Recently Richard Moy announced the Collabsphere 2019 Beauty Contest, a competition to enhance a yet-to-be-decided database for use on DMA. I don't intend to be involved on a specific team. However, I do intend to make myself available to offer advice and experience to anyone looking to get involved. As well as technical experience, I can help you through the steps involved to package up your final application for OpenNTF (though it's quite straightforward). I will also be willing (time permitting) to review applications and documentation, offering constructive feedback. I'm not intending to offer myself up for the judging panel though, so feedback will be restricted to my understanding of the judging criteria.
Some initial thoughts are:
@Platform = "iOS"can be used to determine DMA access, I don't know what will be used for differentiation to iPhone or Android though.- Designs can be previewed in Notes Client to speed up development, but be aware of screen sizes.
- DMA and traditional development approaches are not responsive. As far as I'm aware there's not a function available for identifying the device orientation at the moment, although that may come in the future.
- Be innovative. Think about what works well on mobile devices in other applications and leverage that. Think about what works well in other platforms and development frameworks, is it relevant? Think about strengths of the Notes Client and what might be leveraged from that.
- Do you want to include error handling? What is the best option for error handling, particularly for DMA applications?
- Integration with maps is easy, will that be relevant, and where?
- Certain images fit in with the device UI, but are device-specific.
- What level of customisability do you want and could you provide?
- Think about your strengths and weaknesses, and where others on your team could enhance your submission.
- Think about best use of new tabs vs dialog boxes.
- Think about what is possible with views vs embedded views.
- Think about how help is made available, if appropriate.
The value of a good application is in its longevity. My first open source application, XPages Help Application, is pretty unremarkable and stuck with a OneUI look and feel that is now very dated. But it included an XPages Java implementation of OpenLog, which evolved into a separate applications (XPages OpenLog Logger), extended into being an OSGi plugin, and became the first bit of functionality I was able to provide into ODA. That functionality has been enhanced many times and is also the bedrock of many applications I've built in my day job. It's not something I'd use outside of Domino, but when adding it to ODA I was encouraged to also add a standard Java logger. That learning has provided relevance beyond a single platform.
With a little bit of thought, a small amount of effort can contribute great things.
