Mick Moignard's Blog

I've just been running Lotus Notes on a iPod Touch, or rather, using Lotus Notes on an iPod Touch.  

There's a free Citrix Receiver client app on the AppStore - search for Citrix.  I installed Citrix Receiver 2.2.1 - and note that there appears to be two versions, on for the iPhone/iTouch, and one for the iPad which may be the same thing, may be different.  The config for connections to Citrix servers is simple: five things to enter.  Connect up, sign on, and start the Notes client.

It worked well, with the performance that you'd expect with Notes running on Citrix - I was using Notes 8.5.1.   The Citrix App has gestures for zooming, panning and scrolling, so wandering around the screen is pretty easy, zooming and panning as relevant.   Entering data is more of a challenge; what takes a little more effort and care is to hit the screen accurately.   I found I could take several attempts to get the cursor into a field, or to click a control such as a button, field helper, OK button on a dialog, and not then accidentally fill fields up with carriage returns.  I found myself zooming in and out a lot, to be sure that I was hitting what I wanted to hit, but then be able to see enough of the Notes screen to be able to do what I wanted.  So actually entering data was a bit of a chore  - not something you'd want to do a lot of.   It does portrait to landscape switches well, and that also helped.

Given that the Notes app I played with was one that's a data entry app, with pulldowns, validations and so on, which meant that I was moving around the screen a lot to deal with dialog/picklist windows,  I'd say that the usability was reasonable - say 3 out of 5. With a Notes application that's more sensitive to the screen size, and one that is more oriented to reading than data entry, I'd say that it's perfectly usable.