Lotus 'Agenda' Returns as Open-Source 'Chandler'

RobotRunAmok writes "Before there was Outlook, or Evolution, or The Brain, there was Lotus Agenda, a DOS-based Personal Information Manager created by Mitch Kapor. Wired is reporting that Kapor is throwing 5 Million USD at the Open Source Applications Foundation to create an open-source resurrection of this PIM-Of-The-Gods in the form of Chandler, available now as an alpha for Windows, Linux, and Mac. For the Agenda hardcore among us, it's as though Atlantis is rising..."

Comments

Great

[slimjim8094]

It's good to see people using money to create open-source programs. There is some expectation of support and quality, and you still can modify it any way you want.

Aside from that, is this a better PIM than Evolution, or another? Why (other than the "oh, it's being redone") is this news? Was/is it revolutionary in some way? I have never used it.

Having said that, I think it's fascinating that the programs creator is using his own money to open-source it. Will we see more of this? I hope so.

Re:Great

[truthsearch]

From a developer's point of view it's a framework for networked apps. On top of the framework it's easier to write chat clients, email clients, RSS readers, etc. that are all connected in some way (e.g. email sender links to chat client).

From a user's point of view it can be an integration of all of your PIM applications. Data from various sources can be viewed in a variety of ways. I think the idea is to create more open and dynamic ways of viewing and integrating the data. I think the developers are sort of hoping new ways of working with emails, RSS, and other data are invented as a byproduct.

Re:Great

[hb253]

Agenda was revolutionary in my view. It was not a PIM in the sense of an address book/email program. It was a freeform database that you could dump text data into and manipulate in ways only limited by your ability and imagination. To this day, there have been no programs released with Agenda-like functionality.

I would gladly pay for a modern version of Agenda.

Re:Great

[andrewman327]

Does anyone know if this supports synching to Palm OS? That is the most important feature I look for in a PIM.

Re:Coming back as Chandler?

[morgan_greywolf]

Does it use the "3 Nipples" interface metaphor?

No, but I think it does open with the "I'll be there for you" theme music.

Chandler has been out as an alpha for years...

[Anonymous Coward]

This story is ancient news. Chandler has been in alpha form for years. Real news would be when it's finally released.

Re:Chandler has been out as an alpha for years...

[Timesprout]

Absolutely right, 2 years ago this was promoted as a nailed on Exchange/Outlook killer and Python would become the defacto programming language, claims that look moronic now.

Re:Chandler has been out as an alpha for years...

[IGnatius T Foobar]

True. A couple of years ago there was a dearth of open source PIM software out there. Now there's quite a bit. For the AJAX-minded, there's server software like Citadel. For those who want a fat client, there really isn't anything better than Kontact, which really has come into its own with end-to-end PIM and groupware functions. Put the two together and you've really got an end-to-end solution.

Re:HOT: MAC PRO DETAILS

[morgan_greywolf]

Mod parent down! WARNING: Link is NOT safe for work!

Re:Coming back as Chandler?

[digitaldc]

No, but I think it does open with the "I'll be there for you" theme music.

Complete with a snarky comment after you finish each entry.

Atlantis rising

[krell]

"For the Agenda hardcore among us, it's as though Atlantis is rising..."

That's pretty good and all that, but you're really never going to be able to get the dead fish smell out of the place. You're also going to have to contend with lawsuits from Namor and Arthur Curry as soon as you set foot in it, too. Best advise your lawyer to play those two off each other.

Re:Atlantis rising

[Shipwack]

"For the Agenda hardcore among us, it's as though Atlantis is rising..." That's pretty good and all that, but you're really never going to be able to get the dead fish smell out of the place."

If you think that is bad, wait til you get a whiff of R'lyeh... "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

Re:Coming back as Chandler?

[schon]

Complete with a snarky comment after you finish each entry.

"Could that entry BE any smaller?"

Re:Coming back as Chandler?

[digitaldc]

Complete with a snarky comment after you finish each entry.
"Could that entry BE any smaller?"

or
"Oh yeah, like you are REALLY going to finish THAT on time - just like your last 15 attempts."

Seems Newton-like

[TheRaven64]

The PIM I used in the DOS days was SideKick. The great thing about it was that it was a TSR; you could leave it running in the background and invoke it with a few keystrokes. It would then pop up on screen in front of the DOS application you were running, and then return you to your previous state afterwards. I never used the Windows version; once the OS was multitasking the killer feature had gone.

Reading the Wikipedia article about Agenda, it sounds very much like the PIM functionality of the Apple Newton, particularly the Agent. I wonder how inspired the Newton designers were by Agenda.

Yeah...

[Noctrnl]

"For the Agenda hardcore among us, it's as though Atlantis is rising..."
Both of you? :)

Chandler...

[revery]

with apologies to both lovers and haters of Friends and particularly Matthew Perry...

Could this project BE better funded?

or

This project is alive with the sound... OF FUNDING!

This Story is Three Years old

[asv108]

The whole "Chandler is going to be an outlook killer," is a three year old story.

So far, they've only managed to produce alpha quality software at best, after more than three years. I always felt that they made some bad technology decisions from the start, like Python is probably not the best language for writing a PIM.

The requirements for this project have gone all over the place. Initially, it was touted as "exchange without the server," using some P2P method. Then it became an "outlook killer," then a "repository," and now they even have a "higher ed version," thats been talked about for some time.

Instead of trying to do a few things really well to start with, this project has become the poster boy for scope creep.

Re:This Story is Three Years old

[bitMonster]

Why is Python a bad choice? It's just a high-level OO language with lots and lots of libraries. Speed shouldn't be an issue with this sort of application. Whatever GUI library they use is surely written in C or C++ with Python bindings. Also, training developers to use Python is very easy (lots of personal experience), especially if they already know Java, C++, or C# pretty well.

Would you have chosen C, C++, or Java or ... what? I think that if the project is taking too long, Python, or any other language like it, would be the last thing to blame.

-Jeff

Re:This Story is Three Years old

[grotgrot]

The reason for the "progress" so far is that the folks working at OSAF are all senior people, some already "independently wealthy". Consequently you get lots of high level design (or as Joel calls it, Architecture Astronauts) but not much actual real work.

Python is a good language for writing a standalone PIM. However I question the point of a standalone program.

Today you can't tell if email coming from Amazon.com is important unless you also have been watching my web browsing. If I was there in the last few days then I'd be excited about what is shipping to me. Conversely if I haven't been in years, then it is spam. A good PIM can only be worthwhile if it takes into all of your activities over time with whom you communicate and that must take into account web, blogs, mail etc. The problem today is not storing information, but making sense of it and working out which is more valuable and when.

Re:This Story is Three Years old

[IamTheRealMike]

Python was a dumb choice because:

• It's too slow. You say that doesn't matter in "an app like this" but performance always matters. If you are competing for users then performance matters, it's as simple as that. You can get away with crap performance only if your app is so unique or valuable that people will tolerate the lack of it. I don't know if this is still true but at one point Chandler took over a minute to start up. The whole point of a PIM application is to collate and present a potentially large amount of personal data, fast. Python is very, very, very slow compared to C unless you use tricks like Psyco which trade memory for CPU time making it merely very slow.

• It's too inefficient. Python leaks memory by design. Go read up on it - the PyMalloc allocator never frees memory back to the operating system. It always holds on to the peak heap size as a misguided optimisation. What's more, data is just more expensive in Python due to its highly dynamic, reflective nature. Lots of strings are kept around where a C++ program would be using numbers instead. On a desktop machine (where you run a PIM) memory is speed: use too much and you drive the machine into swap hell. Similar problems contributed to the death of desktop Java.

• It's too dynamic. This doesn't just hurt performance. There is a school of thought that claims having safety features in a language doesn't matter, because you should write unit tests for everything anyway, and they'll catch all the bugs. That doesn't tally with my own real world experience; at any rate it can be very hard to construct accurate and comprehensive unit tests even if you are very disciplined. For instance there is no reliable way a unit test can catch a race condition or mutex inversion. Compile and runtime safety checks can do. A Red Hat developer whos name I forget commented that a huge number of bugs in their Fedora tools (all Python) would have been caught by the compiler if using an alternative language. This doesn't strictly mean type safety bugs, rather, bugs that would have been caught by the features of the language that can be used to check for correctness.

• It's interpreted (or just-in-time compiled if you're feeling very generous). This means NO opportunity for automatic program optimisation. These sorts of optimisations can make a huge difference, especially if whole-program optzn is used. Especially important because optimisation can remove a lot of the overhead of modern design patterns (very useful in c++).

Basically, the Chandler team allowed ideology to overrule engineering fact. There is only one language suitable for writing complex client-side software and that's C++: anything else doesn't have the performance characteristics necessary. You can also eliminate the most common sort of bugs in C++ code by using a garbage collector like Boehm GC; the Unreal engine uses this approach.

That said, Python has many tasks for which it is appropriate: prototyping ideas, simple scripting tasks, even small desktop apps like configuration applets, teaching etc. Basically anything where there's no risk of your program being undercut in the market by a tighter, more robust competitor. So no PIM suites then.

Re:This Story is Three Years old

[TobascoKid]

Python would have been a good choice if they were going to rapidly develop Chandler - once they had a working app, they could go through and move parts to C/C++. So they could get Chandler out the door and conquoring the world quick, and then optimize later. But if they had rapidly developed Chandler, you would think they'd be working on version 2 by now. Seeing as the project is moving at glacial speeds with python, it makes one wonder if they would even have released version 0.1 by now if they were writing in C++.

How is this like Agenda?

[Chris.Nelson]

Aside from the Kapor tie-in? Agenda's key feature was that you could just take notes and it'd see, "Meet with Dave next Tuesday about project x" and it'd know which Dave based on the Project X team and when next Tuesday was based on today's date, etc. Then it'd categorize all your notes so you could ask it, "Show me Project X stuff" or "What appointments do I have today?" If this is just an alternative to Outlook - that is, calendar-oriented or whatever -- how is it Agenda-like?

Gmail and Zimbra

[tenchiken]

Honestly, This seems completly behind the time. The lesson of Gmail is that uses will accept less functionality in exchange for more universal access. Take a look at Zimbra if you want to see a real exchange killer.

Chandler is new code, not Agenda code

[control meta]

You seem to misunderstand the situation.

Chandler has very little in common with Agenda other than being a PIM. Certainly there is no Agenda code in it.

I don't know what's news about Chandler today -- it's been in alpha for a while.

Lotus Improv

[Mean Variance]

Drop me a line when that app is revived as open source. It was a unique spreadsheet app that I have yet to see replicated anywhere. If my memory serves me, it was actually developed for Next and quietly went away.

On the other hand, my recollection of Organizer was when it came bundled on my old Hitachi laptop, circa 1996. I found it to be mostly "cute" with its binder metaphor but otherwise nothing special.

One more Lotus app I miss: Magellan.

and an incompatible website

[whitelines]

The layout is haywire with firefox...

How unfortunate... The handy "View in IE" extension to the rescue...