Gears Within Gears

A few days ago Sumeet Moghe posted about upgrading to Notes 8.5 on the Mac and I left a comment wondering aloud why his inbox looked nothing like mine. Lo and behold, The Internet responds, and I dutifully repost:

If your mail file looks like version 7 while using version 8 you need to replace the design of your mail file with the 8.5 template. Make sure Advanced Menus are turned on in the View Pull down menu first. Open your inbox, then go to File > Application > Replace Design > Select Mail 8.5 from the list and also click the Upgrade Folder design check box at the bottom. Click Replace.

Your mail file will be upgraded, the progress icon at the bottom of Notes will start to move left to right – click on this to display the full progress of the design replace – when it finishes close your mail file and any open tabs for that matter then open the mail file once more – it should now have the 8 Look and Feel!

Thanks, Anonymous!

I interned at Lotus for about a year and remain impressed with the once-revolutionary Domino while still being dismayed over Notes’ clunkiness. But I admire all the engineers I had a chance to work with there (though I was actually working on the IBM Workplace initiative, arguably a competitor to, and replacement of, Notes, but that’s a story for another day), and it’s nice to see the interface receive the overhaul it deserves.

But I’m upset that it took this long, and frankly the fact that I have to dig through a menu somewhere to upgrade my mail template by hand is pretty obnoxious. I don’t know anyone who likes their mail client looking like it was designed in 1998, and if they’re going to make users go through the effort of a PKG install rather than a simple DMG then they might as well offer to automatically drag my inbox into the 21st century while they’re at it.

The latest Microsoft/Linux patent controversy has stirred up some interesting commentary from former IBMers about IBM’s voracious hunger for new patents. Mark Pilgrim discusses being coerced into filing, whereas Brian Levine, who I’m proud to call a former colleague and mentor during my two co-op stints at Lotus, agrees but takes offense at Mark’s histrionics:

What I take issue with is Mark’s need to point out that he was coerced into filing a patent application and to justify it by pointing out that he has a mortgage. Lots of people have mortgages. Many more people with more significant financial responsibilities than that are asked to do much more heinous things than file a patent in order to keep those jobs.

Software patents may suck, but Brian is right: they should not rank that high on any reasonable scale of heinosity.

IBM has been the patent king for many years now, and I suppose it makes good business sense: if you employ more engineers than virtually anyone else in the world it behooves you to exploit them in any way you can. But even if you believe IBM’s claim that its software patents are purely defensive, a shift in management could change everything in a heartbeat. It’s not all that long ago that they were suing Amazon for patent infringement. Although I don’t mean to cause any offense, it seems to me that forcing software engineers to patent anything even remotely novel is a reasonable disincentive for those of us who are concerned with the future of software IP to work there.