Chandler and Outlook: separated at birth?
I checked out the doc on Chandler recently. (And boy is there a lot of it. They've got screenshots on multiple OSes and have even posted the functional spec for parts of the app.) Chandler is an open source collaborative email/calendar/task list application with, as they put it "ambitious plans for sharing, extensibility and cross-platform support."
According to Joel Spolsky's review of Dreaming in Code (a book on this project that isn't even in beta yet), they've spent "millions of dollars and several years" on this project. According to the Chandler site, they are currently at version "0.7alpha4." (Lord help me if I am ever part of a project so complex that it has 4 alphas per point release!)
Chandler's "revolutionary" all in one view allows you to "triage" your emailsOkay, so now my expectations are pretty high. Why then, I feel compelled to ask, does the product look and feel so much like Outlook?
The one insight I see here is that they've recognized that people use their email inbox as a kind of task list and that it would be useful to own up to that and let you prioritize those items, bucketing them into categories like "Now," "Later," and "Done." I don't know if anyone's mentioned it to them, but Outlook has had that feature for many years. I use it every day.
Outlook has a similar view, allowing you to flag your emails. Where is the revolution, exactly?I see a few other neat enhancements on the basic Outlook template. The calendaring view allows you to see meetings in multiple time zones at once, for example. The synchronization feature seems a step backwards from Outlook, though, requiring you to choose to sync up rather than having it happen automatically as necessary. I can see missing a lot of timely information this way, or being forgetful and ending up with out of sync information across users or systems.
The Chandler notion of eliminating "silos" and mixing notes, emails, tasks, and calendar items into one view is interesting in concept, but most people use Outlook this way already. How many people have taken notes in a meeting and then just pasted them into an email to send to the group, complete with follow-up items for the participants? Or even taken the notes in their email application to begin with? Calendar invites are handled through email already.
In the end it feels like Chandler is reinventing Outlook bit by bit, but without making any money in the process. What am I missing?
Bruce McCarthy
in Bad examples, Tools, Productivity
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Reader Comments (3)
From looking over the site now it looks like you are right and they are rebuilding Outlook/Exchange as an open source project ... not that there is anything wrong with that as a goal. They just seem to have an over inflated opinion of what they are really building. That or we are both missing something.
To the topic at hand: one thing I dislike about Outlook (that is, a minor one of the many, many things I dislike about Outlook) is the fact that it tries to conflate all these things (tasks, calendar invites, email, etc.) without trying harder to show you stuff in context.
For example, when I get a calendar invite (of which I get way too many) I ought to get it in a view that shows the context of the invite: surrounding meetings, proximity to the present, related tasks/emails, etc. to the extent that the system can tell about these things. Just showing it to me on a small view of the schedule itself would accomplish much of this. Probably I can configure the thing to do some of this, but why do I have to?
I am a bit late, but better late than never, eh...
The latest Chandler release is 0.7.1, and we are currently spinning quick, one month releases based on user feedback.
I think some of the things you noticed unwieldy have already been fixed.
Also, I think you may not have fully grasped the no silos and triage and stamping concepts. But no worries, we now have a great tutorial and short movies that explain the concepts. Scoble also did a long interview of our UI designer and general manager which further help explain the concepts.
Briefly, the no silos means that you don't have to switch from one application to another, or even application area to application area, to add more context to an information item. Say you were taking notes in a meeting in Chandler (so the item starts out as a note). Then you realize you need to set up a follow up meeting, so you press a button to add event-ness to the note. Then you press another button to add message-ness to the note to send it out as email. And you probably created the note in some collection you are automatically sharing with your colleagues, and so on. Most, or maybe all, of these things you can handle with a collection of other programs, but Chandler makes all that seamless in one.
But really, I'd advice you to head over to http://chandlerproject.org and check the tutorials and videos.