Users of the decommissioned Lotus Sandbox need lament no more, it has been brought back to life and is available for downloads once again (no thanks to IBM).
I recently commented about its passing and yesterday there was a reply posted with the good news.
You’ll find that it has a new “banana home” courtesy of Peter von Stöckel and you can see the Sandbox again here.
Go read Peter’s blog posts about it at Notes.Net Sandbox and Notes.Net Sandbox, part 2
Add to the list of unfathomable corporate decisions IBM’s recent making unavailable the much-loved Lotus Sandbox archive, see here, please go read it.
I do refer to the Sandbox several times per year but haven’t visited for a month or two, and was only alerted to this sad action by Thierry Cayla’s R.I.P posting and I agree with him that it’s not one of IBM’s smartest moves.
So I sent of the following via the developerWorks feedback link on the Sandbox page and maybe you’ll consider doing so too if you’d like to see the Sandbox archive revived.
Here’s my developerWorks feedback to IBM (why not have a go yourself?) …
Bring back the Lotus Sandbox. There were still valuable downloads on it that aren't available elsewhere (such as OpenNTF.org). Consequently decommissioning the Sandbox will prove to be a disservice to the Lotus Notes/Domino community. Even if you don't actively maintain but merely leave it there as a "legacy" resource, it will remain of value to the Notes community. Could you not afford the trivial expense of leaving it there? Surely your budget is not so constrained that you can't afford the disk space and download bandwidth?
- - - - - - - - - - -With the boilerplate response: Thank you for giving developerWorks your feedback. Your comments give developerWorks important information that we will use to further improve our design.
Time will tell if they do anything positive about this unimpressive decision.
This reminds me a bit of IBM Australia’s decision, back around 1989 or 1990 -- when admittedly the economy was getting a bit tough, and the usual aggressive annual sales growth targets were being missed -- to stop supplying free biscuits (cookies, if you prefer) in the IBM coffee rooms across the nation. Rumour had it that the biscuits were costing IBM Australia the not inconsiderable amount of some $150,000 per annum (or maybe it was $250,000), so it was probably an understandable decision for the times.
But I can’t see how merely keeping online the Lotus Sandbox could be imposing any such unbearable cost on IBM Corporation.
So IBM, please reconsider, and make available again the “knowledge biscuits” stored in the Lotus Sandbox.
I remain puzzled about the Domino Designer 8.5.2 Help database, which only seems to mention the previous 8.5.1 point release. This is what I found when I opened it:
This is the file help85_designer.nsf that I opened from the Help folder.
Thinking that somehow I might have “stuffed up” the installation (even though I deliberately installed the new release into a brand new folder and not simply overwritten the folder that I had used for release 8.5.1), I contacted one of my clients and he reported the same.
Is this a faux pas on my part, or were there simply no new application design features in the Notes/Domino 8.5.2 release which the IBM information developers found worthy of writing about?
Am I going crazy? … The answer to that rhetorical question is undoubtedly a resounding “Yes!” … But maybe I’m not the only one?
The online interactive Domino Object Maps for versions 8.5.1 and 8.5.2 are very useful Help resources for the for Lotus Notes/Domino developer.
In case you missed it, they’re accessible here:
I wanted to make a offline copy, mainly to get snapper performance, by downloading each of the above-referenced pages and all their sub-pages. But this didn’t work, with many of the sub-URLs pointing to other pages external to the base URLs.
Can anybody provide a method for making/obtaining a working offline copy of each map structure in its entirety?
I’ve been flat out and haven’t had a chance to work on my Searching for Desktop Search blog for ages and ages.
I thought that I’d mention that NetworkWorld has recently published some desktop search reviews:
I’ve tested many (at least a dozen) desktop search programs for Windows over the last five or more years, including X1 and Copernic search, and I could really tell some stories about them!
But at the moment only have dtSearch Desktop installed on my 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate. Currently, I’m actively using only Windows 7 search (when I migrated from Windows XP as soon as Windows 7 was released in August last year, I discarded some of the other desktop search programs).
While Windows 7 search has many good features, one thing that I really dislike about it the ability to readily enter advanced searches (with Boolean search arguments, etc), as you can using dtSearch like this:
All that Windows 7 gives you is this:
or this inscrutable nonsense at the top right of Windows Explorer:
What Windows 7 desktop search badly needs is an approachable query interface, say like Google’s “Advanced Search” form:
But one distinct advantage for Windows 7 is that it’s built in, and the indexer works unobtrusively and continuously in the background. I find its performance impact to be unnoticeable, and due to the continuous “on the fly” indexing you can query documents added just a few seconds ago.
More about this, and the some distinct advantages of dtSearch, some other time when I have a moment or two to put down my findings.
A classical tale of love, hardware-wise, in the French style. … “L’amour toujours” as experienced by two laptop computers.
It’s been out at YouTube for a couple of years, but is quite cute and worth a view. Be forewarned that the tragic conclusion may cause a little weeping!
Catch it here or watch it below:
