Yellerdog

I''ve been using Lotus Notes on the Mac for some time now, starting wtih Release 7 and moving on to the 8.5 beta. With the release of 8.5 gold, I've been using a full version on my 2Gb Macbook for some time now.

All in all, things are good. Performance is acceptable, and just about all of the features I need are there. It looks great, and once it's open (which takes a bit), I tend to leave it open all day. Also, the preferences file is now a text file editable with TextEdit rather than a .plist file, which makes my life a lot easier. Plus the OS recognizes it as my default e-mail client. Replication is smooth and seamless as expected.

There are some hiccups that I would like to see addressed, however.

• Not all mail-enabled apps can take advantage of Notes as the default mail client.
• When I use some apps or the OS to "send a document" via E-mail, the file is often not attached. Sometimes a draft e-mail does not even appear.
• Performance is only adequate. My CPU is an Intel Core Duo, not a Duo 2, and I have just 2GB of RAM. Still, that's a pretty good machine, and Notes is my slowest app by far.
• The keyboard shortcuts, which I live by, are inconsistently applied. Alt-Enter opens up the properties box, but no combination of keys with F9 refreshes a view.

I am pretty far along in making the Mac my "home" platform, and Notes 8.5 was a critical step.

Now all I need is a Designer and Admin client in 8.5, and we'll be asll set.

 I have been using the Mac 8.5 beta client on my Macbook for about five weeks now, and I have some initial impressions. FYI, I am running on Leopard on a version 1.1 Macbook (Intel core duo) with 2Gb of memory.

• At this point, the Mac client is a lot more stable than I would expect from a first beta....
• ...assuming you have a clean install. I started with an upgrade and it was pretty crashy.
• Performance is OK. I am sure it will pick up in production.
• The Lotus team has a challenge in balancing the Mac UI guidelines and Lotus UI tradition. I am glad I don't have their challenge.
• I'd like to see the InfoBox be dockable and re-sizable.
• About the only thing I deperately miss from the Windows environment is menu keyboard shortcuts. Pressing Alt-F for the file menu is a lot more efficient than reaching for the mouse.
• IBM really needs to update the home page creation tools. They are basically unchanged since R5. One enhancement I would love to see would be an accordiion-like interface for controlling content display. They've done it in the sidebar, so it is obviously doable.
• When the migrate Administrator and Designer to OS X I will be able to delete my Windows partition.

I am currently in the process of converting my family from a Windows environment to a Mac environment. We have two Macs in the house, my Macbook ('Platon') and my wife's Mac Mini ('Vesta').

My wife, for the time being, is getting all of her mail via Mac mail (mail.app). She connects via IMAP to our home Domino server, and she seems to be pretty happy with it. Here are some observations.

1. There is no way to tell mail.app which folder to use for junk mail. It just goes ahead and creates one when you establish the connection and turn on junk mail filtering. So now Pam's mail DB has more than one junk mail folder.
2. Ditto for Sent. Dumb.
3. The LDAP directory settings don't seem to be working. I think this has more to do with my Domino server than anything else.
4. The Mac client does an excellent job of rendering e-mail regardless of format - rich text, plain text, HTML. Wish I could say the same thing for Lotus Notes.
5. We have a Logitech trackball attached to the Mini (and all of our other PC's in fact). Pam finds the use of the right mouse button to be pretty straightforward. It blows my mind that Apple stubbornly stuck with a 1-button mouse for years. Sure, Jobs is brilliant, but when he is wrong, he is wrong.

I'll have some observations on the Mac 8.5 beta client later.