My New Bosom Buddy

This past week I discovered the joy of using NotesBuddy, a companion program for Lotus Notes and Lotus SameTime. I knew about NotesBuddy before but passed it off as only useful if one wants to hear SameTime messages read aloud. There was enough noise in my office, why would I want to have the PC read out loud my SameTime messages? Then in the same week, two different people told me to get NB installed so they could send me animations. I was hooked on it once I saw the anim, which as it turns out simply animated GIF or AnimGIF, nothing new really. But the ability to send still graphic and animation via a beefed-up SameTime was fun.

At first I thought I would use NotesBuddy only for its chat feature. Then it dawned on me that I could certainly also use the program's email feature as an additional way to access my Inbox. We use a Notes-based request system, called GAGS, for our daily work and GAGS can be painfully slow sometimes when we try to close out tickets. GAGS would hog our Notes session all for itself and we would have no access to email the whole 20+ minutes that transpire. With NotesBuddy, we have a way around the problem. I do run Notes on more than one computer and in one or more Citrix sessions, so NotesBuddy won't make a big impact to me, but I have colleagues who are either have only one computer or haven't started using Citrix.

I like NotesBuddy's primary buddy feature - you can keep a list of special people with their photos. According to the IBM forum on NB, supposedly there's a bug with the feature such that you can only keep five people in your primary buddy list.

So you found all the great animgif and store them in your custom palette, but then when you want to use them, only the first few show in the preview window. Sure you can resize the preview window, but it can only grow so much - there are no built-in scrollbars. Poking around in the folders related to NB, I discovered the custpal.html file and had the idea of updating it to show scrollbars. My idea was confirmed by a post on the IBM NB forum, but for some reason the codes didn't appear in the forum - maybe the forum admin removed them. I googled high and low on various keywords and finally came across one that does just what I need. Try the lines of code below on your palette's custpal.html file. Probably because Blogger doesn't allow HTML tags, I wasn't able to save this blog with the real HTML code. Instead, I had to replace single angle brackets with double parenthesis. To be safe, I also replaced single brace with double braces, for the definition of the style. Undo my spoofing of Blogger if you decide to try out the codes. Note that the width and height don't have to be exact numbers as shown, use whatever the palettedim tag specifies.

Unfortunately, the additional code is lost whenever you update the palette, e.g. by resizing it via NB or add/remove anims. Supposedly the feature will be included in the next release of NB. For now, save a copy of the manually-modified custpal.html and copy codes from it whenever you change your palette.




From:

((html))
((body marginwidth=2 ...))
((palettedim cx=266 cy=330 ))
((img src="animgif01" alt="" onmouseover="window.event.srcElement.style.cursor='hand'"/))
((img src="animgif02" ...
((img src="animgif03" ...
...
((/body))
((/html))


To:


((html))
((style type="text/css"))
div
{{
width:266;
height:330;
overflow:auto
}}
((/style))
((body marginwidth=2 ...))
((div))
((palettedim cx=266 cy=330 ))
((img src="animgif01" alt="" onmouseover="window.event.srcElement.style.cursor='hand'"/))
((img src="animgif02" ...
((img src="animgif03" ...
...
((/div))
((/body))
((/html))