A few days ago I posted a conversation Zink & I had regarding Lotus Notes, and how crappy of software it is. Here's a few updates...
Noah commented and even drew up an image expressing his disdain for the product.
With big, orange flames. But still the red line so people would know that notes should be burned, and that its not rockstar or something.
I kept reading through the Google results for "lotus notes sucks", and stumbled upon none other than Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror) complaining about the same thing. The comment frenzy that he ignites is filled with all kinds of priceless nugets.
Someone shares a hatred for how notes makes you accept invites (I too complain about this DAILY)...
when I receive a new meeting invitation, I'd like to right-click on it and see a choice for 'Accept'. Or at least a button at the top of the Inbox that lets me 'Accept' the meeting; all I see now is a 'Respond' that sends a note to the sender. Best I've found is opening the invitation, *then* I get to see a button with an 'Accept' choice. Am I missing something, seems like a lot of steps to just 'Accept' a meeting?
Which is met with this response...
A Notes programmer could add a button to the top of the inbox to accept the invite, but there's no support for adding to the right-click menu in current version. In the next major version, the right-click context menu will be accessible to Notes developers. The real trick will be whether they give us context-sensitive abilities, so that the "Accept" action will only be available if you're sitting on an invitation. I don't know if they've committed to that or not.
You've got to be KIDDING ME. So, in order to acheive any semblance of usability, you need to hire a notes programmer!!?!? That's hogwash. Listen, I'm all for having an extensible application, but let's not forgo basic usability for the sake of "extensibility". This sounds an aweful lot like "internal software", where usability issues are often passed off as a "training issue". Buuut, that's an argument for another day.
Then comes the often-mentioned fact that pressing F5 in Notes locks the application (Simliar to locking a Windows XP/2000 machine with Ctrl-Alt-Del). This goes against EVERY SINGLE other mainstream application available, all of which use F5 to refresh something. Browsers refresh the page. Email clients refresh the mail list.
Naturally, there's a response to this (the same argument used in LOTS of cases)...
it's been like this in Notes for years - almost 13 that I can attest to.
Too bad F5 has become the de-facto standard. It doesn't matter if Notes had it first. They lost that battle, move on. Stop crying, and actually create a usable piece of software. Blah.
I'll stop now, because I - like many others - could go on and on... It's interesting to me though, and Jeff Atwood hit the nail on the head when he mentions that most of the people getting defensive are developers of and/or derive income from Notes. That's natural, of course, everyone thinks their stuff is the coolest. Notes developers don't see how frustrating and difficult the software is, because they KNOW IT BY HEART.
I am but a simple user who wants to send email. Why does it have to be difficult?