On to your questions:
“examples [of arcane commands]?”
Well, I have to hand it to you: After trying to remember some of the more egregious keyboard shortcuts, I couldn’t come up with one. That’s what I get for trying to forget this useless app. But wait! Let’s look at the keyboard shortcuts listed here:
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21164659

“F5″ to lock user ID. Of course. You’d be stupid to even think to forget that “F5″ locks the User ID.
Also check the numerous multiple mappings. According to that document above, hitting the space bar when reading documents does the following:
- Access embedded element in a document
OR
- Activate selected object
OR
- Expand or collapse selected section
OR
- Open selected link to document, view or database

So easy, it’s child’s play!

“you want every UI to be the same? Even on products that are cross-platform?”
Preferably, in an ideal world, they would be the same (and I think you’d agree with me on that). And we ARE moving in that direction on all major OSes. Why *wouldn’t* you want similar UI and commands? It’s like you asking me, “You want all car manufacturers to have the pedals in the same order??”

“Wow, that must really have made your work day so difficult. A new UI technique.”
Thanks for not getting it. It’s not that it’s hard to do, it’s that there is NO way of knowing beforehand that clicking on that grey area does anything. Don’t you just love mystery-meat navigation?

“I am calling you a liar [wrt LN unresponsivess]”
Well, companies I’ve worked for include one of the largest Swiss banks, all the way down to SMEs with around 5-50 users. They ALL had similar problems: Updating the view in mail or calendar often taking ages.

“Name me another email client with full-text search.”
Apple’s mail.app? And I believe Thunderbird does full-text search, too. Mozilla’s probably, too. Oh, and Outlook (see next answer).

“How well does the full-text search work in Outlook?”
Just checked, works like a charm.

“It doesn’t.”
It does. I’m calling YOU a liar, Bernard!

“Search used to be horrible in Outlook”
Note that the person is talking in the past tense. Using Outlook 2003, I just found out that the search works as expected, leading me to believe that maybe, just maybe, Microsoft put one or three engineers on to that problem in the meantime…

“You complain that full-text search in Notes isn’t telepathic”
No, I don’t.

“cos you can’t be bothered to read the help”
Wrong again, but thanks for trying.

In the end, I’m glad that there are more and more rivals to LN that do only ONE thing of LN’s stable of apps, but does that better than the previous 7+ iterations of LN ever could.

The rest of what you wrote, Bernard, isn’t worth going into, as it’s just more of your childish, insult-laden misrepresentations of what I said.

Note to self: I really shouldn’t feed the trolls.

“bizarre UI choices”
you want every UI to be the same? Even on products that are cross-platform?

“I have to click that empty square in the top-left corner of the mail view to check for new mails?OK that makes sense!”
Wow, that must really have made your work day so difficult. A new UI technique. I’ve got news for you: don’t try using a different OS (they all do things differently, you know), or don’t try using the vast majority of Java desktop apps (they won’t look the same as the native apps).

“slow UI to the point of unresponsiveness (even on decent hardware, with maybe 5 users, and our servers being right next to me)”
Well, something wrong there. The last company I worked at had 300 users on a single server, and that server had a 1 processor and less than 1gb of RAM. For 3 years I have used the R5 designer client and the Notes client inside VirtualPC on a Mac Powerbook G4. Even bearing in mind the emulation, it was _never_ unresponsive. I do not believe that you have worked in multiple environments where they have misconfigured something so badly that it is as slow as you described. I am calling you a liar.

“a downright laughably bad search, especially in email searching, that gives you search results that have absolutely NOTHING to do with my search query”
Clearly, you don’t know how to use the search provided by Notes (there is help included with the app). I have a 4gb database of useful technical articles. Every single time I search it the vast majority of the top search results are relevant. Name me another email client with full-text search. How well does the full-text search work in Outlook? It doesn’t. As one of Microsoft’s most prominent ex-employees says : “Search used to be horrible in Outlook. It was so bad that for all intents and purposes, you couldn’t search your old email. Instead, you were encouraged to carefully sort it out into a hierarchy of folders (shudder)… Theoretically, Outlook 2007 has search built in, although it’s not really built-in: it’s built on top of Windows Desktop Search, which comes with Vista” [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/04/19.html] Does Groupwise have full-text search? (nope.) You complain that full-text search in Notes isn’t telepathic, cos you can’t be bothered to read the help.

So your critique of a piece of software that has survived 20 years, a piece of cross-platform software that has outlived some of the platforms it used to support (and now supports new platforms), a piece of software with 140 million users, a piece of software that to this day MS is still failing to rival (even though they appointed Notes principal architect as their CTO)… because you do not like having to click on the ‘refresh’ view icon to display your recently arrived email.

You’re an idiot with blinkers. I’ll continue using Notes until a tool with similar features and less drawbacks comes along. I keep looking round for something better, and it doesn’t exist. Perhaps you’d like to tell me what cross-platform tool you use that makes working with emails and text so productive? What cross-platform tool simply allows you to transparently keep copies of important documents in multiple locations, all using encrypted network transport and encrypted local storage? What RAD tool allows you to flick a switch and suddenly make your internal fat-client applications available through a web browser so e.g. you can monitor your sales or the status of your servers through a SSL browser connection?

“Unusuable? In what ways?”
It seems to me that every time I was forced to use LN, every step of the way, LN tried to stop me from being productive in any way. Arcane commands, bizarre UI choices (I have to click that empty square in the top-left corner of the mail view to check for new mails? OK that makes sense!), slow UI to the point of unresponsiveness (even on decent hardware, with maybe 5 users, and our servers being right next to me), a downright laughably bad search, especially in email searching, that gives you search results that have absolutely NOTHING to do with my search query, the list goes on and on…

“Thanks for actually contributing something positive to a discussion.”
Hey, don’t attack me just because I don’t happen like your favourite app.

“Your asinine and childish behaviour says plenty about you.”
Your ad hominem attacks against me say plenty about you, too!

“FWIW, I haven’t worked as a Notes developer for 6 or 7 years. ”
That’s great. You finally saw the light and moved on.

“And clearly Sterling was able to refute your ridiculous opinion.”
He did no such thing. All he said was that in his experience, if companies took advantage of the app part, LN is “really loved”. Too bad that in most companies, LN is sold by the IBM droids as a great groupware app, which it may or may not be, but at the end of the day, companies switch off all those “features” and use exactly two components: Mail and Calendaring, which happen to be the worst implementations in their respective fields, in LN.

Using LN for email and calendaring only has been the case in 4 companies I’ve worked for, and Lotus Notes for me is now a red flag: If I see LN being used at a company, it’s a company I don’t want to work for. Furthermore, if the company I’m working for has decided in their infinite wisdom to switch to LN, I’m outta there.

I’d take the mess that is MS Exchange & Outlook any day over the risibly bad, legacy-ridden Lotus Notes any day. And I’m an Mac user!

(NB: My experiences with LN go up to the last release before LN8, I haven’t tried that yet)

@Sterling – just got a chance to check out ClearContext, looks very cool! Thanks for the tip.