Lotus 'Agenda' Returns as Open-Source 'Chandler' 106
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..."
Coming back as Chandler? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Coming back as Chandler? (Score:3, Funny)
No, but I think it does open with the "I'll be there for you" theme music.
Re:Coming back as Chandler? (Score:3, Funny)
Complete with a snarky comment after you finish each entry.
Re:Coming back as Chandler? (Score:3, Funny)
"Could that entry BE any smaller?"
Re:Coming back as Chandler? (Score:3, Funny)
"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."
Joey, be a dear and fetch me my shawl! (Score:2)
Re:Coming back as Chandler? (Score:2)
Re:Coming back as Chandler? (Score:2)
Hey, that monkey has a Ross on its ass!
Erm... I still can't find a place to use that quote, here.
Chandler Bing? (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:Chandler Bing? (Score:2)
Re:Chandler Bing? (Score:2)
(Lameness filter: The quote isn't THAT lame.)
Re:Chandler Bing? (Score:2)
Great (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
I would gladly pay for a modern version of Agenda.
Re:Great (Score:2)
Re:Great (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure Agenda was released before the Newton (circa 1988).
Re:Great (Score:2)
I remember liking it a lot but realizing that the possibilities it offered were far beyond the ability of most mortals to master.
Remember, PIMS were a hot market prior to Windows 3.0 - but most products were never ported to Windows because there wasn't enough revenue being made. This was because users would buy the hype, buy the product but weren't commited enough to get past the learning curve and dedicate time to maintaining dat
Re:Great (Score:2)
An accurate assessment, IMNSHO. (I worked on Agenda 1.0.) It's an interesting footnote that the term PIM (Personal Information Manager) was originally coined in a paper about Agenda published in
Re:Great (Score:3)
Chandler has been out as an alpha for years... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Chandler has been out as an alpha for years... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Chandler has been out as an alpha for years... (Score:2)
I've got Chandler on my watchlist, but it's process is glacial. Which is quite sad, really.
Re:Chandler has been out as an alpha for years... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Chandler has been out as an alpha for years... (Score:1)
Free/Open Source Windows PIMs (Score:2)
Evolution [sourceforge.net], a decent Outlook alternative from Novell, has been ported.
Aethera [thekompany.com] seems stalled, but includes native windows ports of KOrganizer.
Finally, there are some versions of Kontact which can run under Cygwin.
Kontact's great, but... (Score:2)
Re:Chandler has been out as an alpha for years... (Score:2)
Sometimes it does matter what the meaning of the word "is" is.
When the OSAF announce Chandler a few years ago, I was looking forward to a decent Cross-platform Open-Source PIM. Now, there seem to be a couple dozen PIM applications on the horizon--- including
Atlantis rising (Score:4, Funny)
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 (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Atlantis rising (Score:2)
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
The age of Aquarius
Aquarius! Aquarius!
Oh.. wrong rising.
Re:Atlantis rising (Score:2)
Re:Atlantis rising (Score:1)
Seems Newton-like (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Seems Newton-like (Score:2)
Unfortunately, that was also what (sometimes) sucked about it. It would eat nearly have of your precious 'real memory' (>640K) and, even more unfortunately, it seemed to have a problem with many extended (EMS/XMS) memory managers, including the popular QEMM/386 from Quarterdeck.
Re:Seems Newton-like (Score:2)
XTG under DOS was the killer app of it's day, but never actually made it to usability on Windows.
A close contender these days is Resco Explorer [resco.net] for the PDA, which does everything you could ask for.
To bring this post back on topic, the killer app for me on the PocketPC is Pocket Informant [pocketinformant.com]. If this will sync up to Chandler then us PDA users can drop the horrendous ActiveSync/Outlook combination that is the only way to manage PIM data between mobile a
Re:Seems Newton-like (Score:2)
The windows version is called ZTree.
http://www.ztree.com/ [ztree.com]
It still comes in handy for viewing old file formats.
It is usable still.
Re:Seems Newton-like (Score:2)
Re:Seems Newton-like (Score:2)
http://p-f-m.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
I had forgot about XTG for windows (I don't think it had the CLI), but now I remembere what a dog it was. Most of us just got the DOS version working on windows and stayed with the 8.3 file naming for a few years. It had some great viewers. It even had an AutoCAD one. Ztree can use external viewers.
I never tried NC though some said it was better than XTG.
Re:Seems Newton-like (Score:2)
Sucked like a Dyson on steroids.
Here [zisman.ca] is a review of XTGWin, and here [xtreefanpage.org] are the XTG Fanpages.
Re:Seems Newton-like (Score:1)
Am I the only one who's a fan of 'dynamic scheduling' in PIMs? I think something as original as dynamic scheduling might be a way for an open source PIM to stand out from the rest of the crowd. In most PIMs, tasks and appointments are independent of each other, with the result that you can never easily be sure how far forward your workload extends, but the
Yeah... (Score:2, Funny)
Both of you?
Chandler... (Score:4, Funny)
Could this project BE better funded?
or
This project is alive with the sound... OF FUNDING!
Re:Chandler... (Score:2)
Re:Chandler... (Score:2)
Oh, gush and fawn. Agenda died for lots of reasons (Score:2)
Maybe OSS'ing it might improve it, but by the post, you'd think the Rapture was upon us. It's not. This code will take a lot of work to make right, It was developed in an era where code wasn't checked much for array bounds, and if memory served (I used it and kind of liked it) it had little code for large files (pics and video) and had no knowledge of a number of varying kinds of file types for linking, im
Chandler is new code, not Agenda code (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Oh, gush and fawn. Agenda died for lots of reas (Score:1)
Also "a lot of freaking work" is exactly what the $5M is for
Anyway, I don't believe Chandler is going to be an updated Agenda: I think it's a new animal that will share a lot of the features and strengths that Agenda
Re:Oh, gush and fawn. Agenda died for lots of reas (Score:2)
Agenda was an MS-DOS product, which meant that: a) it was a standalone application with relatively few opportunities to be compatibile; b) it had memory and file limitations inherent with being a DOS application; and c) it didn't have a GUI. The UI it did have was, admittedly, ugly.
These limitations, whether the fault of the Agenda implementation or not, certainly contributed to its demise. To succee
This Story is Three Years old (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you have chosen C, C++, or Java or
-Jeff
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:3, Insightful)
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 larg
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
I think Python is only rapid if you are working at a certain scale, beyond that you start to go "hmm we can't really release beta 1 when it takes 500mb of RAM to get to the welcome screen", so you end up sinking a lot of time into optimisation and profiling; worse people who chose to go out on a limb and use Python for everything probably aren't going to sit down and go "Huh, maybe we should rewrite large chunks in C++". So it's rather self defeating for very large projects.
Don't get me wrong, I like and
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
I call bullshit as long as you don't back this up with numbers. They point is, even in C++ you are normally using the (native) bindings to you GUI library of choice. That means that the dominating factor for speed of the GUI is the speed of the GUI library, because in most cases your backend code will not be time intensive.
In Python/Perl/Ruby etc.
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
Numbers? Sure, how many popular desktop apps are written in Python? Zero, right? And how many in Java? Well, only Java IDEs really, then you have that BitTorrent client and I think LimeWire used to be written in it. Maybe still is. I can count them on my fingers. Now look at newly developed apps - Picasa, Skype, Google Talk, World of Warcraft etc. C++, all of them.
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
The original BitTorrent client & a lot of the derivatives kept that language. MusicBrainz Picard. Various podcatchers. There are few popular desktop apps, but it isn't zero.
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
"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."
See? It's not about Python vs. C++, per your own words.
Btw. WoW uses TCL in the backend, Battlefield 2 has python hooked in for scripting, where you can script _everything_, not
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
I realised after I posted that I should back this up with some argument instead of just pointing to newly released commercial software.
The idea that if you have a fast GUI toolkit you can bind to it and use slow and inefficient languages is popular but IMHO wrong. Consider - most interesting apps actually do some work beyond putting widgets on the screen, usually manipulating data of some kind. The string "Hello World" takes about 61 bytes in Java (probably slightly less in Python but you have more of th
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
Can you give any examples of this wrt to Python? Having used several Python based applications. If what you say is true, then they would necessarily be slow because of Python. If Python doesn't imply slow, then what you are saying doesn't mean anything.
Most performance problems these days are architectural; you have lots of compute
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:1)
I can't imagine Chandler needing to perform FFTs, and if it does there are bindings for other languages. How fast does your "wait for user input" loop need to cycle, anyway?
Are there accurate ways to catch all of these in C or C++ applications at compile time or with a static tool? I'm not aware of anything with complete
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
You can die a death of a thousand cuts. The idea that you can optimise a few hotspots then use something slow/inefficient for the rest just doesn't work when everything needs to be tight (like on desktop apps). Not me saying this, talk to the Unreal Engine authors about it.
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:1)
I can't follow your argument. You tried to write an FPS in Java and think that somehow proves that C++ is the only viable option for writing GUI applications? Exactly what do you think Chandler does anyway?
I've never used Chandler, but I've used Evolution and I've looked at some of its performance problems. Granted, it's mostly C code, but they're the same kinds of errors I would expect to see in any language -- bad caching, very poor r
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
And finally I have tried to profile a Python app for memory usage, but gave up when I discovered that Python doesn't even try to be efficient with memory usage. No point trying to optimise the main app when the runtime makes memory inefficiency pervasive.
It isn't correct that Python does not attempt to be efficient with its memory usage. You mentioned before that you had heard of PyMalloc. What is PyMalloc for? "Pymalloc, a specialized object allocator written by Vladimir Marangozov, was a feature added
Re: (Score:2)
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:2)
Python is a great choice for a lot of applications, but I think its a bad choice for A PIM. I never had a job working with python directly(zope, mailman, indirectly). I don't claim to be a python expert.
As far as Java is concerned, that is also a language I wouldn't use for writing a PIM as well.
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:2)
Shrug.
It's open source.
Mitch just wants to see his baby running & is prepared to pay.
Re:Dead on... (Score:2)
What libraries are those? wxPython existed before Chandler and twisted was independant (I'm not certain which was first - twisted or chandler). I know they've created a library for http and [web|cal]DAV - but such code has existed for python for a while so I'm guessing they just wanted something easy to use and all in one place.
Saying that, I've never been able to figure out how to
Re:This Story is Three Years old (Score:1)
They had an incremental plan for developing the basic functionality, then simple p2p calendaring, then a server-based repo, then the "higher-ed" version (a not-quite-ready-for-enterprise release). I haven't checked in on them for a long while, but it now looks like they're right in pace with their initial roadmap.
I didn't think it would take them this long, but they are making progress. Not every OSS project has the speed and
I love Python, Agenda, Mr Kapor... etc.. but.. (Score:2)
I download every version..
I TRY to use it...
There has to be some manangement issues over there as OSAF... because they can't seem to ship something that is useful and stable.
Arg.
How is this like Agenda? (Score:2, Interesting)
Agenda? In what way? (Score:2)
If someone made a real clone of Agenda, that would be news.
candlemaker? (Score:2)
My guess is that it runs (burns) slowly and functions (illuminates) poorly, but at least it's better than nothing...
Or "chandelier"? (Score:1)
The surname Chandler is a contraction of old French "chandelier" meaning candle-maker, as you point out. But is this project like a chandelier in that it falls down and breaks into a thousand pieces?
Re:candlemaker? (Score:1)
Something more to think about
Re:candlemaker? (Score:1)
Re:candlemaker? (Score:2)
You're right - it's a dumb question.
Why? 'Cause you're on the freakin' web and can look up "chandler" and learn the more commonly used meanings of the word for yourself.
Next time, after typing "I know it's dumb" and before hitting "submit" how about wising up?
Re:candlemaker? (Score:2)
Gmail and Zimbra (Score:3, Interesting)
Lotus Improv (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
How unfortunate... The handy "View in IE" extension to the rescue...
Re:HOT: MAC PRO DETAILS (Score:3, Informative)