Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : My Lotus Notes Christmas List

My Lotus Notes Christmas List

Christmas is upon us, and I realized that I forgot to send my Christmas list to Lotus/IBM. Since it probably won't get there in time if I put it in the mail, I decided to post it here on the forum instead. I know that a lot of these are things that other people have asked for before too, but it never hurts to put it on the list, right?

Also, if any of these are things I have already received and just didn't realize it, please tell me where to find it in my closet. I have so many toys in there already that sometimes I forget where things are.

First, here's my list for ND6:

STOCKING STUFFERS (little things that shouldn't be hard to implement):

1. Ability to automatically disable all return receipts on every e-mail I receive (either as a preference or a rule). Yes, I can code this myself, but why not have it built in.

2. Iif statement in LotusScript (I know, I can write this as a function in about 5 lines, but it's just such a common thing to do...)

3. LotusScript access to @Command( [FileExport] )

4. Add a "portrait/landscape" option for @Command( [FilePrint] ), notesUIDocument.Print, and notesUIView.Print

5. New method for NotesRichTextItem: GetContentsAsHTML (I know I can do this sort of thing for rich text fields that are stored as MIME, but I want to be able to do it for ANY rich text field, and I know it's already been coded because Domino has been doing it for years)

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BIG PRESENTS (harder to implement, but not major code revisions):

6. Options for personal address book and ReMail-type calendar view ( http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/calendar.html ) as the contents of the bottom left pane in the mail template (in addition to Follow-Up, New Notices, and To-Do)

7. New options for exporting views and documents: HTML, XML, DXL, PDF

8. Ability to use LotusScript or Java instead of just @Formulas in a custom SmartIcon/toolbar button

9. Ability to include more than just plain mono-formatted text in the header/footer of a form when it's printed

10. An option to return the text of the line of code that caused an error in a LotusScript routine (if the compiler knows which line of code the error occurred on with Erl, then maybe it also knows the text of the code that's on that line?)

11. Provide an option to either capture the Notes client status bar messages (right-click and copy to the clipboard?) or log them to a text file -- and I'm not talking about the messages I generate with a Print statement in script (I already know that I can send those to a text file, thank you), I want this for things like the huge stream of messages that fly by when I manually refresh the design of a database.

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MOMMY, I WANT A FERRARI (big code changes, but boy would they be nice):

12. Better visual class handling in Designer IDE (instead of displaying a class as one gigantic chunk of code in the Declarations section)

13. Support for Optional parameters in custom LotusScript subs/functions (or the ability to overload them)

14. Addition of Text Styles and Colors as Shared Resources so you could easily make global changes to all the views, forms, pages, etc. in a Notes application (even converting the old-school Paragraph Styles into the Shared Resource model would help, although I'd like to be able to use it for things like view column and action bar fonts too). And if the Text Styles automatically became CSS styles when a page was displayed in a web browser, I would probably weep with tears of joy (even just optional HTML tags for Class, Style, and ID would be a start).

15. "Render as HTML" option for design elements, allowing a page, form, view, etc. to be displayed as an HTML page in the Notes client instead of as a native Notes rendering of the element (which would allow us to use things like CSS in our Notes design and truly design only once for the client and the web if we wanted to)

16. Either update NotesPeek for ND6.x or open-source the thing

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Since I've been especially good this year, I also have some Christmas wishes for the LDD site:

17. Provide some official way of submitting bug fixes and enhancement requests that doesn't involve either a fax machine or a support incident

18. RSS feeds for the LDD forums, the Sandbox, and the KnowledgeBase

19. The ability to see ALL the responses to a forum message on a single page, instead of having to click each individual link to see each individual response

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Thanks Santa/Iris/Lotus/IBM. I'll even leave some milk and cookies out for you, if that would help. And if your elves don't have time to build all of these toys by Christmas, I understand. I can wait until January if I need to.

Sincerely,

Julian