Domino 12 beta 3: subtile UI changes

Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 7:37 AM UTC

Now I want to focus on some improvements of the UI of the standard client.

I am not talking about the new 64bit basic client which looks like... R6.5 Goofy

Let's forget about that for a minute

There were several posts in the forum about the new workspace, the tabs, the sidebar and the new templates. I also posted my 2 cents to that and look what we got with beta 3: some improvements (I will name those that didn't make to beta 3 in the end).

Workspace tabs

With beta 3, they can be hidden - partially and completely.

 

Hiding them completely doesn't make sense to me personally, but hey, if a policy only allows a single workspace this could also be a use case.

Icons (tiles)

Me and others claimed that the replica state and action button are not visible or too subtile - this changed in beta 3, too. Database tiles that have replicas are now "marked" with an additional circle around the tile. Once you single-click such a tile, the replica action button gets visible - with a fatter dots-menu.

It's not perfect to my taste but HCL heard us. But why not a "hamburger" (3 horizontal lines) instead of these dots? We already have those in the widgets-sidebar:

New templates - new font (since beta 2)

The new templates for Rooms & Resources, Certstore and Dominobackup come with a new design using a new font in navigators and buttons. The font is "Helvetica Neue" which is very nice but not available by default on older Windows systems. In my case I sometimes open the databases on a Windows Server 2012 machine with a 9.0.1 client - just for maintenance or checking. This results in that image:

The client seems to render this unknown font as "Default Serif" and not "Default Sans Serif" - Helvetica Neue is a sans-serif font overall. The workaround is to install a package containing the Helvetica Neue fonts on your ancient system. After a reboot the databases look as they should. I already added this to the forum, so the client should interpret this as a "sans-serif" font.

Not here, yet

Drag & drop of workspace tabs to re-order them was wished by many users. On the Mac the client still has some issues with the file open dialog not resizing the file list (I was told that isn't related to V12 but I never noticed this with V11). The fonts on the Mac still are not perfect. I ended up setting them to "large fonts" in the preferences:

Chime in!

If you don't already have an account, register to post ideas, bugs and improvements to the forum - with a bit of luck they will end up in the GA of version 12:

https://registration.hclpartnerconnect.com/d12betaforum.nsf







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