I have a bit of a usability problem with Lotus Notes tabs.
It’s a simple thing but it catches me out every day and has become an annoyance that I feel like I need to write about.
When I start Notes the first thing I do is to take a quick look in my inbox and then open my calendar. The two tabs that I have open look like this:
As I open items to read the tab bar starts to fill up and the size of the tabs starts to reduce.
The number of tabs that I need to open depends on the size of the screen that I am using. On my laptops it’s only four items before I get to this:
I’m now stuck, which is my calendar, which is my inbox. Opening more items just makes the situation worse. If I had a shorter name it would be less of an annoyance, but I don’t have a short name.
I’m not sure why Lotus couldn’t do something with the icons to show me which view of my mail file I am looking at, perhaps it’s configuration issue I can work my way around, or even the way that Notes has been deployed to me, but I haven’t done anything to create this situation.
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Graham Chastney 
Amen, brother. I have the exact same problem and I, too, wish the icon for the calendar view was a calendar. After all, I did press the Open–>Calendar menu item, so a calendar icon would be appropriate.
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Now if you have manager rights you can change the name of your database. Its just a database property and isn’t used by anything like mail routing and is completely independent of your directory entry. So your database could be called “G” and it would work.
Trouble is like me you’ll end up with dozens open so even a single letter name makes little difference.
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Hi Graham…What version of Notes are you using? In R8, the mail and calendar tabs do indeed have different icons. I’m trying to find out if there is a way you can control those in this version or previous ones.
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@3 Is that configurable Chris? I’m on 8.02 and have the same icons for both (& To Do too). The ODS is 43 as the server is stuck on ND7 for a bit longer, so I guess that’s the problem.
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I’m also using Notes 8.02 but the template version will be a good deal older than that.
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You should be able to update your mailfile design to version 8. Let me know if you need the details.
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I wonder, if this is a reflection on tabbed browsers too. Given the emeregence of cloud based services I see the same issue in the browser. I’ll be interested to see how IBM, Mozilla, Microsoft and others tackle the problem.
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