Yesterday I posted my new app for iPhone and iPad to the Appstore: NotesBook.

This app synchronizes the content of your personal Lotus Notes Notebook (Journal) to your iPhone or iPad and fills the gap that Traveler leaves. All your notes are with you on your iPhone or iPad, even when you're offline.

Update 20 Dec 2011: it's now available in the Appstore! So if you want to fix that Lotus Traveler does not sync your personal Lotus Notes Notebook (Journal) you should download NotesBook in the Appstore.

Click here to get the NotesBook in the Appstore!

Here are some screenies:






Notable features:

• No changes to your journal.nsf needed! As long as the journal.nsf is on the Domino server and Domino is reachable via HTTP or HTTPS, the app 'just works'.
  (that means our YouAtNotes Framework 'Domino To Go' can now download the content of a view without copying an XPage to the NSF, it's just a little bit slower than with the XPage)
• Universal app for both iPhone and iPad.
• Only changed Notebook entries are downloaded at each synchronization to save bandwith and time.
• The app has views sorted by date and by category, just as in Lotus Notes.
• Your Notebook entries look similar as in Lotus Notes.
  (in fact, it's the HTML representation of an entry, but with some optimizations, for example to get rid of the ugly table borders)
• You can search for notes by title and category.
• If you delete an entry in Lotus Notes, it will be removed from the app, too.
• The app synchronizes automatically from time to time, or you can initiate a synchronization anytime you wish.
• Many RichText features are preserved: font colors, size, many font attributes, even sections.
  (up to 10 sections are expanded automatically while the content is downloaded, if you're using more sections you need to set them to "auto expand" manually.)

What's not supported yet:

Images and attachments are not supported yet. I'm thinking about how to solve this... the obvious way would be to download all images and attachments to the device, but that would lead to a lot of HTTP requests, a lot of bandwith usage, a lot of time need for the download process and a lot of space needed on the device. I'm not very happy with that idea.

Perhaps I just implement a way to get access to images and attachments when the device is online.

Planned for upcoming versions:

• Password protection for the whole app or for entries in a specific category (for example, if you're storing passwords in your journal).
• Creating new entries and push them back to Domino.
• Support for attachments.
• Support for inline images.

Requirements:

• Your personal Lotus Notes Notebook (journal.nsf) needs to be on a Domino server that is reachable via HTTP or HTTPS.
  If you are a roaming user, this is already the case and your're good to go.
• If the Domino server is only reachable via HTTP/HTTPS from inside the office, that's fine, that just means that your can only sync the content if your iPhone or iPad is connected to your office network.
• The app is tested against Domino 8.5.x. I guess it will work with Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.x, too. Perhaps even with 7.x.

In most cases I hope the app will just work after you give your Domino user account, the hostname of the Domino server and the path to your journal.nsf (for example, 'roaming/jdoe').

BTW I tested the app with a journal having 2500 entries and it worked fine, just needed some time for the initial download. And, if you're notebook contains more than 1000 entries, you may need to tell Domino to deliver more than 1000 view lines in the web using the web site document.

Availability and price:

I submitted the app to Apple on tuesday, 6th dec. I guess it will be available sometime next week. I selected $5.99 for the price and have no idea if it's a good price or not :-)
Personally I think having the personal Lotus Notes Notebook (Journal) on the iPhone or iPad should be well worth $5.99, but we'll see how it goes.

Technical background:

While developing this app I did a lot optimization and polishing work to our mobile framework YouAtNotes Domino To Go, and we started to write the documentation for the framework, including tips for general Titanium development (the URL is temporary and will change in the future).

The NotesBook app and the xpageswiki.com app are two examples how to work with the framework, and how fast one can work with Domino data in a Titanium based app.

In fact, getting the data out of Domino for the NotesBook app was a piece of cake and took only some hours to implement. Most work went into the general UI and polishing the Domino To Go framework. I think writing a new app which simply gets the content of a view out of a NSF and displays it in a tableView in the iOS app would take me only a couple of minutes now.
Or getting the HTML content of Domino documents would be just as easy. Even getting file attachments is easy, the main problem then is how much space will be needed on the device.

There were some frustrating days during development, though, since I experienced random crashed although my code was good. See this blog post for details.

But since this was solved by using a more recent SDK I'm very happy with Titanium again. It is a very productive and good development environment, at least for iOS (my experiences with Android are quite limited yet).