He talks about playing with the UI, evidently expecting some of the PIM functionality to start working. I admit that I too expected more to be working, and was initially disappointed. Then I started looking through the source, and reading the various bits of developer documentation that is out there on the Chandler Wiki, and was impressed but what they do have working under the hood.

Or maybe I'm just too forgiving.

I don't know. I don't see that there's anything to gain by focusing on the bits that aren't there yet. I recognize where they are going as a big project, and while I'd like to see results sooner (anybody would), I guess I'm not all that surprised that they are where they are.

Am I too much of a Pollyanna? I don't know.

10:48:06 AM    comments ()  trackback []  

Well, let me make a run at it...

Chandler is the spiritual successor to Lotis Agenda, and Agenda was arguably the first real Personal Information Manager (PIM). PIM's these days tend to be just something that does email, addresses, calendaring and to-do lists, but Agenda was more than that.

Agenda was a free-form database. You just created notes, which could then be categorized and tagged with different information, and much of this organizing and tagging happened automatically. You could define categories, and then define conditions that caused notes to fall into those categories. In addition, if there was anything in the note that could get interpretted as a date or a time, that information was extracted and attached to the note as additional information.

Along with categories, you could define views on your data. A view controlled how you say your data, which columns were displayed, that sort of thing. You could also have date-driven views, like the Calendar view in Outlook. Combine this with the date parsing ability of Agenda, and you could create a note that said:

"See Dentist a week from Monday"

and it would automatically show up in the right place on your calendar. Plus, if you had a Dentist category, it would show up there as well.

Agenda gave you a way to take a large amount of random data and extract useful information out of it.

Mitch Kapor was one of the main driving forces behind Agenda, and it's no surprise he's the chief agitator for Chandler.

E-mail wasn't as popular when Agenda originally came out, so it didn't have anyway of dealing with it. But if you think about it, e-mail is now one ofthe most popular ways to send data around, so it becomes an obvious candidate to be incorporated into an Agenda-like program.

My personal hope is that Chandler ends up being Agenda on steroids.

This page has a lot of links about Agenda, but many of them are now dying, sadly.

8:41:31 AM    comments ()  trackback []