Now that Notes 8 is out in the wild, we are starting to see the beginning of the Notes community extend Notes thru Expeditor and Eclipse.org development. The first one that seems obvious is a Sidebar Application that shows information about the currently selected or open document. Imagine the second tab of the Properties box ... but much bigger and always open! Here is a screenshot:



Now, the industrious "Mr. Frunobulax" from the LDD forums wrote this. You can install it using the url for his update site: http://www.domiclipse.com/frunobulax/domiclipse/UpdateSite.nsf

You may ask, how do I install this ... you need to access the update site using the File | Application | Install. But I bet if you go to your File | Application menu, you do not see an install. Here is what you do:

This was talked about at Lotusphere, but Martin Lewis also wrote about it in the Notes 8 forum.

One way is via a policy setting "Allow user initiated updates".

The other way is to edit the file \framework\rcp\plugin_customization.ini to add this line:
com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true

Once you do that, restart the Notes 8 client. Then, go to File | Application | Install. You will see this dialog:



Click Next and you will get this dialog:



Click Add Remote Location. Give it a name and then put the URL above in the field. Click Finish. You will then be presented with an Eclipse.org Application Install Wizard. You want to select the Document Viewer piece.

Enjoy!