Soeben über Leo’s Blog auf dieses praktische Widget gestossen, das eigentlich (von Apple) schon mit Leopard hätte kommen sollen. Viel mehr gibt’s auch nicht zu sagen… Leopard only. Freeware. nice.

Download: http://todo.philipefatio.com/

Notes 7 for Mac is a pain. Badly implemented and it looks even worse, especially for a mac-eyed fellow like me. Until today, I thought, Notes 7 is the end of wisdom – thought wrong. There is a Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta! (You don’t have an account at www.ibm.com? Bad for you…) And I have to admit, it’s not bad. Okey, it’s not as eye-candy as other nativ Mac software, but it’s at least better than Notes 7.

My first impression after a view minutes of usage:

• Installation was flawless
• First start slow, until it’s setup, then is starts up much faster (my feeling)
• New Icon. With unread Mail account!
• New Icons in the Toolbar, Sametime and Mail-Information
• The ugly Icons inside Notes are gone, but it’s still not mac-like
• You can disable the ugly Workplace texture (Command + , > Basics > Additional options)
• Weeks for the first time ever displays the detail-view with a readable font-size
• Slightly larger Memory-Footprint
• Feels much “snappier” than the previews Version

So far, I did not encounter any problems with Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta and it’s look and feel is much better than 7. It’s also faster (at lest for me it feels faster), over all a very welcome update. But after all, it’s still Lotus Notes, you know…

Update 1

Lotus Notes finally has a spell-checking feature built in (it does not use OS X’s built in spell-check thou.), thats great. BUT, english only? Why no using the features an OS is providing for free? Is it too much to ask for? OS X has built in spell-checking since i don’t know when and this in a dozens of languages, including german and event support for multiple languages in the same document. Someone please tell me that there is a plugin for a german dictionary in Lotus. I have the feeling, there isn’t!

Update 2

Wrong alarm. One can install dictionaries in other languages. But finding them ist not that easy. A co-worker pointed me into the right direction and also sent me the needed files. So here it is, the german (deutsch.dic) and swiss-german (dschweiz.dic) dictionary for Notes to download: