Lotus Notes Tribunal, Exhibit 001-I: “Notes Confirming Things that don’t Need Confirmation”

Lotus Notes is a crime against humanity. In exhibit 001-I we see how Notes wastes your time by managing your time.

Try this in your Notes calendar: click an entry.  That entry will be highlighted as expected.  Now click it again.  Fun game: what do you think will happen?  Good software will do nothing – a single click is “highlight” and as the item is already highlighted there’s nothing more to do.  Poor software might (wrongly, but at least somewhat sensically) actually take action on the item – open it, present a context menu, etc.  Notes says “Nuts to that!”  When you click on an item already highlighted Notes assumes that you want to edit the item.  But it doesn’t let you.  Instead you get the following confirmation message:

Notes error message: "You need to open this entry to edit it."

Why Notes, why?  If it’s assuming that you want to edit, why not simply open the item?  If it’s truly unclear about your intentions why do anything (forcing you to double-click to actually option the item)?  Instead it delivers another inane confirmation message from it’s seemingly endless sea of inane confirmational messages.  Assuming that you did actually want to edit the entry (and you work at a company of any size) then you very likely might get this insult instead of the editable item:

Notes Message: "There are two chages..."

Notes, like any true super-villain, really likes to hear itself talk.  This giant, multiple-optioned, caveated dialog could be replaced with nothing – yes nothing.  Because this dialog only arises when the meeting organizer has changed the meeting it should be clear that any sane person would want to see those changes.  Has anybody, ever in the history of this product ever selected anything other than “Have Notes automatically process all of these notices for you”?

This is just two more cases of Notes lying to you.  Trying to lull you into believe that it cares about you.  Trying to distract you with false affection while it plots to destroy your life and family.

A Depressed Press SeriesPrevious:
Lotus Notes Tribunal, Exhibit 001-H: “Useless Errors” 
Next:
Lotus Notes Tribunal, Exhibit 001-J: “Folder Tree” 

4 Comments

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  1. Paragraph Film Reviews

    I work in IT and hate notes with a passion. A surprisingly high number of users much prefer it to outlook, but it’s about a bajillion times more frustrating to support! Even the install is stupid, and more complex than it needs to be.

    1. I’ve heard of people that prefer Notes (but have never met them). I’ve always assumed it would have to be some variation of Stockholm Syndrome and that these poor people would benefit from counsuling. Perhaps aversion therapy? ;^)

  2. I’ll ignore the earlier rantings of useless word spitting, that obtains absolutely nothing but stupid arguments.

    I have done the same as you did in my calendar and didn’t get any of the results that you did and i’m running version 8.5.3.

    Wonder how your client is setup and what version you are running.

    1. Currently I’m running “Release 8.0.2FP1 CCH2” (because IBM has just as much idea how to do version numbers as they do collaboration clients). While some of the other exhibits may have been on earlier versions (Notes has been torturing us for many years now) this behavior persists in this version.

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