A supplement suite of office programs?

[Lynch, Jonathan]

Hi Alex...

No doubt that you are right about most everything you said. I should not
have sounded flippant about their product.

My points still stand, though...

>The calendar functionality you have is, I suspect, a tiny portion of 
>what Chandler will have (I don't know how far they've got so far). 

I would imagine so. I just happen to believe that we could come up with
something more powerful. My calendar is a component of Task Mage and is
not meant to be a stand-alone calendar program - but it isn't weak.

>I do not believe that in a few mornings you have built anything within
2 
>orders of magnitude of the capabilities they have.

Please check it out. I would appreciate your feedback. The program has
taken me more than a *few* mornings.

>I do think Chandler has fallen into the trap of over-architecting their

>solution - but nevertheless they have tackled a hard problem, and have 
>built a foundation on which the complete (and secure) sharing of all
the 
>PIM info should be doable.. btw - it's being built in Python, by a
group 
>including some pretty smart people.

Ours could still be better, or just quite different. Ours could also
have the possibility of including many different minor applications as
well as the major ones.

>Other than a name, what would you expect to be common between these 
>different apps ? (i.e. why are they called Somethin'Mage). Should they 
>have common UI ? common menus ? auto-shared info where possible ? a
shared
>library of functions to handle data access and requests, etc.

These are all things to be worked out during the collaboration process.
Some components would need to have significant interaction, while others
could stand mostly on their own. 

>Ouch.
>  Two-way communication between developers who may or may not know the 
>other exists until too late.

I did not mean to imply this. 

>I think there is a need for some more prescriptive mechanism for 
>co-operative use of data ...

Can you explain further? It seems that such a project could only work if
the process for getting from here to there is mapped out quite clearly.

>I don't want to sound negative - I think this is a great idea. But it 
>would be easy to "under-architect" a solution, and finish up with a 
>bunch of vaguely related apps with no common theme, no common "feel", 
>duplicated (and therefore out of date) data, and other similar
problems.

Yes, I can see how that could happen. I guess it would mean that we
would need to have a proper road map laid out. I will take that as an
intellectual challenge, and spend some time thinking about what such a
road map would look like, as well as the mechanisms of how we would get
to each point along the way.

Take care,

Jonathan