Jan 182008
 

Rob Novak has created a Lotusphere Keynote Bingo card!

As the Keynote (Opening General Session or OGS in Lotusphere land) progresses, you simply check off the items that really do happen. If you find yourself in the lucky position of having a straight line of five, simply yell out “BINGO!”.

You can download the PDF from his site.

Jan 152008
 

We here at SNAPPS has outlined plans to convert our entire line of AnyPlace™ for Quickr and QuickPlace to free licenses.

From Rob Novak’s blog:

Our products, especially AnyPlace Administrator, have been an entry point for many enterprise customers who have then become high-value consulting or development clients. Making the AnyPlace products free brings down the price barrier to realizing the value of these powerful tools, while expanding the reach of the SNAPPS name throughout IBM’s Lotus Quickr customer enterprises. Our goal is to expand the use of these products by 50 times their level as paid licenses. It’s about giving back, and it’s about ubiquity.

The four products are detailed on the SNAPPS website under “Solutions”, and have trial versions available.

At the same time we are announcing the immediate availability of fully supported subscription versions of the template applications for as little as $1 per user, in addition to new support options for the free versions.

A subscription entitles the subscribing company to benefits usually associated with fully paid licenses – for a fraction of the price – including:

  • Unlimited technical support, a helpdesk and escalation system
  • A new blog, wiki and documentation site combined with the template website
  • Guaranteed first release with new features, and a feature request mechanism
  • Guaranteed compatibility with new IBM Lotus Quickr versions within 30 days of their release

Subscription pricing is between $1 and $2 per user, per application, per year depending on the number of subscription units purchased. Custom subscription options are available for modified or combined templates, and QSite is priced at 2x the normal subscription price (QSite includes 10 applications in one).

Is that not great news just before Lotusphere?

Jan 032008
 

First of all, Happy New Year. I hope 2008 will bring you good fortune.

Here at SNAPPS I’ve been extremely busy preparing for my sessions at Lotusphere. I’ve already posted about them here. If you have a chance to attend Lotusphere this year, and are using Domino, I think this will be the most exciting one in years. If you see me in the halls, come up and introduce yourself. I love meeting new people.

December ended very hectic with my youngest son Erik’s first birthday and later Christmas with in-laws visiting. A great time with family and lots of great food.

I know a lot of you are waiting for my update of the Dojo Calendar to work with the Dojo Toolkit 1.0 and beyond. I’m working hard to have it out there for you soon. I’ve been very busy with “real” work, but I have a working copy so all I can say is soon.

Speaking of the Dojo Calendar. I have decided to make it work with dojo.data. To make the calendar get information from many different resources is important and the Dojo data stores make that more convenient using the same API no matter what the source is.

I hope I see you at Lotusphere.

Dec 052007
 

As Rob Novak already blogged about here, today is SNAPPS (real name – Strategic Net Applications, Inc.) 10th birthday.

I have been an employee of SNAPPS and Rob for 8 years now and I could not be happier and, yes, proud that we reached this milestone together.

Congratulations Rob, and the rest of my co-workers, Melissa, Troy and Jerald.

Nov 162007
 

I have had the privilege to speak at every Lotusphere since 2002. In 2001 my first son, Jakob, was about to be born and my wife did not want me to travel that close to his birth. I have actually never attended Lotusphere as anything other than a speaker. This year I have three sessions accepted by the Content Team.

HND305

Session: Building Custom Themes for IBM Lotus Quickr
Track: Hands-on Sessions
Abstract: The elements of a good user interface are just the beginning when it comes to Lotus Quickr — with this platform, you expose functionality, user context and security in the “look and feel.” Custom themes give you much more. In this first-ever hands-on session you’ll explore the inner workings of themes, building one from scratch (with a little help). Your instructors wrote the book on themes, and have developed more than 100 in the past 8 years for companies worldwide, from simple corporate looks to highly complex, feature-packed themes. You’ll learn the custom tags, tips and tricks on Lotus Quickr CSS, and how to use themes to improve Lotus Quickr performance. You’ll also get some brand new themes you can take home to study … and even deploy!The corresponding breakout session for this hands-on is “AD502 Customizing IBM Lotus Quickr Themes and Skins”.Please refer to the Pocket Agenda for date, time and location information.
Speakers: Viktor Krantz
Troy Reimer

This is the first time that I am presenting at a hands-on session and it will be fun. You will learn a lot about theme developing here.

BP205

Session: Extending and Customizing Templates for IBM Lotus Quickr: Straight from the Developers
Track: Track Four: Best Practices
Abstract: The IBM Lotus Quickr 8 release was quickly followed by a suite of eleven free, open templates, now used by thousands of companies worldwide. Each template has a specific business purpose and design, but they share common elements and reusable techniques and components. In this session, the developers of the templates will dig into the code, expose and explain some of the most valuable components, and teach you to assemble Lotus Quickr applications using a modular, extensible approach. By learning techniques for adding comment capabilities, custom workflow, tagging, and more, you’ll come away with the skills and tools necessary to build your own Lotus Quickr application. Plus, you’ll also receive a new template designed exclusively for Lotusphere 2008!
Speakers: Viktor Krantz
Troy Reimer

This will be a really fun session. You will learn how to extend and combine some of the 11 free templates we at SNAPPS have created for Lotus Quickr 8.

BP212

Session: The Great Code Giveaway: “Beyond Cool”
Track: Track Four: Best Practices
Abstract: All new development techniques are brewing in the labs at SNAPPS, an IBM Business Partner with a penchant for giving expensive code away while providing a great education. It’s always very cool, and incredibly useful — the code is used by businesses, governments, partners, customers, and celebrities to improve applications and techniques. This year the SNAPPS labs have produced some of the most impressive IBM Lotus Domino-centric techniques in four areas: visual effects, data access and processing, mashups, and cross-product integration. Sounds like a lot, and it is! We’ve logged more than 500 hours bringing you these demos, so don’t miss the opportunity to experience “Beyond Cool” and take home incredible examples and full-blown applications!
Speakers: Rob Novak
Viktor Krantz

This is the session I look forward to all year long. Rob Novak and I spend a lot of time on this one. Over 500 hours last year and it will not be less this year. We have delivered it several years in a row now, always with new content, free useful code to take home and sometimes a little cool.

I hope to see you at Lotusphere 2008 in January.

Nov 052007
 

The Dojo Toolkit 1.0 was released this morning. Many of us, including me, has waited patiently for this release. Now I can finalize the updated code for Dojo Calendar.

There are many new, improved and awesome features.

New and Awesome:

  • The Grid. This is the feature everyone’s been waiting for, and now it’s here! With support for virtual scrolling to accommodate huge data sets efficiently, built-in sorting and column resize to help you find what you’re looking for, complex formatting, and fixed rows and column headers, the new Grid lets you slice-and-dice your data as never
    before. The 1.0 grid features a Tundra theme, editing and write-back examples, support for custom cell editors (including the full set of accessible and localized Dijit editing components), and markup-driven instantiation.
  • Charting returns! The new dojox.charting supports automatic axis calculations, widget-driven instantiation, multiple chart types, dojo.data data sources, and theming. Good-looking, data-oriented default themes help make your data understandable and easy on the eyes at the same time. And since dojox.charting is based on dojox.gfx, the general-purpose 2D drawing layer in Dojo, charting will only get more powerful, responsive, and good looking over time.
  • a11y and i18n: rich experiences for everyone. All Dijit 1.0 widgets feature keyboard navigation, right-to-left text detection and layout, and solid localizations for 12 languages. No matter where in the world you are, Dijit has you covered. Dijit goes even further by providing ARIA role and state hinting to give users of assistive technologies the experience that developers intend.
  • Universal data access. dojo.data and the growing list of data store implementations makes building and using data-driven widgets simpler and faster.
  • dojox.gfx3d. Beautiful, portable 2D drawing is what dojox.gfx has always been about, and we’re taking it further with the ability to draw 3D scenes. 3D charting is based on gfx3d. This module was developed as a Summer of Code project by Kun Xi.
  • improved widget look-and-feel. The base Tundra theme continues to be improved. New and exciting extension (dojox) widgets are appearing in 1.0, including a new Lightbox widget.
  • Django templating for widgets. Many people have fallen in love with Django’s templating syntax and now you can now use it to build widgets thanks to Neil Roberts’ excellent dojox.dtl package.
  • improved stability, speed, and compatibility across the board.

Improved:

  • Dijit form widgets obey width in a way that makes visual sense
  • reworked validation indicators for form elements
  • lightbox widget
  • the widget lifecycle has been improved such that create() is now called from postfix(), allowing your constructor code to “get in on the ground floor”
  • the new Drupal front-end for the Neil’s documentation parser is now checked into the util namespace. This version provides disambiguated summaries and detail pages of the parsed object hierarchy, and since these pages are in Drupal, comments can be left by anyone.
  • better command-line functioning of the unit test system
  • an improved Firebug Lite which allows inspection of errors, popup-window placement, and parent-child cross frame logging.
  • smoother animations
  • build system now handles UTF-8 correctly end-to-end
  • improved documentation and unit test coverage for all Core and Dijit APIs/widgets

Congratulations to the Dojo team for this milestone. I know it’s been a lot of hard work.

Oct 092007
 

From Rob Novak’s blog, his original posting can be found here.

So – to recap – we found a massive, hairy, evil monster that can cause pain and most definitely fear in most human beings, especially around the office. So naturally, we named it SharePoint. Here is an actual photo of the beast, taken just this weekend.

Sadly this week, we’re going to kick SharePoint out. Turns out it’s too expensive to keep feeding it, and it really needs a bigger box (probably more than one) and more attention than anybody originally thought. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and we’re honestly getting more afraid of it every day.

We have a lot of fun at SNAPPS.

Sep 282007
 

Troy & Viktor at g33k in Stockholm, SwedenTroy Reimer and I spoke for a couple of hours in front of 30 or so geeks Tuesday night in Stockholm, Sweden. Ekakan sponsored the event and Troy and I had a great time. We spoke about the Lotus Quickr Templates, you can download them here, and about workflow lotusscript, JSON and the Dojo Toolkit. It was great to see some familiar faces from past years when I was working in Sweden but also several from Lotusphere.

Viktor and Troy at Icebar, StockholmBefore the event they took us to Icebar Stockholm. They made an entire bar in ice from the northern part of Sweden. That’s right, they ship the ice down and build the walls, bar and seats out of pure ice.

The pictures are taken by Joachim Dagerot who also together with Niklas Waller has blogged about the event.

Sep 202007
 

Warren and Kitty Elsmore, Troy Reimer, Rob Novak and I had the opportunity to visit one of London’s great buildings Tuesday. The Gherkin, as it’s also called after it’s pickle shape, is London’s sixth tallest building with 590 ft (180 m). It’s located in the City of London in the main financial district. The building was designed by Lord Foster and Ken Shuttleworth and constructed by Skanska of Sweden 2001-2004.

The building is closed to the public but we got to visit the building through Matt White who works as a consultant in the building. We had drinks at the very top of the building that overlooks London with spectacular views. You can see for your self.