After my last post I might have left some thinking that the world of Quickr is all roses. Sadly this isn’t the case, as Quickr has a ways to go before I would consider it polished enough for prime time.
An example of an area where Quickr could improve is its “inclusion” of the Dojo toolkit. You’d think that ‘including Dojo’ woud mean that developers have access to it when customising Quickr. Not in my experience. I’ve spent hours trying to make a simple AJAX call with dojo on a Quickr page to no avail (if I’m doing something silly, let me know). After some digging around, it appears that the full framework’s there alright, but the version that’s referenced and used by Quickr appears to be a modified version that doesn’t offer all of Dojo’s core functionality. Include the full toolkit yourself and you run into more problems because Dojo is already running, and the second instance doesn’t seem to initialise. Life shouldn’t be this difficult.
Another example of where Quickr hasn’t quite hit the mark is the included wiki template. From a conceptual point of view, I’d go so far as to say it’s barely a wiki at all when compared to the likes of wikipedia. My biggest gripe with it would be the layout for wiki articles. Whenever you go to the home page for a wiki, it lists each page, with subsequent edits cascading below it like responses to a forum post. I don’t know where this design comes from, and I don’t know how this constitutes a wiki.
Finally, one of the most astounding omissions from a software house I’ve ever seen. The updates don’t have an installer. That’s right, in order to update Quickr, you have to manually copy and paste the new files into the system subject to the instructions in the MS Word document provided. I’m sorry, but that’s just pathetic. To IBM’s credit, it looks like the hotfix 19 will come with an installer, however, it’s hotfix 19. There should have been an installer with hotfix 1.
Well, now that I’ve complained about Quickr after singing its praises, I hope I’ve offered a somewhat balanced view of it after my limited experience with it. Please note I’m fairly new to the world of Lotus, and even more new to the world of Quickr, so if I’ve gotten it all wrong, don’t be afraid to let me know. For those of you who want to see some more negatives, check out The Open Sourcerer’s opinion.