Ryan Homan

Well, I have successfully completed my 2nd Lotusphere as of about a week ago. Overall, it was a success. This being my second year, I knew a little bit more how things work, and got to go to a few more things this year. Also, I didn’t spend that much time in the product showcase so I didn’t have a million emails and voicemails from all these vendors I will never work with, but I ended up with 5 or 6 new t-shirts. I also was able to utilize my evenings a little better this year, and had plans almost every night. I feel like I learned quite a few things, some of which I’ve already used in one of my projects, and I really want to start using a framework for helping with development. I was also impressed with IBM’s commitment to Lotus and what they are planning to do in the future. They are really putting a great deal of resources in making their products work better by using all the technology we have today. Just some resources that I wanted to point out. I really like what Nathan Freeman did with his hair. Check out his blog at http://www.lotus911.com/nathan/escape.nsf Also, Rich Waters framework, Ext.nd is coming along well and is great for those who want to web enable their apps extremely quickly. Check out his work at http://www.rich-waters.com/blog/ Well thats all for now, and I look forward to what Lotus surprises us with next year.

Well I’ve been using notes 8 for a little over a week now. It has lots of many new features which I definitely liked using. I really liked the more user friendly buttons and functions and how it looks like most of the other apps I work with. I also liked the integrated sidebar with IM, calendar, and RSS. It was however quite a resource hog though even on a newer system. I was running it on a laptop with a 1.7 Pentium M with 1GB of memory, but it seemed extremely sluggish. It also frequently crashed or gave me error messages. I sent them all off to IBM, but it actually became so troublesome that I went back to 7.0.2 because of all the errors. I would like to give the folks at IBM credit for coming up with an up-to-date GUI and similar functionality to other apps, but for a beta, I thought it was missing some things. The speed is going to need greatly improved. I do not think systems with 512 MB of ram will be able to run it. I also feel they need to fix the many bugs I came across. Hopefully they will get it all taken care of and by launch date it will be as great of a product that it has been advertised as.