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.

Comments

sorry

[Karamchand]

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! :-)

good idea

[solendril]

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?

Re:good idea

[Anonvmous Coward]

Don't confuse Outlook Express for Outlook 2000. OE is the worm attractor. OL2K, though somewhat vulnerable, is nowhere near as problematic as OE. It's kind of surprising considering how much more OL2K does.

OL2K is more than an email prog, it's got a lot of cool things going for it. You've got the calendar, the todo list, the sticky notes, and contact list. This may not seem all that interesting until you synch up with an device such as a PDA.

I have an Ericsson T-68. It has an IR port (and bluetooth) and synchs up with my laptop. My laptop is running OL2K and has my contact list on it complete with phone numbers and email addresses. If I update a contact with a new phone # in Outlook, then it appears on my cell phone. In other words, if I buy a new cell phone, I don't lose all my phone #'s. Pretty cool considering I didn't have to buy a $120 cable to link the two.

The todo list has been a surprisingly useful feature on my phone as well. I do not carry my PocketPC around. My laptop's not on all the time. So what happens when I need a reminder? Well, I enter something to do in Outlook, the phone grabs it and will alert me. This may not be interesting to all of you, but it is to me. Nearly forgot my gf's birthday is on Tuesday and I need to go buy her present today!

Anyway, this isn't a 'Run out and get Outlook!' post, it's a "here's why people use it" post so that it's clearer why something like what is mentioned in this article is so interesting. MS basically has no competition in this area because nobody else seems to understand the value of it. The only app I can think of that could have given OL2K a run for it's money is the Palm Pilot desktop. It had similar features, though I don't remember it having mail. (note: I'm not saying it wasn't a mail client, I'm saying I don't remember it having one.)

Until OL2K has competition, it is really hard to replace Office. Until Office is replaced, Windows cannot be replaced. (in a bidness setting...) As a matter of fact, that's why I'm not using Star Office right now. I'm too dependent on OL2K's org features. Might as well install the rest of Office while I'm there.

Why not start with Mozilla's framework?

[pcx]

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.

Re:Evolution....

[CvD]

+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. :-)

more outlook features

[Jafa]

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.

[OT] Re:good idea

[benedict]

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.

Cross platform UIs

[maunleon]

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.

Re:Evolution....

[Qrlx]

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?

Potentially dangerous features

[dstone]

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!

worse still Re:Serverless browsing ..

[einhverfr]

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.

Re:I've been looking....

[cscx]

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.