You know, my small iOS App NotesBook syncs the content of your personal Lotus Notes Journal (Notebook) to your iPhone or iPad. The App was made with our upcoming toolkit for development of iOS Apps for Lotus Notes, Domino To Go.

Several users of NotesBook asked me to allow creating new entries for the personal Lotus Notes Journal (Notebook) right on the iPhone/iPad.

Since a few days Domino To Go provides the technology for doing just that, in Domino To Go I can now create new NotesDocuments and push them to Domino without the need to modify the target NSF database (previously, we needed a special XPage in the NSF).
That means I can do stuff like this now in my iOS App:

var db = new NotesDatabase('http://server/roaming/jdoe/journal.nsf', 'notesbook');
var doc = db.createDocument();
doc.replaceItemValue("subject", "my new entry");
doc.replaceItemValue("body", "content of my new entry");
doc.save();
db.uploadChanges();

Without the need to modify the design of the NSF, all done by standard Domino HTTP POST requests.
So, technically creating new entries for the journal on the iPhone/iPad is no problem anymore. I just wonder if that actually makes sense.

Because: it will only be possible to create a new entry, but not to edit entries. The journal entries in Notes contains RichText, and there is no RichText editor on the iPhone or iPad. And even if it where (for example, I could use a CKEditor embedded in a browser component), it would only allow to edit portions of the RichText, while stuff like sections would be deleted.
Furthermore, to edit entries I would need to download full Domino documents to the device, which is currently not possible without modifying the NSF (we need a special XPage for downloading full documents to the device).
In the end, editing existing entries is not possible.

That means the flow would be:

- create a new entry on the iPhone or iPad with plaintext for the body
- click a "save" button
- the entry will be uploaded to Domino (or queued if the device is offline)
- the entry will be displayed beside the other entries, but without the possiblity to change it

So, does this makes sense? Or would it only annoy users because they don't understand why they can create a new entry on the iPhone/iPad, but not edit it afterwards.

On a side note, I already fixed some small bugs in NotesBook and I'm planning to support the Notebook part of iNotes, too.
After that, I'll look into downloading images and/or attachments to the device.