Notes user interface is poor indeed - what to do?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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Hi - now i have worked with Notes for over two years and im tired of the poor user interface and wondered if there is any add-ons or APIs that can make it better.

I love the views and the data handling in Notes, but the Form element is just… poor!!! I actually considered at one point to make the entire system at my work into an intranet, because it gives much more freedom to create intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces to the rest of the users.

I dont think that Notes is a bad platform, but it seems strange that the form design element cant do something basic like creating fields in Lotus Script - it would be truly sweet to build up a report by creating and setting up fields and appearence backend - not to mention that doclinks and hotspots is a bother in any application with all the restrictions.

I explored the world of RichText for a long time too - maybe that was capable of creating something easy-to-use but that turned out to even more restricted.

So im looking for something, add-ons, API or something else that can augment the interface in Notes. I would like the keep the views, the outlines and replace all the forms with something close to a webpage.

With regards

Jacob

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Subject: Notes user interface is poor indeed - what to do?

Write web applications instead of Notes applications, there you have unlimited possibilites for the UI.

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Subject: Take a look at NotesBuddy from IBM’s developerWorks. New e-mail front-end!

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/notesbuddy

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Subject: Notes user interface is poor indeed - what to do?

Let’s see…

There’s the COM API, so you can use VB to write your UI.

There’s the Java API, so you can do it in AWT. Or you could use an entire J2EE system to front-end your Domino app.

There’s the C API, so you could rewrite the entire interface.

There’s Domino’s HTTP rendering, which allows you to develop for a browser, giving you complete access to DHTML techniques.

There’s DXL, which allows you to access Domino data at a raw level, which you could then process through any XSLT transform of your choice, for presentation in anything you can think of that can deal with XML.

There’s framesets, outlines, views, dialog boxes, preview panes, embedded editors, tabbed tables, in-view editing, and about 100 other built-in design techniques in the Notes client itself that can get you away from the “click on a document in a view and open it in a form” mode.

There are about a dozen different reporting packages for Notes that you can find with a Google search.

And there’s OpenNTF.org, where you can download open source Notes templates to see what kind of design ideas other people have come up with.

I think it’s safe to say that in two years, you’ve barely scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg in Notes interface.

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Subject: RE: Notes user interface is poor indeed - what to do?

hmm your advice is then to use another product than the native Notes Interface and just use the Notes database?

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Subject: RE: Notes user interface is poor indeed - what to do?

No. My advice would be to first look at other applications (such as the ones at OpenNTF.org) and see how other long-time Notes developers have taken different approaches to UI. Then, start looking at the capabilities of Domino for hosting your interface via a browser. Your initial remark about “I’d like to replace the form with something like a web page” makes me think you’ve never fired up the HTTP process on your Domino server and pointed your web browser at it.

THEN you might want to start looking at API-based solutions.

But really, my advice is to look a little harder into what you already have before you start griping about the Notes user interface.