Comments on: 6 paths to rounded corners in the Notes Client

By: Arshad Mahmoud

Arshad Mahmoud — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:31:21 +0000

Hi Martin,

Great technique, I downloaded you sample Db couple of months ago, I now have a project that can benefit from rounded corners.

I have managed to produce superb looking form using 1 image border - 1 x 1 table - dynamic size - solid. It looks superb on screen, BUT when I print it the rounded border image does not print. Instead off rounded border, I get a black solid rectangle which probably 8 pixels wide.

Am I missing something, or is this the same old Lotus Notes scenario of what you see on screen and what gets printed is different.

I have could lots of tables with tables to separate different area of the form, and I though the table complexity might be causing a problem BUT I printed out the ‘About Database’ document, that prints in a similar manner. Does the rounded corners technique only work on screen?

By: Nathan T. Freeman

Nathan T. Freeman — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 13:11:32 +0000

1) Thanks for a great post with a number of consolidated approaches to this problem.

2) In Example 5, did you try using a “Size to Fit” on the gradient instead of a tile? Tiled backgrounds are SLOW on a repaint if you have a lot of them on the screen. Put 10 or 12 of those on at once, and you’ll watch your client redraw them in slow motion. I mention using a size to fit approach here: http://www.lotus911.com/nathan/escape.nsf/D6Plinks/NTFN-6YPPMV

3) re: the person who thinks it looks so 1980s — if he thinks it’s a bad idea, it’s automatically a good one.

4) One of the things I’ve always wondered is exactly how Notes does the image parsing for the repeated border. It turns out that it’s quite difficult to get perfect images where you want to do rounded corners on gradients with themselves with an additional border — like your site logo.

Lotus is now cheating to produce those in Notes 8 standard. Your calendar uses rounded-corner templates whose internal RGB shadings are computed on the fly. These are rendered 100% by SWT/JFace, rather then by the native Notes C++ code, so there’s no way for you to do this in your own views yet. But to me, those are exactly the kinds of visual controls we should be trying to achieve on forms, even in Notes 6. If we can figure out exactly how the source image gets chopped up and repeated for a table border, it SHOULD be possible to mimic that!

By: Martin Vereecken

Martin Vereecken — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 07:20:32 +0000

Hey, my very first computer was an Atari ST. I didn’t know there were others owning one too!

By: Fabian Robok

Fabian Robok — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:25:49 +0000

“Amiga is ’sooo 1980’s’”

Lol! Yeah, it’s still just an Amiga, no ATARI.

By: Vitor Pereira

Vitor Pereira — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:23:55 +0000

Well, actually I’ve been thinking about it for a while, I just couldn’t find the time to work on it.

By: Martin Vereecken

Martin Vereecken — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:20:58 +0000

Thanks glod and Vitor!
Vitor, was it the IdeaJam post that triggered this? Because I started thinking about rounded corners the day before this was posted on IdeaJam by someone. I just ask because it seems like a lot of people were thinking rc’s at the same time

By: Vitor Pereira

Vitor Pereira — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:05:32 +0000

Nice work Martin! And very timely as I was about to do some experiments with round corners too.
Thanks.

By: glod

glod — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:01:15 +0000

Yes, it was the Company proxy… now it works! Thank you! (5 Stars!)

By: Martin Vereecken

Martin Vereecken — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:39:25 +0000

Hm, tested it one more time, and it really seems ok to me. Perhaps some company proxy in between?
Can anybody else confirm having the same problem (or not)?
Meanwhile I’ll just mail you the file, ok?

By: glod

glod — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:34:01 +0000

sorry, wrong smily. this ist the smily i wanted to paste:

By: glod

glod — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:33:20 +0000

Hello Martin!

The database doas not work. the errormessage still appears.

I cleaned my browsercache and i used even another browser (internet explorer) to download the database…

By: Martin Vereecken

Martin Vereecken — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:37:19 +0000

Oh my glod! I created the database in Notes 8. Apparently with local encryption on and this seems to differ from local encryption in previous versions. I learned something today!
I apologize for the useless download, I signed it with a previous version, took the encryption away and now it should be all ok (maybe clear your browser cache to make sure you download the newer version).

By: glod

glod — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:23:44 +0000

I can’t open the Demo-Database in Notes 6. It says (in German): “Versuchte Verschlüsselungsoperation wird in dieser Notes-Version nicht unterstützt”. Can you send my a R6-Version of this Database?

By: Martin Vereecken

Martin Vereecken — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:59:37 +0000

Might be the very answer why rounded corners are attractive :-).

By: Patrick Kwinten

Patrick Kwinten — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:55:17 +0000

well they are at least very 90’s. But mostly I like rounded corners more than the square corners (the same goes for females).

Thank you for the posting!

By: Martin Vereecken

Martin Vereecken — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:46:10 +0000

Yep, I saw that “so 1980’s” one too, and I nodded my head :-). He’s wrong… I agree with “microfades of color”, but I think AmigaOS4.0 is not going to beat Microsoft, Apple or any Linux distribution out there. Amiga is “sooo 1980’s” ;-).

By: Fabian Robok

Fabian Robok — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:10:57 +0000

I like rounded corners, too (and whoever finds them to look “so 1980″ - well, we both know who does … - is plain wrong). And I think it’s OK, that Notes won’t generate them for me.
Unfortunately, my employer’s CD is all about sharp edges and right angles. Not much hope to use techniques like these, I’m afraid.