Chandler lives

It was a PIM application. The kind of PIM application that'd make a developer kick a hole in his workstation.

I'm, of course, talking about Chandler - the open source PIM (personal information manager) app being developed by Mitch Kapor (of Lotus and EFF fame) and friends - which gets it name from the best of the best detective novelist Raymond Chandler. The software is meant to be somewhat similar to Microsoft Outlook or Exchange in concept but then come in at a lower cost than Microsoft's software, have a few more bells and whistles and work on Windows, Linux and OS X.

It's not new as such. Kapor announced the product well over a year ago. But that was all talk back then.

So where are we at now with Version 0.3?

Well, looking over the Chandler site, the vision for the software seems to be holding steady - it's a PIM app for the Internet age.

"With Chandler, users will be able to organize diverse kinds of information for their own convenience -- not the computer's convenience. Chandler will have a rich ability not only to associate and interconnect items, but also to gather and collect related items in a single place creating a context sensitive "view" of many types of data, mixing-and-matching email, mailing lists, instant messages, appointments, contacts, tasks, free-form notes, blogs, web pages, documents, spreadsheets, slide shows, bookmarks, photos, MP3's, and so on (and on). Data in Chandler is stored on repositories on the user's local machine, on others' machines, and on shared resources such as servers."

The idea is more or less to let users sort through all their data like never before and then share that information, where appropriate, with just about anyone. No more being tied to the desktop either. The data moves with you.

The Chandler site does a great job of explaining all the ins and outs, and I'll leave that information gathering to you.

The important bit is that Chandler is alive and kicking. A lot of these types of projects have a tendency to float off into the ocean of hype of never be heard from again. It's not really clear that we need another PIM application, but, hey, if Kapor and friends are willing to put the effort in, we're willing to give it a try.

Here's a release schedule for the project. You can play with the code now, but expect something tidy by the end of the year.

Posted by ashleevance, May 18, 2004 02:16 PM | | TrackBack