Notes on iPad
by Volker Weber
Photo Bjoern Duengefeld
Nokia has its banana phone and IBM has Notes on an iPad. This is as retro as it gets.
I have a ton of questions about this. I think it is running @formula and Lotuscript. How do you get this through an Apple app review process? Usually they don't allow runtimes that execute code which has not been reviewed. There is a reason Excel Mobile does not run macros.
I'd like to see a whitepaper on this. And a roadmap.
Comments
Here's a hands-on video:
https://youtu.be/5veoCliQcNQ
I read a Tweet that LotusScript also gets some enhancements like access to GPS and methods to load HTTP content, which was until now only possible using the LotusScript-to-Java bridge (LS2J) or by calling COM objects, which both are not available on the iPad.
As I wrote on Twitter, this really makes me shudder :-) . Notes Client Apps will not look more beautiful when run on the iPad. As you, I am wondering how this thing can be compliant with Apple's App Store guidelines, but maybe IBM gets a special bonus as they cooperate with Apple in some areas, e.g. business apps and Watson integration into Siri / CoreML.
The Notes Client apps that I know have really bad performance especially on the macOS client and with remote databases, as the code runs synchronously in the UI thread, so every data fetch process blocks the rendering.
The Notes application's UI also is not really responsive. We'll see how much time IBM will invest to improve the user experience.
One thing that I would find really interesting is an NSF runtime offering like Couchbase offer with Couchbase lite, where you can just use NSF as a replicated database on the device and not for the application UI. Having the same data on servers with master-master replication, desktop and mobile clients is a real killer feature.
We build something like that (NSF as pure runtime environment) on the desktop, where we use a Notes Basic Client just for data storage (via Java and C API) and an Eclipse RCP application with Chromium Embedded as browser to display our locally replicated web applications.
So the web app runs both on the server with every browser or replicated locally (and offline) with enhanced desktop features like file editing in Word/Excel/Powerpoint.
It should be fun trying to get the Midas LSX to run on iOS. And by fun, I mean not fun.
Regarding distribution, the Enterprise App Store is not reviewed by Apple. Therefore an enterprise version of this offering could provide full Lotuscript support.
https://developer.apple.com/programs/enterprise/
ok... there are many questions... but I found it cool https://twitter.com/bjduen/status/976625166410133504
