After using long time version 7.03 of the Lotus Notes Client for OS X, I have now switched in a first try to the 8.5 Public Beta 2 version, hoping that Notes would have improved.
I was positively surprised at the first glance. The application became quicker than the old one. Although after a few starts, I had to realise, that the most caching and loading is now done at startup. You see a nice screen at the startup, which tells you now, that Notes is doing something and not freezing. But compared with other programs, which use a lot of memory (such as Adobe Photoshop), the startup process is within the limits.
I was positively surprised at the first glance. The application became quicker than the old one. Although after a few starts, I had to realise, that the most caching and loading is now done at startup. You see a nice screen at the startup, which tells you now, that Notes is doing something and not freezing. But compared with other programs, which use a lot of memory (such as Adobe Photoshop), the startup process is within the limits.When started there is a lot to discover. The ugly old gray background is gone and now there is a blue background. Then I have noticed the sidebar on the right. Before we had one on the left, but I never used it. Now there is plenty of functionality in this right sidebar. There are three tabs so far: "Day-at-a-glance", where you see your calendar entries for the actual day; "Feeds", there you can read the syndicated content you want to and "Sametime", where you see your contacts/groups online.
Looking a little bit closer, you will notice the permanent search field on top of the sidebar. With this you can search your mail and astonishingly it delivered quite appropriate results. To be more precise, when you submit a term for search, then, in case your mailbox is not open, will be opened and your results will be shown.
The last improvement for now I have to comment is the fact, that the client configuration is getting more compact. Instead of having two or three different menu entries with sub-navigation, we have now one single panel for the complete configuration of the client. This makes the client much more user friendly, since in version 7 we had to go through different configuration panels, located in different menu entries, to configure the complete client.
That's all for now. I think all together the new client is a good thing. Unfortunately I had no 8.5 Server and a Domino Designer available for the test, where IBM should have made some more changes, especially for the web design. But we will see in the future.
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