Notes 6.5 on Panther
by Volker Weber
Panther introduces significant changes to Mac OS X's text services, providing new formatting doodads, ranging from the mostly-useless-but-flashy (e.g. text shadows and outlined letterforms) to the genuinely useful (e.g. true typographic small caps and better ligature support).
I don't know whether it's Panther or the Notes 6.5 update, but fonts no longer look ugly with Notes on OS X. I used Silk to enable antialiasing on Jaguar but this haxie was broken with Panther. So I uninstalled it. I later realized that fonts now look OK in Notes, but I simply don't know whether it was IBM that changed Notes or Apple that changed Panther. And actually, I don't really care. :-)
Comments
The first thing I noticed with Notes on Panther is the F9 key. That used to be the refresh key in Notes, now it is hooked into Panther's Exposé feature.
That's true. But you can map the Exposé feature to any other button. When I played around with key combinations of F9 I noticed that shift-F9 will run Exposé really slow - so that Steve can show it off. :-)
It seems that it's 6.5 that made the fonts look better. (That's one point for Lotus.) I just installed 6.0.2CF1 on this test Panther PB15 and the fonts looked horrible. I used the KissWorks NiniX to set the font size to 2, which helped with size, but not looks. Then, I upgraded Notes to 6.5 and they looked much smoother.
I guess I should give this PB back before my iBook looks slow and small...
I wrote a simple little notes app to allow users to set ini variables; it only manipulates the fonts ini right now. I am using this app for exec's to use on their PBs instead of the NiniX tool; I am afraid to give that much power to a novice user. If anyone wants it "as is" ( i.e. no support), just let me know.
Me too :-p
Notes 6 on the Mac
Is there a version of Lotus Designer or Administrator (6.5 or better) that works with Panther?
No. The Mac version is a Notes client only. No admin or designer unless you run within an emulation layer like Virtual PC
