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Apple Allows Lotus On iPhone (After Banning Competitor)
ImNotAtWork writes "Apple is allowing IBM's Lotus
to be installed on iPhones. Recently it killed a developer-submitted program that was deemed competitive with Apple's product."
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Lotus Notes for iPhone is just a plain old Web app. You can't stop the web.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
Lotus notes is not the same as using Mail and iCal on the iPhone. The program that was denied by Apple usurped those apps into its own app. To my knowledge Mail or iCal have no Lotus syncing features.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Did the poster even read this article before posting it? It clearly says that it's a web based application that will run through the Safari browser. Nothing gets installed on the iPhone. Try reading it next time before posting, that way the headline you choose might make sense.
The IBM system is just a web app i.e. a web page with AJAX, viewed via Safari on the iphone. Of course Apple can't ban it, anymore than they can ban you from visiting gmail with an iphone.
The whole AppStore NDA issue is important, and worthy of discussion, but can we at least avoid FUD ridden straw men like this one.
Granted the presentation of this post is a bit trollish, he's nonetheless right.
As many others have already noted, this is just a web app, and the parallels drawn to app banning are misguided on a number of fronts). What's surprising is that IBM got completely shut-out on the enterprise side of things. At the 3G release keynote, "enterprise" basically was taken to mean "Exchange," and IBM was left twiddling their thumbs. There's an IBM exec's blog that I found amusing to read (http://edbrill.com). If you thumb through the back archives and read between the lines, you can see the s*t-storm of "Why aren't you guys on iPhone" that he had to deal with, followed by a series of petulant "we didn't want to be on the iPhone in the first place" and "look how un-secure the iPhone is" posts.
I think its incredible that they wont let people download their own email client. The vendor of the phone shouldnt even have this power. Email clients are basic functionality. Installing your own doesnt hurt Apple in any way. Typical Apple: run by short-sighted MBAs. Im so glad I didnt give in to the iphone madness. WM isnt sexy but it runs everything.
Actually, the NYT article says nothing about "Apple allowing Lotus on iPhone (after banning competitor)". In fact, it makes no mention at all of Mail.app. The article is only about IBM making a mobile Safari friendly version of Lotus.
That's not what I read at Ed Brill's site...
What I read was lots of iPhone fanboys screaming that there was no enterprise sync with Domino/Notes, and that this would single-handedly kill the product as Corporate America spent the next month doing nothing but throwing out all phones for iPhones, and all mail systems for Exchange.
(That's why I call them fanboys - their reasoned analysis and reaction identifies them as such to me.)
IBM's response was (and had to be) "Apple didn't approach us about it, and we can't do it on our own as the SDK as shipped doesn't have the appropriate APIs exposed".
Basically, Apple chose to work with Microsoft only when it came to synching with Enterprise systems, and IBM has little control over that.
Now, IBM had _already_ been developing the iNotes Lite system that the NY Times article refers to.
The full iNotes webmail system is pretty good, but it's also a pretty complicated web application which only ran on a couple of supported browsing platforms - all desktop. (For example, until recently, it was actually IE only, with ActiveX components.)
To give people access to the basics no matter what the (modern) browser someone was using, iNotes Lite was developed. (The betas have been shown to work on the Opera browser of a Nintendo Wii, amongst other things.)
So this wasn't even really developed specifically for the iPhone. It's just the first thing that IBM have shipped which can work on an iPhone.
IBM may or may not be working with Apple to get more native integration working on the iPhone. But given how open and public Apple are, we likely wouldn't know until it ships.
But let's be clear - the real blocker is the lack of support from Apple. This isn't specific to IBM - my understanding is that if you wanted to write something that used SyncML to synchronise an iPhone and a Funambol server, you couldn't do it either. The SDK has no documented ways of doing access to the mail/calender/to-do application storage that would allow integration, so unless you can work with Apple directly you're stuck.
What's really interesting is that IBM's marketing is now spinning it as "The iPhone wasn't secure, this is".
That could be IBM giving up on Apple and just going with what they've got. Or it could be IBM toning their public reaction down from "Apple are crap and don't want to work with us" because they are working with Apple now.
Only time will tell.
I feel pretty sorry for IBM on this whole affair. The sheer hype around the iPhone makes this somehow a major story, when in the grand scheme of things - even within the computing world - it's actually rather a non-event...
Let me check my business for non published interfaces: Lotus notes, check; MS office, check; MS Windows, check; Cisco phone system, check; non standards VPN, check;
Seriously it is possible to run stuff on the Iphone, that's enough to make my company cringe. Let alone if it was open (ie friendly) to develop other tools for it.
Lotus notes may have a great database or whatever, and some nice features like integrated calendars and meeting notes... but the interface sucks donkey nuts. Rotten, maggoty, herpes-infected donkey nuts.
Keyboard shortcuts and terminology are completely different from every other program out there. I mean, F5 is the standard refresh key in Windows and every other program I've used... but in Notes, F5 is the "lock interface" key. F9 refreshes. And selecting multiple items with control or shift doesn't work; you need to use the little check column. WTF, IBM?
Instead of all the options being in one place, different options and configuration screens are accessed through completely different menus, with no logic as to which option is available in which menu. WTF, IBM?
Notes insists on putting that stupid email header with a picture and scroll boxes on every fracking email. I guess it's designed to look like stationery, or like a formal memo. But that fancy header takes 800 bytes. And when you replicate that over a chain of emails with quoted history, it starts taking up a good bit of space. WTF, IBM?
And speaking of quoting emails... trimming quoted emails is a major pain in the ass. Say you want to trim the ten quoted emails down to two, because your idiot coworkers don't... if you accidentally move the mouse just a little bit, and highlight beyond the magical invisible point in the quoted text, it selects all of the quoted material, and there's no way to back up other than starting over. WTF, IBM?
There's no way to just delete the attachment on emails in your inbox, so they sit there cluttering up space. I know you can download the attachment, but you can't save the email in with the rest of them. I want to be able to delete the attachment and keep the email in my inbox. And please delete the attachment automatically with replies... I'm tired of seeing the 3mb file I emailed out turning up in every one of the seven replies. Is that too much to ask?
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Notes is a great platform for corporate apps. But any corp worth their salt is running their remote users through a VPN tunnel of some kind. So you'd need to run that tunnel or VPN dialer or tokenized app on the iPhone as well.