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Mitch Kapor's Outlook-Killer
Kent Brewster writes "In the San Jose Mercury this morning: 'For more than a year, [Mitch] Kapor and his small team have been working on what they're calling an open-source "Interpersonal Information Manager." The software is being designed to securely handle personal e-mail, calendars, contacts and other such data in new ways, and to make it simple to collaborate and share information with others without having to run powerful, expensive server computers.'" Kapor explains his intent in his own words.
But as long as I do not see at least some screenshots it is just vaporware for me.
:-)
Perhaps this is a bit exaggerated but I've simply experienced too many disappointments with software which does not exist yet.
Anyway, still I wish good luck to this project!
It would be possible to make mozilla act as described, wouldnt it?
The mail functionality is there and the calendar is getting there, although it is very basic right now.
--------- I have no signature
Good thing. I despise outlook. I work at a tech support department at a medium sized college, and we officially support netscape (not much of a better choice) but outlook attracts email worms like a neon light attracts bugs. After the hundreth box that I had to zero or get our net engineer to block I'd love to see something more secure. I'm using Eudora right now.
Also, I'd love to see popular email programs support background encryption, something that happened behind the scenes without the users notice, so even the most inept id10t could handle it. It's ridiculous that 90% of the world is sending it's email around in cleartext. Are we just begging the FBI or the NSA to read our minds?
Mozilla is already open source why do these guys need to re-invent the wheel when they could take the mail and news client already exists and expand on it to make it infinately more useable?
I mean isn't that the whole point of open source, not having to re-invent everything but to expand and improve on what's already out there?
Maybe I'm missing something.
+1 Insightful... why reinvent the wheel when there's Ximian Evolution, which already has a whole load of these features and an actual working product. I know it happens all the time in the open source world, but that doesn't take away my right to bitch about it. :-)
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
If they're not careful, they very well could mimic outlook even moreso. Under Feature Summary:
-user-scripting capabilities
This might not end well...
I guess they can't screw things up worse than Outlook though.
so many projects reinventing the same wheel
in this case, i-ve already got pine and ldap
simple tools that work well and don-t need to be reinvented to be "feature-rich"
and, anyway, why is something so good becuase its done "without a server"?
were all servents, or should be, and whats the harm in extra computing power and bandwidth when its all so cheap
lets drop our interest in these highprofile highfalutin projects and go where the action should be, openbios, open spectrum, and opencores
Turn it on, hook it in, no admin
It's not necessarily sensible to encrypt non-
sensitive material. There's a performance cost,
a risk of future unreadability, there's the key-
distribution problem, and of course the difficulty
of making everyone's implementation compatible.
There are good reasons to encrypt everything, too,
I'm just saying it's not black and white.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
No. It said, "Outlook KILLER," not "Outlook Express clone." :)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Now I'm not familiar with wxWindows/wxPython, but the problem I see is that by writing using a cross-platform library, you can't take advantage of OS-specific features. You are stuck with the generic widgets that appear to work the same way accross platforms. For example, on windows, you cannot take advantage of COM functionality unless you isolate the code and make it windows-only. Yes python supports COM, but that code will crap out on linux...
Example: one of the worst interfaces I've seen is Ethereal. Excellent program, very useful, but the interface bites.
> remote peer-to-peer browsing of others' data
And when that data is sitting on someones laptop? What then?
Macka
OK, now I know that I don't have to write a single line of code to get my project spalshed across the front page. Good. Now, what was it I was going to write...
:-)
(head scratching)
Oh yea. I remember. Hey, Taco, I'm going to invent a perpetual motion machine the day after tomorrow. For real. Not vaporware. Honest! I demand my story submitted.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
ALL platforms?
There's no mention that it will run on PDAs. In fact it sounds like it's not intended to. I think it should. If it's a really lightweight app, it should run on a PocketPC.
(Yeah, Microsoft, dont' feed the trolls, blah blah blah. Stay with me folks.)
The very last line of The Article says "In the era of the WEB, are PC applications obsolete?" I think, for an "outlook killer" the answer has to be yes. Not having a handheld version of a LIGHTWEIGHT, MULTI-PLATFORM PIM seems to completely miss the point of that whole "market space." Leveraging that portability onto the PDA-space would enhance this product's Outlook-killability.
You can get PDAs with 400 MHz processors and 64MB RAM nowadays, with WiFi those things are capable of playing in realtime. Why ignore that?
If the software is going to work without a server I expect it's going to need to share information between clients somehow, so my best guess is that it's going to use P2P technology to do this in conjunction with the Jabber stuff for messaging. But without a central server for replication this is going to mean that data will get out of sync if it has to be cached on other users machines, or otherwise a user will need to keep their machine on all the time they want to share their information such as calendars, etc.
Inter-operaterability with other systems would most likely be ignored whilst prefering to encourage transistion and migration from one system to another. That way they'll be able to get you to move your data over and use it right away, but not talk with the Exchange server requiring an Evolution like connector (which is not open or free).
I wish them luck. I can remember sitting in a bar discussing the pros and cons of coming up with a competing product to Exchange and Outlook around about a week before the first time I saw Evolution mentioned, which was on Slashdot.
I hope that they can pursuade the Mozilla people to allow people to use it if it's that much better.
/usr/bin/awake/too/long
A bit optimistic. Better hope that the organizer of events never loses a hard drive or leaves their notebook at home. All the technology and specs already exist to make an Outlook/Exchange killer. vCard, iCal, iTIP are all good protocols for PDI and can be used via e-mail and HTTP (defined in iMIP). The best part (and Apple realized this by picking vCard and iCal for their OSX PIM software) is that Outlook already supports auto importing of vCard and iCal data (no if they would auto-export it then life would be great).
Among the features the email client will have are "in-line viewing of attachments" and "user-scripting capabilities". (!)
In order to displace Outlook, I suppose people will demand these features. But let's hope the OSA Foundation does a better job on securing these features than MS!
Try this on a network of any size. 2 computers means 2 computers (1 for each), three means 4, 4 means 12, and so on-- the number of possible connections gets out of hand rapidly. If you have 100 peers, you have 9900 possible connections on your networks, with 99 computers that might need to be searched at a given time!
This is why we have servers (LDAP, email, etc.) but they don't have to be expensive... P2P doesn't scape THAT well for the corporate workstation, and instead, people tend to rely on networks of servers and networks of workstations instead.
So although this might be nice for the small office, I have serious questions about its scalability.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
what we need isn't a mail client that "LOOKS" like outlook but one that functions like outlook. Something for *nix desktop/workstation that can interact and use exchange server. That would be something else... not another look a like.
It would be possible to make mozilla act as described, wouldnt it?
No. Not even close. Not trolling here, just talking reality, my friend.
Think Ximian Evolution -- but that's such a verbatim copycat of Outlook that I'm very surprised that they haven't been sued yet.
If I hear that sure-fire, badge of stupidity, quoted one more time I may just roll over, die AND throw up on my shoes. Not in that order of course.
Wheels get re-invented ALL the time. It's called PROGRESS. What? You didn't realize that progress was cumulative? That everyone stands "on the shoulders of giants"? Every post, it seems, that says ANYTHING, someone drags it out "What's the point? We've done that with x?"
Bozo. You folks are supposed to be thinkers. So think.
No Wheel, no rubber tyre - no rubber tyre, no tractor - no tracter, no avocado farm - no avocado farm, no Guacamole for the masses!
And then where would we be? Mmmmm?
Okay, so I'm a _little_ off topic but at least I have my chips and dip.
Stoptional
I've still got the dos installation disks. I could never bear to throw them out. (Even today when I'm on a Mac!)
That thing, in the the day of DOS was the most advanced information manager I've ever used. It would mine information out of the context of your notes and relentlessly track details like a bad luck bookie. Nothing I've used since has come close to the pure elegance of Agenda.
Oh, to have it back! And on a Mac!
Anyone got a small paper bag for me to breathe into?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Reads and updates my calendar from the outlook server.
That is the only requirement. Anything that does not do this is be defininition not an outlook killer, in that I will still be forced to use outlook at work. Something I can just drop in frees a whole box from runnign Windows.
I have thought of using Evolution with the connector, but haven't taken a look at it yet.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think the point was that it would run without exchange - that's the killer part of most small-business email systems, the expense (outright and TCO) of exchange. And try to find commercially hosted exchange servers to use. Don't exist.
I'm all for anything that does an end-run around exchange.
closed minded is as closed minded does
yea but you don't usually store really, really imporant data on someone else's node on a peer-to-peer network either. How do you get data integrity (I presume you don't HAVE to leave the desktop on all the time? If you did, you'd just trade 1 big server for 100 (or howevermany) little ones, more of a pain to admin. I thought someone else brought up a distributed peer-to-peer DB on slashdot a while ago...
closed minded is as closed minded does
What "we" need isn't a client that functions like Outlook. "We" need something that feels like Outlook, but functions properly. Well, actually, "we" need a client that feels like Outlook Express, but functions properly.