I am one of the most fervent supporters of Notes, but I have to say that toolbars continue to be one of the most frustrating areas of the client in terms of usability, even for me. It seems like this has been going on since they were introduced.
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They just do not stay put and looking at other posts this may be related to the dynamic nature of the context sensitive toolbars, but we have got to do a better job of this.
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Since they move around, I have to reset them by dragging. When I drag a toolbar to move it, I want it to butt up against the side of the screen or existing toolbar, not float or shrink the adjacent toolbar. If I want to shrink I should be able to grab the right edge of a toolbar and drag left to shrink it. If I want to float I should drag it down (off the toolbar row) not off the left edge.
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A number of toolbars just insert themselves into the toolbar rows and then cannot be removed. I believe they are context sensitive, as none of those displayed in the Toolbar right click menu have become enabled, such that I can turn them off again. Short of blowing away the workspace directory (or knowing the explicit file in which the layout is stored) they cannot be removed via the UI. Restore defaults is perpetually unavailable (greyed out).
Can we get some focus on this really annoying issue - it is really a very visible problem when it occurs.
Subject: We agree that the toolbars need more work
Hi David,I will be the first to admit that the toolbar user experience is not ideal.
Part of the issue is that we are trying really hard to waste less space-- and maybe in the long run it is not worth it. For example, in Old Notes (pre-8) each new toolbar used up a new row by default. You could then move them around, but at the get-go, we put each new one on its own row.
Most users (and by that I mean the business end users, not savvy types such as yourself) would never move the toolbars-- so they wasted tons of space. (and then these same people complain that we use up way too much screen real estate compared to Outlook…)
Anyway, so we tried to be smart and put additional toolbars on the same row if they would fit or “almost fit” .
And that does not seem to be working as well as we want. We are still working on it, and we hope that you will see improvements in the shipping version of Notes 8.5.
Subject: The toolbars STILL need more work
I and my colleagues have suffered great frustration over the mercurial toolbars since moving to 8.5.
Today, using 8.5.2FP4, I AGAIN found that my toolbars had re-arranged themselves.
This is not the only agonizing retrostep in 8.5 so I have decided to start bringing them to this forum in the hopes that someone, somewhere will care enough to listen to our pain and do something to make the program work as well as 6.5 did and stop wasting time just prettifying Notes.
Subject: Screenshot of problem 3.
Subject: Resetting the toolbars ?
Once I get in this state, I cannot reset the toolbars any other way except blwoing away the data\workspace directory which of course also resets many of the client preferences.
I have looked at the com.ibm.rcp.platform.personality.config.xml file which appears to be where toolbar layouts are set, but have not been successful at modifying that. It would appear that the settings are also stored in another place and the xml is re-populated with them at runtime.
Any pointers as to how to reset only the toolbar layout would be greatly appreciated.
Subject: Let me know when you find out how to reset it, I have the same issue (thx)