Thanks to everyone who attended my session this morning at the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference in Chicago. I appeciate you being there.

Several asked about getting the example database and/or presentation for their own use. You can download a copy of the one from Lotusphere (same bits...different background) here.

Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about what you're seeing or how it works.

"Don't spend any time on making it look good...it's only for internal use. All it has to do is work right."

I'm wondering how many times we've heard that statement from customers. I can't tell you the exact number but I can tell you it is a lot.

Every time somebody tells us they don't care how their application looks, we laugh. Not a mean laugh--it's a nice laugh--but we laugh nonetheless. That's because (a) we know they're lying and (b) we know we're going to make it look good, anyway.

Mind you, they don't mean to be lying--more often than not they're just trying to save a little money--but the truth is, it's not the truth. Not even close. They do care how it looks, even if they haven't quite admitted it to themselves yet.

Fortunately (for them), building ugly applications is something we're not willing to do. Blame me for that, if you like, but, personally, I can't stand to even work on an ugly application, let alone use it. I certainly don't want to stick any of our customers with one, even if they have, for all intents and purposes, asked for it.

Why not? For a lot of reasons, the most important of which is I know that, at some level, design matters to pretty much everybody.

"Not to me," you say. "Function matters a lot more than design. Design is just a nice-to-have." Uh huh. Yeah. I hear what you're saying but I don't believe you. Design is integral to everything we do and everywhere we go, every day of the year. Like it or not, you see and touch and use great (and terrible) design work all the time, and somewhere inside that function-is-all-that-matters head of yours, you not only know the difference, you care about it, too, a least a little bit.

An example? Sure...

Consider the two beverages shown above. Let's assume they have exactly the same beer on the inside and that the cost per ounce is identical. So, same beer, same price. The only difference is the printing on the cans. Which would you rather buy? Which would you rather drink? Which would you rather serve to friends?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you didn't choose the beer on the left.

But maybe that's not quite fair. Let's leave your friends and all that peer pressure out of it for the moment. Let's even change the price a little. This is just beer for internal consumption among the members of the household. Nothin' fancy. Your friends and outsiders won't have to see it and the good news is the one on the left is now a penny an ounce cheaper. Still the same stuff inside the can but with the plain one you can save more than two bucks a case. I'm sure you'd be OK with the one on the left now, wouldn't you?

After all, it's the same beer, but cheaper. Clearly, the smarter buy. And, it's just for the "employees" of the house, anyway. Surely they won't care.

Or will they?

I'm surprised how often I hear people spouting off information about Notes and/or Domino that is more than innaccurate, it's just plain wrong. And always, it seems, from people supremely-confident in the rightness of their wrongness.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose.

These are the Myths of Domino and just like the years-gone-by myths of dragons or sea creatures or Minataurs, what irritates me most about them is how often they come from people who (a) should know better, and (b) are in positions of authority to make poor decisions on the basis of them.

We have come to the point that some of our proposals now contain an entire section devoted to addressing some of the most pervasive (and damaging) of these myths. I thought I might share some of the more damning with you and hopefully you'll share the ones you've heard, too.

So, here goes:

Last weekend we raced at Mid-Ohio for the last time this season. After posting a personal-best lap in Friday's practice (1:37.16 on the pro course), I qualified on the class pole both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday's race went great (I won!) but Sunday's, which started out great, ended up with a motor making too few noises of the right kind and too many of the wrong.

The video below shows the start up to the point the motor quit (4:08 into the video). All of the cars you see here--even after the motor quits--are in higher (which is to say, faster) classes.

You'll notice that all these guys all kill me down the straights (that's what an extra 60+ horsepower can do for you) but once you get past the very fastest cars I'm pretty much able to make up most of the difference under braking and in the curves.

Apologies for the Doris Day fuzz...I never seem to remember to clean the lens!

FINALLY, I have real Notes mail on my iPhone. Yea Lotus! I've had the iPhone for what seems like a long time and as much as I love it I have to admit I look enviously over the shoulders of BlackBerry users as they endlessly and effortlessly check their e-mail from EVERYWHERE.

By comparison, we Notes iPhone users feel somehow inferior with our vastly superior handsets saddled with a commoner's need to log-in.

Oh, I see. How...unfortunate.

YES, I have iNotes and its special iPhone interface and, YES, it works pretty well but still...it's not nearly native e-mail and, well, it's good but it's not great.

Now I've got great.

Lotus Traveler to the rescue. After a very easy server setup (thanks Gab!) and about two minutes of fiddling on my phone I now have full mail, calendaring and contacts just as god and Steve Jobs (or am I being redundant?) intended.

No more web interface. No more nice but not-nice-enough interface.

I've got NATIVE Notes mail, baby.

Woohoo!

We have finished several Domino projects over the past year where we have consistently had multiple developers working on the same form at the same time. Not the same project, the same form.

In the most recent, there were three of us more or less constantly on the project (and in the form) for three months. In one before that there were, at times, as many as eight developers working on the same form at the same time. And these aren't trivial applications. The latest included more than 8,000 lines of JavaScript. So...pretty serious stuff.

"Wait just a minute. That's not possible," you say. "You can't have more than one person working on a form at one time without causing all kinds of problems."

Actually, you're right but, as it turns out, wrong too. Let me explain.