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I used to work for a company that built Notes apps in the mid 90s, and while the UI was clunky as hell, it was a great tool. I was a big fan of the Domino back

I used to work for a company that built Notes apps in the mid 90s, and while the UI was clunky as hell, it was a great tool. I was a big fan of the Domino back end too, in spite of the ridicule it got. When Couch and Mongo came out, it was kinda refreshing to me to see "document" oriented dbs come back.

open-source-ux 10y ago
"...the UI was clunky as hell..." The Interface Hall of Shame website (a now defunct, but once popular website with examples of badly designed UIs) did a critique of Lotus Notes back in 1999: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=original http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=or...
- stan_rogers 10y ago
  Most of what's listed there is about bad application development (error checking and so forth). Many other complaints come from the fact that Notes was multi-platform (Win, Mac, OS/2, many Unices) and was consistent across all clients, rather than trying to look native in any one of them. The thing about that site that gives me the greatest kicks is that the pages of application tiles on the workspace has since become the way to do things, the only real changes being colour depth, screen resolution and vogue colour choices. (About F5/F9: F5 didn't mean "refresh" to anybody until MSIE came along; F9 did.)
codeulike 10y ago
Aha! I worked with Notes a few decades ago, interfacing it into PeopleSoft. I got it to work but I never really got a grip on the slippery concept of what exactly Lotus Notes was, and why it was so terrible at one-to-many data structures. But thanks to your comment I now get it! It was a document oriented nosql db, years before we had a name for that.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, I believe IBM at some point ended up moving the Domino back end to something relational like DB2 long after I stopped using Notes. I was a MacOS (8 or 9) user when I got that job working with Notes. The thing that I found that helped me learn Notes very quickly was my background using Filemaker Pro. This was before Filemaker Pro had "gone relational".
  - sk5t 10y ago
    Yes, a DB2 storage option for Notes existed, but it didn't do anything to solve the basic mismatch between Notes and a) performance of Notes views in databases with hundreds of thousands or more documents, b) one to many relationships / transactions / RI, or c) support SQL or other non-script approach for query or update.

open-source-ux 10y ago

"...the UI was clunky as hell..." The Interface Hall of Shame website (a now defunct, but once popular website with examples of badly designed UIs) did a critique of Lotus Notes back in 1999: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=original http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=or...

stan_rogers 10y ago
Most of what's listed there is about bad application development (error checking and so forth). Many other complaints come from the fact that Notes was multi-platform (Win, Mac, OS/2, many Unices) and was consistent across all clients, rather than trying to look native in any one of them. The thing about that site that gives me the greatest kicks is that the pages of application tiles on the workspace has since become the way to do things, the only real changes being colour depth, screen resolution and vogue colour choices. (About F5/F9: F5 didn't mean "refresh" to anybody until MSIE came along; F9 did.)

codeulike 10y ago

Aha! I worked with Notes a few decades ago, interfacing it into PeopleSoft. I got it to work but I never really got a grip on the slippery concept of what exactly Lotus Notes was, and why it was so terrible at one-to-many data structures. But thanks to your comment I now get it! It was a document oriented nosql db, years before we had a name for that.

slantyyz 10y ago
If I'm not mistaken, I believe IBM at some point ended up moving the Domino back end to something relational like DB2 long after I stopped using Notes. I was a MacOS (8 or 9) user when I got that job working with Notes. The thing that I found that helped me learn Notes very quickly was my background using Filemaker Pro. This was before Filemaker Pro had "gone relational".
- sk5t 10y ago
  Yes, a DB2 storage option for Notes existed, but it didn't do anything to solve the basic mismatch between Notes and a) performance of Notes views in databases with hundreds of thousands or more documents, b) one to many relationships / transactions / RI, or c) support SQL or other non-script approach for query or update.