A few days behind with this news, but Notes 8 beta 3 is now available. As I reported a month ago, beta 3 is more stable and performs better than beta 2 – this is to be expected as that’s pretty much what the Notes 8.0 team are working on between now and the ‘mid-year’ ship date. Having said that, there are still some nice tweaks included – my favourite is the improved ‘Day-At-A-Glance’ calendar in the sidebar. Although the previous iteration was great, it had one problem… if you had only two appointments in one day (one early, one late) you’d end up with a big chunk of empty space between the two.
Screen real-estate is very important, so the new summarised view is much better (you can go back to the original time-slots view if that’s your preference).
After much debate in Mary Beth Raven’s blog , the recipient indicators in the Inbox (those which tell you whether the e-mail was sent to you alone, or whether you were one of x number of recipients, or whether you were only cc:ed) have reverted back to circles rather than the originally-planned chevrons. I was happy either way, but the circles are more visible. A good example of the attention to detail being shown in the development process, and of the interactive way that the Notes user community is contributing.
Lunch with The Team at The Savoy! Who signs off your expenses?
Okay, I admit it… 21st June was the first day in the diary without anything in it, so it’s very possible that one or more of the calendar entries may be for demo purposes.
Hey Darren, I hope you are well! I was sitting in IBM Brissle last Friday pre heading to Wetherspoons for drinks with my ex-colleagues, when one of them, Paul Jenkins, showed me Notes 8 on Red Hat. Sexy or what? As a converted user of Outlook (NOT!!) I can tell you that the difference in usability and functionality between Outlook and Notes 8 is equal to the width of the Grand Canyon times the square of the height! I understand the intention was to produce something that looked as good as Outlook…well Notes 8 looks 100 times better (and I still can’t view by person – a real pain in the but…maybe ACL will ditch Microsoft one day….Catch up with you soon!