[Design] PIM Design

[Paul Vincent Craven]

Several years back I worked on a PIM for  the Macintosh called
WebArranger.  It originally was called Arrange. The company I worked
for, CE Software, bought Arrange and tried to adapt it to the web.

There were several nice things about Arrange that I have never seen in
competing products.  A few things were later included by Microsoft, who
I heard actively tried to recruit the author of Arrange to head the
Outlook team. He turned down the offer.

Nice thing number one: An exposed plug-in SDK.  I added basic e-mail (no
MIME support) with a 40k plug-in for Arrange. There were several fun
things that programmers could do with the SDK, making it a development
platform.

Nice thing number two: The app was backed by an object orientated
database.  Everything was a 'note'. You could create several nestable
record types. A note could exist in a note. All fields were customizable.

Nice thing number three: You could edit 'forms' to display your data.
You could create custom layouts and flip between views.  So you could
have 30 different ways to view your contact list.

Five years after that product was last sold, I still think it was the
best in concept I've ever seen in a PIM.  It was mac-only and expensive.
So it never caught on. The company realized they were never going to
make a product and killed it off after we'd spent the last 9 months
working on a version that was never released.

A new PIM will have to have the following features to catch on:

1.) Open source. No one can compete with MS on the market with Outlook.
2.) Windows/UNIX/Mac OS cross platform. Linux-only will never make it
big. Small percent of people use Linux for a desktop, smaller still will
adopt the product. It will never make critical mass.
3.) Cool features and customizability to appeal to early adopters.

Paul Vincent Craven

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