How We Are Building a Notes Mobile Application for iOS
On October 15, 2019, we hosted a popular HCL Domino-focused webcast hosted by Gabriella Davis from Turtle Partnership and Andrew Manby from HCL. The plan was to bring you up-to-date with the work we have completed on the discussions template for iOS mobile as well as how we got here, what is coming next, how you can get involved. It also includes our hopes for additions to Domino Designer that will allow us to map mobile gestures and behavior to Notes applications. There were hundreds of participants asking a lot of questions. We provide the answers to those questions here (sorted by topics, in bold).
You can watch the replay here, and find out more about the Template Experience project here.
Project Scope
Q: Once you completed discussion and team room template, will you continue to enhance other templates?
A: Yes, at this time currently limited to discussion and Team room template features. However, it is the starting point for the Template project that Gab was describing. Once this template is completed and shipped, we will then look at the other templates (based on customer feedback) we want to modernize.
Beta
Q: Can we get the Nomad on the iPhone now? When is it expected to eGA?
A: Yes, you can! Sign up for our iPhone Nomad beta here. By the way, this URL is right for the beta for Android tablet too. We expect Nomad for iPhone will eGA by EOY 2019.
Cross-platform
Q: Having used Nomad, will you be adding Workspace like the standard client to make accessing new templates easier?
A: Yes, we are planning on providing the Workspace as an option for Nomad. Stay tuned.
Q: Do you intend for this prototype template to work for Nomad on other mobile platforms?
A: Yes, once it’s ready for distribution, it will load a frameset appropriate to the device for example, from an iPad or Android tablet to an Apple iPhone or Android-based phone.
Q: What about Nomad WebAssembly and the Notes desktop? Will those be supported platforms too?
A: That is the ultimate goal, the template will present the best way possible independent of the Nomad client being used (or Notes).
Delivery
Q: This looks great. What more has to be done before it will be shipped? How often will you have updates available?
A: There is more work to be done before its ready to ship the new template that works for Nomad on iPhone. For example, we are adding translations for our supported languages, more bug fixes, performance tweaks, etc. Once we have something ready, we intend to ship updates every quarter like the Domino AppDev Pack and VOP. The work of optimizing templates to work on Nomad WebAssembly and the Notes desktop will come, however, there is no timeline for that work yet. Stay tuned. We are focusing on updating templates on Nomad on mobile devices for now.
Designer
Q: We saw new template functionality introduced in the demo, including a new set of icons, will they be available in Designer in the future?
A: Thanks to the community’s feedback, we are extending Designer to add functionality to make creating more contemporary mobile apps more accessible. Stay tuned for timing.
Functionality
Q: Why there are two top menus?
A: The Top menu, is the Nomad toolbar, the second is the application action bar.
Q: Is the middle column showing the value only from 1 View Column or combined Info? Can we make a part of text Bold too?
A: The Nomad client view columns have the same design features as the Notes views, different text stylings within a single column in view are not currently possible.
Q: The users can copy paste a link into a notes doc or attach it there as normal?
A: The same copy/paste functionality for doc links is available on Nomad iPhone as on the Notes client; however, we have not chosen in this template to map that to action yet. That is something that can be customized, for instance.
Q: It will be possible to combine data from linked documents in a single view? Like adding text from the lookup-ed document?
A: It is still a Notes view with the same design capabilities as today, so not a relationship join within a view.
Q: In my opinion, create a lookup option for a text field in the view, should be very simple to add.
A: Notes has never been able to support this type of view join functionality.
Q: Also, default scrolling horizontally is not a preferred UI option.
A: This is understood. In a future release of the template/Nomad, horizontal scrolling will be disabled. Thank you.
Q: And keep vertical space, top UI should hide when not using.
A: We agree. You will see the Toolbar hidden in future releases for an application like this. We are also looking at ways to redesign the tab bar, which currently takes too much space. Thanks for the comment.
Q: Is there also a view, that shows the main topics/questions, including all responses in a hierarchical fashion?
A: The underlying data is still in a response hierarchy, within the mobile client, it is not displayed in a hierarchy, as we found it created too much space on the smaller real estate. You can see in the “more comments” view that we show documents in a hierarchy but chose not to in the primary views to maximize space on the screen. That could easily be changed in your application if required.
Q: In a discussion forum, you often want to quickly find all topics, that are either new or that have new responses. What would be the best way to find such discussion threads?
A: Great question. In the traditional Notes client, I would suggest using the date flat view, where you can see everything added, new topic, or response etc. In the mobile client, you could use tracking to track subjects you are interested in for some time. Lots of thought going into this area for the future. The Filter and Tracking features are helpful in this area. We’d love your feedback on these.
Q: Will there be a way to handle multi-document actions?
A: Currently, Nomad does not support a view selection column so we cannot select multiple documents in the way we do in Notes. We are discussing alternative ways to approach that.
Q: If we can get an update on a long (> 10 years) existing discussion database… that would be great!
A: We agree!
Futures
Q: As a developer, I’d like a configurable template so I could have a great looking mobile approval form on an iPhone. Any plans to add a Nomad template for this type of solution, please?
A: It’s a great idea and an excellent use case of Nomad on the phone. Before we commit, we want to collect the community’s input on the next target template. To help us, please complete this survey.
Photo by Kaique Rocha from Pexels
