Overall, for a BETA 1 version its been a good experience. Its been at least as stable as 8.0.1 if not more (which is a bit sad, really, for 8.0.1). There are a few annoyances however. I've been keeping a couple of notepads open while I work so I could toss in comments. Here's the list as this weeks nears its end:

Notes 8.5 Client feedback

• Workspace got uglier - unread mark window is odd Its not inset any more. Its a border that changes color with mouse over. It looks like something someone did to test mouseover functionality and then left on by accident.
• Holy FSM, the number of preferences would make websphere people jealous. Too many preferences related to the underlying eclipse framework that should be hidden unless an "advanced" option is selected and the user is warned repeatedly.
• Modal dialog box "Cannot find external name: SIGNENCRYPTPOLICY" with no options, just "OK" -- bad UI design.
• Start up time with bar show % complete. Yuck. If you have to scroll a bar to let me know it isn't dead while its starting, its too slow.

• Already suffering retinal damage from the gray/white high contrast design element view alternating rows
• Designer is way way way too full of raw eclipse ide stuff. What domino developer wants to see ANT menus -- particularly if you can't use ANT to assemble Notes databases?
• what the hell do I need project-build/run/clean for if I'm doing Notes development work.
• They've entirely missed the point of perspectives. I should be in a "Notes Database Development" perspective and not see clean/build/run menus or ANT menus. If I switch to doing Java development, that's a perspective change and the ide configuration should swap out to be what makes sense for that.
• I do like right clicking a design element and selecting "edit in dxl"
• So I can have a "FILE" resource that is a javascript or css or html file and it opens in an editor, but I can't designate a "PAGE" to do that. So, no computed text on a page that I edit with an editor
• I totally hate the order of categorization of the design elements in the database navigator. they don't match the way I do design work at all.
• Escape closes some things, doesn't close other things
• closing/saving a design element (page, form, view) closes the category in the database design browser. Frustrating and slow if you're doing more than one.