client applications.

I've put together a fairly simple example of how this works in five steps. Look for another post in the next few days: "How to Become a Revolutionist"

OK, this one's easy so I'll jump on that band-wagon.  I'll play Ben's vowe.net is back on-line game.

My entry hails from the '70s...

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_FZVD5lsAw

P.S. - I really wanted to simply embed the video, but just couldn't figure it out. Anyone know if that's possible here?

So I'll stop at two. I want to emphasize that I'm not seriously suggesting IBM make these scripts into commercials, but the fact that people are almost desperate enough to create their own end-user commercials (as not only I am doing here, but as Bruce asked us to do many-a-months ago) lends some credibility to Nathan's argument. My organization just recent made the decision to migrate away from Lotus Notes. I doubt any of the decision makers would admit it, but I think the end-users played a huge role in the decision (a few key end-users, especially). There certainly weren't many people shouting "No, don't take away our Lotus Notes." They did almost unanimously flip-out, however, at the prospect of having to choose the Lotus Productivity Editors over Office as their office suite.

Impress the Spouse

Shot opens with camera directly in front of a man working on his laptop. You can just see the man's head above the open screen of the laptop. It appears that he's at the kitchen table or something within his home. Behind the man, you see some bookshelves or cabinets and counters with pictures and stuff. A homey scene. You hear the man typing and clicking away with a somewhat blank stare on his face.

As the man works a woman walks by behind him quickly. She's drying a dish or carrying laundry or doing some sort of house work. (NOTE: these roles could easily be reversed by having a woman at the computer). As she's walking by, she's staring at his screen to see what he's working on. As she's just about to pass by him and out of the shot, she stops abruptly.

Wife: [turning and staring at the computer screen with a slight squint, with a condescending tone] "Honey, should you be using that FaceSpace social site on your work computer?"

Husband: [not taking the time to look at his wife...continuing his work] "It's not a social site."

Wife: [looking a little more closely, continuing to squint a bit] "What is that, the Amatron & Lon bookstore? Are you shopping online?"

Husband: [still not looking up from his laptop] "Nnnooopppe."

Wife: [Getting still closer to the screen and still squinting. Now looking closely over the man's shoulder] "Is that some sort of new search website or something?"

Husband: [now sitting back a little, husband and wife continue looking at the screen together] "No. No. It's our new inventory catalog system at the office. They just rebuilt it using Lotus Notes. It automatically connects here [he points at the screen] to our customer system and here [again pointing at a different part of the screen] to our ordering system."

Wife: [Looking satisfied with the answer] "Wow. It's not ugly and confusing like all your other work stuff. [She stands upright again] They should make all your work stuff that easy to use." [As she finishes, she turns and walks off camera].

[The husband turns and looks at her with a slightly irritated look.]

Announcer: "Work with this [Show SAP in Notes], work with that [show Office 2007 lib], work together as a team [show the Notes Client home screen]. Why make make it harder than it needs to be? The new IBM Lotus Notes. See it at www.ibm.com/lotusnotes."

 Reading Nathan's recent post about the the ways in which Lotus marketing does and does not suck, I thought I'd make my first post on this here blog thingy about some commercials I've written recently. They were inspired originally by Bruce's I'm Notes challenge a while back. I don't know if they will translate in the way I imagined them, but if I had any skills in writing, film-making, or advertising, I'd love to try to make one of these into a 30 second spot.

Surprise the Staff

We're looking in through the door of a cubical, where we see a woman sitting at her desk. We see her profile and she is staring intently at her computer screen, which we also see from a profile (we can't see what's on the screen. Behind the woman, we see the cubical wall at the back of her cube and there's quite a bit of space back behind the cube wall (were there are presumably other cubicles).

Woman: [whispering loudly with a dismayed look on her face] "Whoa!"

Man: [from the cubical behind the woman's] "What?"

 A man's head and shoulders rise up above the back wall of the woman's cube as he peers over the wall to see what she's doing. This is one of those nosey people who needs to know it all...think Dwight Schrute from The Office. He's obviously standing on his chair of something, because so much of his body is above the cube wall.

 Man: [looking at the woman's computer screen as she clicks around with her mouse a bit] "What's that?"

 Camera changes position to a downward shot from over the back cube wall, as if from the position of the man peering over the wall. We can now see the computer screen and the woman and see that she's clicking around on the screen, opening email and playing with widgets.

 Woman: [still staring at the screen with wonder...without looking away from the screen] "It's the new email program."

 Back to the the first shot through the cubical door with the man still peering over the cubical wall.

 Man: [staring at what the woman is doing on her screen] "How'd you get the new email program already? I don't have the new email program."

 Woman: [again, still staring at the screen and clicking] "My boss volunteered me for the early tester program. I can't believe how nice looking and simple this all is."

 Change to a close up of the man peering over the cubical wall, showing just his body and the top part of the wall. Camera is still positioned as if it's looking in from the woman's profile.

 Man: [more looking at the woman now, as opposed to staring at the screen]: "Yeah. Well those guys up in Redmond are doing some pretty amazing stuff with graphics these days. That new ribbon is a paradigm leader!"

 Back to the original shot of the woman's profile with the camera looking in through the cubical door.

 Woman: [still staring at her screen and clicking] "But this isn't from Redmond...this is Lotus Notes."

 Back to the close up shot of the guy peering over the cube.

 Man: [with a somewhat surprised/disgusted/confused look on his face] "Lotus Notes?!"

 Suddenly, whatever the man was standing/kneeling on gives way and he falls out of the shot behind the cube wall with a crash.

 Announcer: "Email, Schedule, Work. Why make make it harder than it needs to be? The new IBM Lotus Notes. See it at www.ibm.com/lotusnotes"

 As the announcer talks, show a short video of the screen as a person addresses an email, clicks on "Schedule Meeting" and uses a widget to access corporate data from the "PO System". Then darken the screen and show the Notes graphic and website address.