Tuesday, 24 April 2012

Lumia 900 could bring more attention to Windows Phone 7

Nokia Lumia 900
The Nokia Lumia 900 has been available from AT&T since April 8 for around $100 under contract. ​

It joins the Lumia 710 from T-Mobile, which arrived in early January, as the first crop of smartphones in the Unites States running Windows Phone 7, which is a partnership between Microsoft and Nokia. The Finland-based Nokia , who in 1987 introduced its first handheld mobile phone, used to be the darling of the mobile phone market. But it has been challenged in recent years by Apple's iPhones and Google's Android devices. Nokia is now moving away from its Symbian operating system in favor of the Windows Phone OS.

It's too early to tell whether Nokia will be successful with the new smartphones, but quarterly results that were released on April 19 indicate a challenging road ahead.

They reported quarterly losses in sales of $4 billion and an operating loss of $1.7 billion. The handset sales were down 29 percent.

The Lumia 900 has only been in the market for a couple of weeks and time will tell if the Windows Phone platform, which uses live tiles instead of application icons, will gain traction with consumers.

During a recent review of the Lumia 710, I found the unique Windows Phone OS to be easy to use, with good synergy for managing social networks, email, appointments and contacts.

The Lumia 900, which is a larger device with a 4.3-inch display and twice the memory of the 710's 8 gigabyte, is poised to attract more attention across the summer. The 900 also has a 16 megapixel camera, with might address some of the quality issues I experienced with the 700's 8MP camera.

These Windows Phone devices might help Nokia to remain the world's top handset manufacturer and regain prominence in the smartphone arena.

Advertisement:
Targus Stylus for Tablets, iPad, iPhone, Smartphones and more

Monday, 16 April 2012

Grappling with "Ignoring portion of document that uses a feature from another version of Notes"

In one our databases, whenever we were trying to open a document it used to give us an error of "Ignoring portion of document that uses a feature from another version of Notes". We were able to see all the fields in document properties, even able to extract all the attachments in it using LotusScript code. But document was simply refusing to open in the UI.

A little search and we found this technote which details out the reason and possible solutions to get the document opened. One of them included deleting the problematic rich text field. YIKES!

But what eventually what helped us was this intelligent suggestion by Cathy Fitzherbert. Just open the document in a browser in edit mode and save it. Then you can successfully open it in your Lotus Notes client. On the downside, you lose all the formatting in your rich text field and all the attachments will start to appear at the bottom of the document.

Wednesday, 11 April 2012

Use replica ID in @DbLookup with caution

Few days back I was faced with an issue where a user reported the following error message while opening a form in Lotus Notes client:

Field '<FIELD NAME>': Connection denied. The server you connected to has a different name from the one requested.

While this thing was working at almost all other machines (including mine), it was just one user where it was not working. The formula on the field was a single line database lookup as:


After unsuccessfully going over technotes, forums and blogs I went back to help documentation for @DbLookup and something caught my attention.
Continue reading »

Sunday, 8 April 2012

Installing and running XPages Extension Library in your local machine

I had been hearing a lot about XPages Extension Library and finally got to try it out in XPages code-a-thon held at Mumbai. So I decided to try it on my local machine along with little help from experts on StackOverflow. Its a simple two-step procedure - install extension library and run extension library.

Install XPages Extension Library

First of all get the latest release of extension library from OpenNTF. Unzip the file and find "updateSiteOpenNTF-designer.zip". Unzip it and you will get two folders of "features" & "plugins" and a file "site.xml". In Lotus Notes sidebar, go to My Widgets and select "Options > Configure a Widget from... > Features and Plugin on an Update Site". If you are unable to see My Widgets in your sidebar then click here.


Continue reading »

Saturday, 7 April 2012

Enable "File > Application > Install..." in Lotus Notes

Mary Beth Raven in her blog here shows how to enable "File > Application > Install..." in Lotus Notes. Just you go to "<Lotus Notes folder>\framework\rcp", find a file "plugin_customization.ini" and add a line com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true in the file.


But based the screenshot provided on her blog I guess she didn't ran into a specific problem, which I did, because she was using Windows XP. Basically if you edit the file plugin_customization.ini and try to save it you will get an error saying "Cannot create the C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\rcp\plugin_customization.ini. Make sure that the path name are correct."

Continue reading »

Friday, 6 April 2012

Displaying My Widgets in your sidebar in Lotus Notes

To display My Widgets in your sidebar panel, go to "File > Preferences...". In the Widgets tab enable the option of "Show Widget Toolbar and the My Widget panel".