[chandler-users] Is Chandler the Successor to Lotus Agenda?

[Katie Capps Parlante]

Hi Davor and Mark,

Davor, you are correct that Agenda's influence is perhaps greater on the 
underlying data model. I'm sure someone could indeed rewrite the UI to 
be closer to Agenda's features and focus, although that project might be 
more appetizing on top of the new architecture that Phillip is working on.

You can see Agenda's influence in Chandler's UI in a few ways:
- Stamping: everything starts out as a "Note", more structure can be 
added to the Note at any time by stamping the item.
- Items in multiple collections: We think this feature is really 
important, and have fought to keep it in despite challenges that have 
come up with both visual design and security when collaborating. The 
idea that membership in a collection is just one more property of an 
item has roots in Agenda.
- Quick item entry: notes can be created quickly from the toolbar, 
stamps and collection membership can be added or removed at any point.

Auto-smarts is certainly an area that we didn't invest in heavily -- 
only a little bit with date/time recognition.

I'll point out that "in the spirit of Agenda" never signaled an intent 
to clone Agenda. While many found Agenda to be an amazing product that 
really met their needs (in particular people who were willing to invest 
a fair amount in learning it and shaping it to their needs), many found 
it confusing and didn't know how to get started. Many of our decisions 
ended up being about trying to make Chandler accessible to a wider set 
of people. (That said, we of course still struggle with 
new-user-confusion problems). As Davor points out, we also had the 
design challenge of working with modern expectations for a pim: 
collaboration, calendaring, email, etc.

We had a wide set of goals and inspirations from the very beginning, not 
just Agenda: calendaring without Exchange for small workgroups, GTD, 
standards based interoperability, open source for the rest of us, the 
semantic web, p2p, cross platform desktop applications, customizable 
UIs, and more.

On the one hand, you can think of Chandler as a research project, trying 
to make something interesting out of all of these influences. On the 
other hand, it was always our intent to ship something real and useful, 
and so many influences and directions made it tough going to actually 
get something out the door. At the end of the day, we had to focus and 
prioritize.

Thanks for speaking up Mark -- we haven't heard so much from 
Agenda-o-philes until recently. Good to know folks are still following 
the project!

Cheers,
Katie

Davor Cubranic wrote:
> Wow, has it really been that long since that announcement? 
> 
> But I agree, that's what first led me to Chandler, too. And there was a 
> lot of Agenda in Chandler initially, reflecting Kapor's influence and 
> those announcements, and actually there still is, underneath the UI. 
> (See its data engine, with Items, attributes, and relations. I 
> sometimes wonder if Chandler's UI could be ripped out and the engine 
> used to re-implement Agenda's features and focus.) But calendaring took 
> on more prominence with time, and collaboration has had as high a 
> priority as personal information management as long as I've been 
> following the project. Those are not bad things, either -- the way we 
> use computers today is way different than what we did in the DOS years. 
> 
> And while Chandler is not Agenda, it still works well for me and I use 
> it daily as my main information manager. It's better for keeping track 
> of tasks, events, and to-dos than for pure information tidbits, so I 
> still have some files that I started, and still maintain, in Agenda -- 
> they just don't translate that well to Chandler's work model and UI. 
> Ditto with other tidbits that I still keep in EccoPro (esp. my address 
> book!). But honestly, I don't know of another open-source calendaring 
> or information management project that works better. (If you do, let me 
> know. :-)
> 
> Davor
> 
> On Saturday 22 March 2008 18:48:47 Mark A. Weiss wrote:
>> Thanks Davor.
>>
>> I was searching Lotus Agenda and found Mitch Kapor's weblog from
>> 10/18/02 where he wrote:
>>
>> "The product, which is central to the whole undertaking, is a new
>> take on the Personal Information Manager. It will handle email,
>> appointments, contacts and tasks, as well as be used to exchange
>> information with other people, and do it all in the spirit of Lotus
>> Agenda, about which more here and here. Agenda, for those who aren't
>> familiar with it, was a DOS product I designed (along with Jerry
>> Kaplan) in the late 1980's which introduced a new kind of database
>> optimized for entering small items of information in a free-form
>> manner, and then adding organizational categories on-the-fly. It was
>> much beloved by a few, despite (or perhaps because) being abandoned
>> by Lotus."
>>
>> That search led me down the path to other postings that tied Agenda
>> to Chandler.  OSAF changed direction somewhere down the line.  It's a
>> shame because an open source program with Agenda capabilities would
>> be an incredible asset.  I imagine that many of the current Agenda
>> users would find it valuable too.
>>
>> Anyway, thanks again for your help.
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: chandler-users-bounces at osafoundation.org
>> [mailto:chandler-users-bounces at osafoundation.org] On Behalf Of Davor
>> Cubranic Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2008 8:07 PM
>> To: Chandler users
>> Subject: Re: [chandler-users] Is Chandler the Successor to Lotus
>> Agenda?
>>
>> On Saturday 22 March 2008 15:52:21 Mark A. Weiss wrote:
>>> Thanks for the response.  I am not a programmer, just a plain old
>>> end user.  If the ability to parse information to categories on the
>>> fly is not a core part of Chandler's features, why the talk about
>>> it being the successor to Agenda?
>> I don't think I've heard anyone from OSAF make that claim in the last
>> five years, if not longer. See blog.osafoundation.org for their (I'm
>> just a Chandler user, too) current vision and direction.
>>
>> Davor
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