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In my previous post, View Icon Changes in Notes 8, I list all the potential changes to the view icons as suggested by Mary Beth Raven in her blog post New View Icons — Take a Look!. For the most part the changes are very positive, but there were several examples of icons that change contextual meaning either slightly or altogether.

Although the argument can be made that we have the option to add custom view icons, the point is that Lotus and IBM have always made great strides to maintain backward compatibility with older Notes versions.

“It has always been our mission, and consequently our hallmark, to support backward compatibility,� says [Ken] Bisconti. “And that’s illustrated even today, when you can open and run applications created with Notes Release 2 in the Notes 7 client.�

As far as I am concerned, that is bending over backwards to ensure the backward compatibility of Notes & Domino. It is rare to see backward compatibility taken so seriously these days by any company, let alone a major conglomerate. And that is why I was so distressed, as I believe many were, to see Mary Beth’s post.

Regardless to whether the icons changed meaning significantly or insignificantly, there is a proposed change in meaning nonetheless to several view icons. The importance of this is that if IBM were to move forward with the suggested changes — which I seriously doubt they will after the current backlash on Mary Beth’s blog — untold thousands of applications would need re-coding to work properly under Notes 8. The promise of backward compatibility with existing Notes application would be broken. Some may see this as insignificant. After all, we are only talking about icons. It’s not like IBM proposes a change to the name of the NotesDatabase class. However, icons are used to convey a meaning of importance or non-importance to the end-user. They are used to convey the need to take action. They are used for countless avenues of short, succinct communication. So, okay, while our code may technically still work and thus be backward compatible with Notes 8, if the meanings of our views are lost upon the user then our applications have lost their effectiveness or, worse, they confuse the user.

As an example, we currently use view icon #9 — the lightening bolt — in Logistic to represent jobs that are running. I don’t think a sun — the new view icon — will convey the same message which means that we would have to modify the application to use a different icon from the new set or a custom icon. No matter how you look at this, this does mean a code modification. A code modification that we had been promised would not be needed in order to run effectively under Notes 8.

I, for one, will be very interested to see how this plays out.

Note: the Ken Biscotti quote comes from the IBM News story “Notes/Domino 7 release a chance to reflect on decades of leadership — and to anticipate the future“.

Update: Mary Beth has posted stating that the new icons have not been checked into production and that they will re-address the issue. I suppose we can expect more on this after the New Year.