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Notes Design Blog

Wonderful Widget improvements in Notes 8.5.1

Mary Beth Raven  October 15 2009 04:00:00 AM
Wonderful widget users,
Here are  the changes we made to Widgets and the My Widgets sidebar panel for Notes 8.5.1.

To the My Widgets sidebar panel we have added a toolbar. From there you can choose for view your widgets as thumbnails or as a list.
You can also filter using the same "Type to find" mechanism that I am sure you all love in the Open List.
Image:Wonderful Widget improvements in Notes 8.5.1

From the Widgets preference page, you can now browse for a Catalog, as shown in the following screenshot
Image:Wonderful Widget improvements in Notes 8.5.1

We have made several changes in the wizard for creating widgets. We tried to make things a bit easier to understand, and we added some capabilities.

We made it easy to add any Notes application to the search center, as you can see in the following screenshot
Image:Wonderful Widget improvements in Notes 8.5.1

One you finish the wizards shown in the screenshot above, you'll see the icon and name of your Notes application as a choice in the search center dropdown.
Image:Wonderful Widget improvements in Notes 8.5.1


We added a new choice to create an Eclipse"Feature or plugin" as shown in the following screenshot:
Image:Wonderful Widget improvements in Notes 8.5.1

We move some of the "lesser used" functions -- like assigning display names and values-- into an advanced tab, as shown in the following screenshot. This allows most users to focus on the simpler parts of creating widgets  (and our initial feedback indicates a higher success rate in making a widget.)
Image:Wonderful Widget improvements in Notes 8.5.1

So, now that you have Notes 8.5.1 and it is eaiser than ever to create widgets, I look forward to seeing some new widget choices in the catalog on Open NTF or any of the other public catalogs.