The Attachment Viewer 2.0.1 for Lotus Notes is now posted on this site. I fixed a couple of problems reported and it looks like the Microsoft Office Converter EXE is now behaving a bit better. From the original post (click here), you may need to install the inter-op libraries for your version of MS Office in order to use it. You need to be running at least Lotus Notes 8.5.2 for this update.
Drag this to My Widgets in Lotus Notes
I need some help testing this out. After playing around a little bit with C# and the MS Office integration API’s I was able to compile an executable that calls out to MS Office to show Documents, Presentations, and Spreadsheets. The architecture is pretty straightforward, the attachment viewer calls out to an executable to have the file converted to HTML and then the document is shown in an iframe in the viewer. I have seen some minor issues and thankfully no crashes.
This version is also Dojo enabled and currently needs to have internet access in order for it to work since I pull Dojo 1.5 from the Google CDN. You will notice the Dojo toolbar and the different view modes – Film Strip, Slide Show, Thumbnails:
Requirements:
Installation Instructions:
Drag this to My Widgets in Lotus Notes
Once I get some good feedback I will be posting the binaries and sources to the OpenNTF project.
Some known issues:
In advance, thanks for all of your feedback and interest in this project!
As a community, the Lotus community is very strong. We all get involved with things like OpenNTF, blogs, tweets, etc. One place I see Lotus fall short is getting involved with the many technologies our core Lotus products use – like OSGI, Eclipse, CKEditor, and Dojo.
Dojo is no exception! We, as a community, need to make this the best JavaScript library out there. So I urge everyone to start learning it, fixing it, documenting it, and promoting it. If you see a problem with an API or the documentation then fix it! It’s open source!
If you are doing any plugin development for Lotus Notes then you need to check out the OpenNTF project Java UI API Exerciser. The project is a pretty good reference and usage of the Java API’s we will be talking about at Lotusphere. The tool can also be used to inspect documents, views, etc and the different properties each of them have in the Eclipse world.
After reading this post today and seeing some of the responses from the Eclipse community it would be interesting to hear from IBM customers and partners on whether or not they use or even know what EventAdmin is! I have written about EventAdmin many times and have even contributed a project to OpenNTF for a composite application bridge but in general I don’t see the technology widely adopted or understood even. I created this poll, it is stated a little different that the blog post to get more specific responses.
[poll id="17"]
There is an interesting post over on Alex Kings site – he is a plugin developer for WordPress. The conversation makes me wonder about other open source initiatives like OpenNTF. I know many people across the community contribute amazing material to OpenNTF and I have often wondered if it was maintainable. I know that every thing I contribute either in an article, blog post, or on OpenNTF will have some level of “support” in the future. It may be days, weeks, months or even years but an email, a question, or a enhancement is inevitable. I would have to say if you are not an open source enthusiast and simply do it because you love it or you in fact do “get paid” enough through donations then your interest over time supporting free enhancements and upgrades will diminish. I do think many people, especially in the Eclipse and Lotus communities contribute to open source for many other reasons – building a community, promoting a technology, or just polishing skill sets. Many, like myself, have a vested interest in seeing the community or technology grow so it creates more opportunities in the future – that to me is the essence of open source.
Most of my readers are in two camps, with many intersections along the way. The two primary camps are Eclipse Developers and Lotus Notes/Domino developers. I have lately been more on the Eclipse side – primarily because of my job – but none the less I do post occasionally Notes and Domino development stuff. Anyway, I want to introduce to both communities (if not already known) the Eclipse Marketplace! This is essentially the same thing as what OpenNTF is for the Notes community. So for all of you Notes folks out there, there is another site you can use for Eclipse tools, plugin’s and solutions that may fit into your enterprise or in your daily tools. Check it out!
If you recall my last post about the download counter plugin for WordPress; well, today I have an update to the usefulness of this plugin. While OpenNTF is a great tool to share source code, widgets and sometimes binaries, it may not reflect how many people are actually using the widget. If the widget accessed a remote site you could potentially figure out how many different clients connect to the server but none of my widgets do that, so I am left with download counts on OpenNTF and from my own site.
You can see the Attachment Viewer download statistics on OpenNTF:
Attachment Viewer – Releases
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And here are the statistics for the Multiple Database Search project:
Multi-Database Search Plugin – Releases
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The problem with this is I really don’t know how many people are actually using it! And to be honest I don’t think I ever will because someone could download it and distribute it freely – oh well. So what I wanted to do was provide the binaries on my site and provide the widget XML so end users can install it themselves, without having to look at the source code. You can see the numbers are very close, so this means the readers of this site closely mirror the people who are also downloading on OpenNTF – well that’s a loose theory anyway.
For reference, here are the widgets you can use to install the different projects:
I have to say I love VideoFest! Since its launch I have actually started doing something that seems to be a no-brainer but I had not done before. That is, watching YouTube videos on my iPhone while on the treadmill! Yep, I love it. I have now done it for almost two weeks and I have watched dozens of videos at this point and have learned a lot.
I have also found that I really like the “raw video” – ie. videos created by normal people describing tips, tricks, or something about a product. Most seem like they are roughly scripted but for the most part you are hearing it from their heart and their experience.
So if you have an iPod and a treadmill why not stay fit and learn at the same time!
I posted an entry about the new Videos page on my site and I was chatting to Joyce Davis (from LTIEC Blog) about an idea I had. What do you think about a new XPage custom control that basically does the same thing as the PHP I described in the last post?
The idea is you would just provide that same parameters as the PHP line to have a list of videos show from the channel. You could even provide options like vertical or horizontal alignment of the videos. This could then be contributed to OpenNTF in the end.
Thoughts?