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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Wed 14 Oct 2009, 05:10 PM
One of the most intriguing, and irritating, aspects of writing software extensions to Lotus Notes is the way people line up and beg IBM to release features that are readily available in external tools.  Sometimes their companies won't let them buy an external tool.  Sometimes the price is not what they can spend.  Sometimes they just don't know.  But year after year, I see people request certain features and functions related to rich text, whether in the Business Partner forum or the LDD forums or IdeaJam or at Ask the Developers or in the Lotusphere labs or on their blogs.  And year after year, they seem to not really notice that IBM isn't adding new functionality to the Notes rich text classes, or at least precious little in the ND 8/8.5/8.5.1 versions.  At best, IBM will point you towards DXL, as if it really makes sense to dump everything to XML, find and process the tiny attribute you need, and then import it all back.

So, here I give you another great idea.  Imagine, the ability to change a table cell background color in LotusScript.  You can certainly vote to promote it, as I did.  But you could also read my first comment, which points out that this feature has been commercially available since Feb. 9, 1998 in our Midas Rich Text LSX.  It will cost you something, but this is only one of hundreds of properties and methods available in Midas that you could propose and vote on in IdeaJam.  Perhaps it is time to vote with your money instead of your mouse, as companies on 47 countries have already done.

You could wait another 11.5 years and see if IBM catches on.  Or, our newest version of Midas, officially supporting all ND releases from ND6 to ND8.5.1, will be here Monday.  Isn't it time to vote?


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