I have long been waiting for a decent Lotus Notes client for MacOS X 10.5, but today I tested the public beta of Lotus Notes v8.5. The installer has a small bug, so you have to check that Notes should be your default e-mail client, other wise the installer crashes. The application itself seems to be stable (I would almost say rock solid), and I have not managed to crash it so far.

lotus-notes-85

This version is a multi-user version. Previous versions I have tried for Mac, has installed the user data in a subfolder of the Applications folder. The needed configurations were done in two minutes, and as I am using roaming profiles, I needed another minute to download my user data. Only negative thing I have to say about Lotus Notes 8.5, is what happened to the great template that was used in the public beta of v8.0? Group calendars don’t necessarily have to be boring!

pocketsync-syncing

After having installed Lotus Notes, I went on trying to install Pocketmac GoBetween to be able to synchronize with my iPhone. The installer didn’t follow the standards for how we install software on Macs, and I had to temporary give my normal user account admin privileges. That should have been unnecessary! Secondly I only managed to sync Addressbook with Lotus Notes. I didn’t manage to sync calendar entries and todos. Sync of contacts didn’t support special European letters, as for instance the Norwegian letters Æ, Ø and Å. Problems also appeared with letters like Ö and É.

problem-letters

Update – 2009-11-19: Luckily, the days when you needed GoBetween are over. You can now use Lotus Notes Traveler for iPhone / iPod Touch.