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Book Publication Announcement

FINALLY I have in hand my first copies of The Goodnight Agency — a YA fantasy by me, writing under my nom de plume, Tyler Tork. I’m very excited about this release — surely the best thing ever written by anyone. I hope you will agree, and buy copies for any acquaintances of an appropriate age (the adults who’ve read it also think it’s grand). Suggesting your local public library order a copy or two is also not a bad idea, if you want to help out without spending any money. And please don’t forget to write a review!!!

Read Attachment Files without Writing to Disk

Someone sent me a link to this “domino idea” asking for the ability to read file data from attachments in Notes documents without “extracting the file” to disk, since ECLs might not always let you do that. I never like to say there’s no way to do that, so the question prompted me to create an answer. This code uses DXL — it exports the document, then searches the exported data for the file data objects, which are encoded in base64. Fortunately it’s just the plain file data without CD record headers or the like, so it’s easy to convert to a NotesStream containing the raw data — or to interpret that data as text in a specified character set. Specification The AttachmentReader class has the following properties and methods: A single attachment is represented… Read More »Read Attachment Files without Writing to Disk

A new tool for creating rich text

I’ve used an earlier version of this in other applications, but now it’s greatly improved and expanded. This is an API for creating rich text, including all the variations of sections, tables, image backgrounds, links, borders… This is an initial 0.1 release, so there will almost certainly be more changes coming, but I need y’all to drive this. Download it, try it out, respond here with questions and suggestions (or send me email or use my contact form). I think it’s pretty useful as is and there’s a lot of documentation in the NSF as well as a ton of code samples showing how to do the fancy stuff. I’m not going to say more about it here because it’s all there in the tool — hoping you find it useful. Download here: Screenshots

More thoughts on Content Assist

Recently I write about best practices for commenting for content assist. I’ve been writing a lot of LotusScript recently (I’m making a present for you), and in trying to make the content assist as helpful as possible, I’ve had some additional thoughts. Use long lines in comments It’s unhelpful that the IDE considers each line a separate paragraph and inserts spacing between, like this: This is where a line break appears in the code, but there the lines are close together and the indentation provides a guide to what should be grouped together. To fix this, I’ve been just writing really long lines in the comments. If I intend something to be a paragraph, I put it all on one line. This does make it a little harder to read in the IDE, but I… Read More »More thoughts on Content Assist

Dialog warning of possible solar nova.

Users don’t read your dialogs

You know how you open a dialog to ask for confirmation or additional information, or to warn them what’s about to happen? Yeah. People don’t read that stuff. Here’s what to do about that.

"working" screen displayed during delay

Close & Reopen Database, and Ad Hoc Stored Form

HOW TO create a design element and immediately make use of it by automatically closing and reopening the current application (tricky!). BONUS create a stored form in memory and view it without ever saving it.