Tuesday, July 13, 2010

the new free CRM based on xPage is on the way

We (means me and my fellow :)) started to do free CMS based on xPage in our free time. The main aim for us is to get more experience in xPage's area. When we finish we will upload it to openntf, I hope first version will be available soon.
here is how it looks now: Kubus CMS
It would be nice to hear any responses.


DesktopX.ndk and possible problem with it

Each Lotus Notes has this desktopX.ndk (X - is number of version of LN) file into Data folder. On of his function is to keep workspace tabs and icons for user. So if you want to have empty workspace, close Lotus Notes and move desktopX.ndk to temporary place and run LN again, yep, workspace will be empty.
It has one ugly behaviour from my point of view I discovered couple years ago and faced up yesterday again. This file keeps some information about database-icons (f.x. server, replica and filepath). Each user in our company when run Lotus Notes see Start-Up page, all required links are there. Links are managed, so each link is simply Title, and Server+Replica, that's all, and that's enough to open application.
Due to some reasons we changed location for couple applications (actually we moved 2 applications to another folder). We MOVED applications so Server and ReplicaID did not change.
After that all users were not able to open applications we moved (I mean they were not able to open from startup page). Good thing - I known what to do just of previous experience... It looks when user tries to open application using Server/Replica Lotus Notes looks into dekstop.ndk first and if it find will use Server/Filepath to open application, but as I told Filepath has been changed for some applications, so the dialog about wrong filepath name will appear.
So what we did - removed desktopX.ndk for each user (good new we have ~15 users only, so it was not a huge task).

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

New version of Skytus is available!

Hi ! I'm glad to introduce new version of Skytus :). Hope many of you already read/heard about it and some of you already tried to use it.

What did we do in current version (0.3.0.)? are you interested? Hope you are :). Here is short list of main things we did:

- loading/unloading skype's add-in manager (it does supporting of skype status in real time) much more correctly. We got couple
reports (special thanks to Tony Austin) about crashes of LN from time to time after installing Skytus. Hope there are no any issues in that area anymore.
- we've added new feature - synchronization. now users will be able to sync already created contacts in PAB with contacts in Skype, hope many of you will find it useful.
- very important thing we did also is Skytus SDK, that's is really awesome thing! from my point of view. We will add first version of sdk to download page later (hope next week) when finish msi installation for SDK. I will post about possibilities of SDK later in next post.
- speaking about SDK I have also admit that we migrated skytus product to it, so now it is done in more right way.

Now I'm thinking about next
steps:
- should we concentrate on new functionality of skytus and continue to improve it? we could probably do recording of voice or improve mail database with skytus' things?
- should we freeze new functionality of skytus for short period and do fixes only and see how it is going on? and in the same time start to do new integration with another AI/tools/product (yep, we
already have some ideas what to integration with LN).

What I would really want is to hear any ideas/comments/suggestions from you, that's would be really helpful for us.test link

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Get temporary folder on PC/MAC

How often do you need to extract files to temporary folder, process them and import back? I do this from time to time, hope you are as well :).
Let's say you have image attached to document and you would like to change it to 32x32 size (obviously you need to change width and height of image in case if it is to big) and attach back to document instead.
I would like to ask about place you usually use to export files. Yes, it is quite easy to extract files to "C:\", easy? right? but not correct, users for sure will not have right for creating files there. Of course I'm pretty sure 95% of you use Environ("Temp") and Environ("Tmp") to determine temporary folder so that's fine, that's I believe only one possible way.
but now question about MAC users, how we can determine their temporary folder? I always use hardcode (yea, shame on me :) ) with path \var\tmp and this approach works fine (at least till this day), but I still can't forget this hardcoded \var\tmp so if anybody know the right way please share it !
Update
here is great link that I was looking for (Thanks to Sasa). Actually main part we need from lss here

Declare Function w32_OSGetSystemTempDirectory Lib "nnotes" Alias "OSGetSystemTempDirectory" ( Byval S As String) As Integer
Declare Function mac_OSGetSystemTempDirectory Lib "NotesLib" Alias "OSGetSystemTempDirectory" ( Byval S As String) As Integer
Declare Function linux_OSGetSystemTempDirectory Lib "libnotes.so" Alias "OSGetSystemTempDirectory" ( Byval S As String) As Integer

Select Case session.Platform
Case "Linux"
s% = linux_OSGetSystemTempDirectory(d)
Case "Macintosh"
s% = mac_OSGetSystemTempDirectory(d)
Case "Windows/32"
s% = w32_OSGetSystemTempDirectory(d)
End Select

Friday, June 04, 2010

JS/CSS/HTML compressors do you use?

JS => http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home
CSS =>http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/
HTML => I've never used such tools at all, so would be interested in your suggestions :)