Making bookmark bar icons more colorful
Have you noticed that the icons on your bookmark bar (the vertical bar on the far left-hand side of your screen) are grayed out until you mouse over them? Lotus purposely did this in order to accentuate the icon by displaying it in full-color once the mouse is over it. Well, it doesn't need to be this way. In order to display the icons in full color all the time, simply go to File->Preferences->User Preferences. In the Display Options section of the Basics tab you'll see a place to change the icon color scheme. By default, this is gray, but you can change it to full color, system color, or pale color. Choose the full color option.

Changing the bookmark bar icon size
Another setting you can change is the bookmark bar icon size. By default, none is selected, but you can make the icons either small, medium, or large. Again, you can change this setting by choosing Preferences->User Preferences from the File menu. In the Display Options section of the Basics tab you'll see a place to change the bookmark icon size. Test out the different sizes to see what you like.

In order for the changes you've made to take effect, you'll need to restart Notes. Congratulations, you've just put a little more color into your life. For more in-depth information about using bookmarks in R5, check out the excellent article by Christie Williams in the June 2000 issue of Iris Today entitled, "R5 Bookmarks: Your fast, flexible path to information." You can find it at http://www.notes.net/today.nsf/f01245ebfc115aaf8525661a006b86b9/bacc002d9b2b20c4852568f1006e265c?OpenDocument.

Discuss this tip on the DominoPower PowerBoards at http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@@.ee6e40e.

Tip #2: Two forms, one alias
Published: February 18, 2000

I like this tip because it reminds developers of a basic capability of Domino R5 that makes doing parallel development for Web and Notes clients much easier to implement and maintain. It gets to the heart of good form design. It can also prevent a lot of confusion later in the life of an application.

There are a couple of ways you can do this, and I'll tell you the not so good way first. You can have a form formula in a view that will allow you to detect whether a Web or Notes client is trying to access a document and then have it compute the name of the appropriate form to use. The problem with this approach is that it can easily get kind of tricky since the forms have different names and you have to either cope with similar documents having different form names or you have to create an agent to save the documents with a single form name. Or you can even use a SaveOptions field set to zero and not allow one of the two clients to save the form. I've tried this approach, and it quickly gets very messy.