John M. Wargo

I've been using the BlackBerry Torch 9800 since it came out (one of the benefits of working for AT&T, you get new BlackBerry devices as soon as they come out). The first release was not ready for prime time, I had responsiveness issues and some pretty interesting ui weirdness. When the first maintenance release came out, most of the issues I'd encountered were resolved, and the Torch became an excellent device for me. I carry it as my primary device and have had very few issues with it.

Yesterday morning though, I went into my office to begin my work day and found that the Torch 9800 wasn't on.  I have it configured to turn itself off at 11 PM and back on again at 7 AM. It was after 8 and the device wasn't on. So, I poked and prodded it, but couldn't get it to come on. I had to pull the battery to get it to come on. Weird.

Later in the day, I was trying to do something with it and it became unresponsive and hard to use. At one point, I was trying to do something and it took a while to catch up with what I was trying to do and it left itself in the state shown the following figure - weird.

I spent some time over the holidays building some sample applications for my Lotusphere presentation. I finally got the time to spend some quality time with Dashcode and build a couple of applications that get their data from a Domino server. After some trials and tribulations I was finally able to get it to work - woohoo! 

Dashcode is cool and now that most of the major smartphone players are all using the WebKit browser, applications written in Dashcode should (and I'm saying should - I haven't tested this yet) work on devices besides the iPhone and iPad. One of the things I learned while teaching myself Dashcode is that the documentation available from Apple is pretty horrible. I really struggled to learn how to do some of the things I wanted to do. Dashcode is so good at pointing to a data source and building a complete application that talks to the data source that Apple apparantly decided it wasn't worth it to document any of the other aspects of the program. Disapointing.

Until recently there haven't been any books written about Dashcode. There were some that mentioned Dashcode, but none that were truly about Dashcode. Fortunately there's a new Dummies book on Dashcode. I ordered a copy and have been reading through it. I'm hoping I can find the time to finish it by Lotusphere, perhaps I'll enhance my demos a little bit and show a more sophisticated application than I originally planned. One of the things I'm planning for my Lotusphere session is to try to build a Dashcode application for Domino in less than a minute.  I'm going to see if I can quickly build the app while someone times me then I'll go back and show the complete, unhurried steps in the process. It will be fun.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Macintosh lately. My employer gave me a Windows laptop, but when I started doing more mobile development, they gave me a 17” MacBook as well.

What’s funny about using the Mac for me is how hard it’s been for me. Not because I’m uncomfortable with the Macintosh or the Mac OS - I was an old Macintosh user, I used a Mac before I ever used an IBM PC. No, the issue for me is the keyboard.

When I taught Novell and Lotus Notes classes, my server was always off in the corner of the classroom on a little table. Because of the size of the table, I never had much room for a mouse, so I got very (very, very) used to using the keyboard to get a lot of things accomplished.

On the Macintosh, many of the keys I’m looking for are just missing.

I’m an INSert key guy. Copying is Ctrl-INSert. On the BlackBerry Simulators, you use the INSert key to bring up the BlackBerry menu.

I also miss the End key and the Home key. As I navigate around on a web site or in a word processor, I used those keys to get to the top of a document or to the end of a line.

Also frustrating is the loss of the delete key. In word or in other applications, I’m constantly deleting the word to the right of the cursor using Crtl-Del.

I’m also finding that I have difficulty moving the cursor from word to word in the word processor of choice. I’m so used to using Crtl plus the arrow keys to skip words.  I know you can still do some of these things with corresponding keys on the Mac keyboard, but I find that the implementation of some of these features is inconsistent between applications. Ugh!

I’m excitedly waiting for Henge Docks to release their dock for the Macbook Pro 17” - once that happens, I can plug this thing into my KVM and have a full IBM keyboard to use.  I've been waiting for months and there's been little progress.  Not sure why they're not releasing products.

My Lotusphere 2011 session with Rob Wunderlich is BP209 and entitled Delivering Domino to Mobile Devices: More Stupid Tricks. The session is scheduled for Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 1:30 PM. 

Last year they scheduled a repeat session, I guess that won't be the case for this year.  Come see us and say hello!