[HN Gopher] Agenda: a personal information manager (1990) [pdf]
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Agenda: a personal information manager (1990) [pdf]
Author : hggh
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-05-24 11:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| cratermoon wrote:
| Lotus Agenda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda
| benfortuna wrote:
| > Its flexibility proved to be its weakness. New users
| confronted with so much flexibility were often overpowered by
| the steep learning curve required to use the program.
|
| I wonder if Notion may suffer a similar fate?
| thomascountz wrote:
| Sounds similar to trying out emacs/org-mode for the first
| time. I think such flexible programs do well with the help of
| crowdsourced/community-based conventions; Notion templates,
| YouTube videos of Obsidian vault tours, and blogs about org-
| mode workflows and use cases, for example.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| be careful here. you may end up spending too much time
| organizing your notes, and too little time getting things
| done.
| ghaff wrote:
| In general, for me at any rate, having some simple even
| handwritten to do lists and some basic calendaring get me
| 90% of the way there. I was just never able to get into
| any of the systems out there like daytimers and getting
| things done.
|
| I had a work colleague who religiously used a Palm Pilot
| to track to do items... which was invariably a lengthy
| list of overdue items.
| walterbell wrote:
| A pioneering DOS PIM succeeded by Ecco Pro for Windows and a
| spectacular resurrection flameout, via Mitch Kapor's Open Source
| Applications Foundation (OSAF Chandler). You can still download
| and run Agenda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24862343
|
| Thanks to Roam Research, we now have Bear Notes, Obsidian, Logseq
| et al for bi-directional linking,
| https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals
|
| OSS Wildland was promising, but seems to have entered Rust
| rewrite limbo, https://wildland.io/2023/01/16/WL2023.html
|
| And of course, Emacs Org Mode.
| hgyjnbdet wrote:
| I'm still using iCal and vCard for this, by way of simple open
| source apps on mobile and desktop synced by WebDAV. Even use them
| for tasks/todos and notes (vjournal).
|
| Always amazes me people are still rolling their own versions of
| these standards, the problem was solved years ago.
| steve1977 wrote:
| But there's no vendor lock-in with open standards...
| hgyjnbdet wrote:
| There is that.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| Am I misunderstanding what "open standard" means? Why don't
| vCard and iCalendar count?
| steve1977 wrote:
| I was being sarcastic. vCard and iCal _are_ open standards
| - and that is probably why there are _not_ used by many.
| Because many vendors like vendor lock-in.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| Got it - thought you were saying vendor lock-in meant the
| standards were de facto not open (which seemed unfair,
| the standards are transparent and not unusually difficult
| to implement).
| harha wrote:
| Always interesting to see how these small screens can display a
| relatively large amount of information so nicely.
| pixelesque wrote:
| There was such an explosion of PIMs and PDAs in the 90s I seem to
| remember...
|
| My Dad went through loads of different bits of software (paid for
| by work)...
|
| I can remember Ecco, Sidekick, Packrat as names, and I'm sure
| there were more that were more closely tied to PDAs like Psion
| and Palm in the later 90s...
| ljsocal wrote:
| I was an early and long-time Lotus user. It was the first app
| that made me feel like these personal computers really can make a
| dramatic productivity boost. I had enough interaction with the
| team at Lotus in Boston that they gave me a peek at screenshots
| of the Windows version. (Code-named "Hobbs" as in Calvin and.).
| There never was a good replacement for Lotus so it was painful
| when I had to accomplish the same work working across multiple
| apps.
| jbillington wrote:
| What is the state of the art in this category today? Apple notes?
| Outlook?
| walterbell wrote:
| Notes: Obsidian, Logseq and other markdown clones of Roam
| Research ($165/yr, DevonThink (native iOS/macOS non-sub), Bear
| Notes ($20/yr).
|
| Notes + Calendar: OmniFocus, 2DoApp (native iOS/macOS non-sub).
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/bearapp/comments/o57g7o/obsidian_v_...
|
| _> DEVONthink is superb for non-markdown files (it's decent at
| Markdown too) .. One plus to Obsidian is it's all Markdown
| files so while not every feature will work in other editors you
| can mix and match with iA, nvUltra, DEVONthink, Typora, Taio,
| etc. it's something that isn't an option with Bear or Craft as
| proprietary SQLite and JSON formats respectively, both have
| great export options though.. Obsidian to me feels a bit like a
| jailbroken iOS device with too many Cydia system tweaks
| installed. It 's great fun, and endless exploration of cool
| features, but stuff breaks and starts feeling clunky._
| rayiner wrote:
| These retrospectives make me upset about the software industry
| today. The PIM software today isn't any better than it was 20-30
| years ago, and in many respects it's worse. Electron-based trash
| that doesn't do half of what Lotus or even Outlook did years ago.
| (Quite literally--the new web based trash version of Outlook has
| blank spots in the user interface for missing features that were
| in the old version.) We are living in "Idiocracy" and don't even
| realize it.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Alarmingly, 1990 is 34 years ago. Though I still think of it as
| 20-30 as well.
| canadiantim wrote:
| I still think of 1990 as 10 years ago and refuse to believe
| otherwise
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I never used Outlook back in the day. But indeed, now that I'm
| forced to use the web version, I find it hard to believe that
| they are pushing such trash on so many millions of users.
|
| How can it lack such basic things as properly quoting the
| message you're replying to (be it with > symbols, a vertical
| line or whatever) or knowing what email address an incoming
| message is actually directed to (this can be achieved by going
| deep into the menus to show the raw email text, but come on).
|
| All those things were common when I started using email, maybe
| around 25 years ago. They shouldn't be rocket sience.
|
| And anyway, it's still not as annoying as that steaming pile of
| trash called Teams... it's sad how low Microsoft's QA has
| fallen.
| mikestew wrote:
| _it 's sad how low Microsoft's QA has fallen._
|
| Microsoft famously got rid of their QA teams, what, ten or
| fifteen years ago? Not that you'd notice...
| walterbell wrote:
| Used by small law firms, Ecco Pro (built by 4 people in
| Bellevue, WA) was killed by Outlook,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro
|
| _> Ecco Pro was originally developed by Pete Polash, who had
| sold an early Macintosh based presentation program to Aldus and
| Bob Perez, a Harvard-trained lawyer hired by Apple as a
| programmer and Evangelist in the 1980s. It was first released
| in 1993 by Arabesque Software, Inc., based in Bellevue,
| Washington. PC Magazine awarded ECCO Pro their Editor 's Choice
| award in 1996 and 1997.
|
| > Development by NetManage ceased in 1997 after the July 1997
| release of version 4.01. Andrew Brown wrote in The Guardian:
| "So what happened to the paragon of a program? The market
| killed it. First it was sold to a much larger company,
| Netmanage; presumably doing this made the original programmers
| a lot of money. Then Netmanage panicked when Microsoft Outlook
| came along as a "free" part of the Office suite, and killed
| development on the program." NetManage chief executive officer
| Zvi Alon noted that 'As soon as Microsoft decided to give away
| Outlook with Office, we started getting phone calls questioning
| the value of Ecco Pro'._
|
| Ecco was so beloved that it was binary patched to enable Lua
| scripting, a decade after being killed. It was virtually bug
| free and continues to work today on Windows, Linux+Wine and
| macOS+Crossover. It was so well designed that even though it
| predated the internet, it could be trivially extended to
| support hyperlinks. The main limitations after 20 years of zero
| maintenance are max db size and lack of scalable fonts.
|
| In 2023, an open-source PIM inspired by Ecco Pro reached v1.0
| status after 14 years, built on Qt with binaries available for
| Win/Linux/Mac, https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine
| CrossLine is an outliner with sophisticated cross-link
| capabilities in the tradition of the well-respected Ecco Pro.
| It implements the concept of "Transclusion" proposed by Ted
| Nelson and - among others - implemented in the legendary
| Objectory SE tool by Ivar Jacobson. It is also a full text
| database with built-in search engine.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "Small law firms" seem to have a history of adopting and
| hanging on to specific software. IIRC they used Wordperfect
| for years after Word had taken over almost all other business
| and personal word processing, because there were so many
| legal templates for Wordperfect and they didn't want to
| abandon what was working for them.
| walterbell wrote:
| If contracts are "code for human behavior", then legal
| templates are a well-tested code base. Wordperfect had
| great support for formatting codes. Looks like it's still a
| feature being developed for lawyers,
| https://www.wordperfect.com/en/licensing/legal/
|
| _> An all-time favorite feature just got even better!
| Reveal Codes window now displays codes for font attributes
| and text alignment features in table cells, rows, and
| columns. In addition, cell and row codes appear before
| table text in the Reveal Codes window, delivering a clearer
| picture of what font and alignment formatting has been
| applied._
|
| Ecco Pro is great for manually linking items in multiple
| locations within a complex hierarchy, with one change
| reflected everywhere. Hard to walk away from a well
| organized database of research or writing.
|
| _Scrivener_ has been praised for complex writing projects,
| e.g. worldbuilding for novels and screenplays. Looks like
| lawyers use it too,
| https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview
| mikestew wrote:
| Oh, man, thanks for the CrossLine reference. As a formerly
| big user of Ecco Pro, I look forward to giving it a whirl
| this afternoon.
| xeckr wrote:
| I appreciate the overall sentiment, but the Electron hate seems
| misplaced here. HTML/CSS/JS on desktop apps opens a whole world
| for UI/UX design. Not that this opportunity has been fully
| capitalized on, but it's a good thing nonetheless.
| dpassens wrote:
| It's not a good thing. Desktop apps that don't adhere to the
| UI/UX conventions of the platform they run on almost
| universally suck.
| rayiner wrote:
| No they don't. They're slow and bloated, defy platform
| conventions (like drag & drop), and enable a low skill class
| of web developers to create crappy desktop "apps."
| etchalon wrote:
| HTML/CSS/JS is less capable than native development. It
| limits, not expands, what desktop application designs can do.
| refset wrote:
| While trying to recall the relationship between Lotus Notes and
| Lotus Agenda ("which came first?" etc.) I just dug up this[0]
| comment from a different Notes-related HN discussion a few months
| ago that also mentions 'Chandler'[1] - an OSS implementation
| written in Python:
|
| _> [Chandler] is inspired by a PIM from the 1980s called Lotus
| Agenda, notable because of its "free-form" approach to
| information management. Lead developer of Agenda, Mitch Kapor,
| was also involved in the vision and management of Chandler._
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39070631 / _" For a
| moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company
| needed"_
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)
| walterbell wrote:
| The millions invested in P2P OSAF/Chandler indirectly shipped a
| great book :) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-
| big-picture/ & https://www.chandlerproject.org/screenshots/
|
| There was also the Groove Networks desktop client from Ray
| Ozzie, a Chandler-esque P2P successor to Lotus Notes, acquired
| by Microsoft, https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/microsoft-buys-
| ray-ozzie-talk... & https://www.crn.com/news/applications-
| os/22104480/crn-interv...
|
| _> Groove File Sharing.. projects the concept of sharing and
| synchronization and conversation directly into Windows Explorer
| so every Windows folder now has a Groove button in it and if
| you press it, you turn that folder into a workspace that shares
| that folder with other people inside or outside the company,
| puts red marks on files, lets you have chats and conversations
| privately within that folder, it projects all the platform
| capabilities of Groove right into the file system. It lets
| people share folders across all their computers, whether at
| home or at work.._
| atombender wrote:
| I remember doing realtime collaboration in Groove in the
| early 2000s, and it was magical -- this was doing what Google
| Docs, Figma etc. only accomplished much, much later.
|
| Unfortunately, Groove was also obviously too much of a toy
| app back then. The whiteboard app was too simple, the word
| processor was too simple, and so on. It was an office suite
| but it could do almost nothing. The vision was extremely
| impressive, but the apps never evolved to compete with real
| office apps.
|
| Another product that was way ahead of its time and failed in
| spite of it, or because of it.
| walterbell wrote:
| Open-source Treesheets on Win/Linux/Mac combines a spreadsheet
| and outliner. Fast 2-D UX from the creator of a 3-D game engine,
| https://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/screenshots.html &
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=treesheets &
| https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets
|
| 1990's doogiePIM for Win continues to receive regular updates
| from an indie developer,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120483 &
| https://bitespire.com. $135 perpetual license or $7/mo sub, with
| 1990s copywriting.
|
| _> doogiePIM is a sophisticated, encryption-enhanced personal
| information manager, uniquely tailored not merely for securing
| your data within the sanctuary of local storage but for enriching
| and preserving the fertile grounds of your creative and
| intellectual pursuits. Envision it as an Artist 's Palette or a
| Scholar's Codex, where the essence of creativity and knowledge
| coalesce._
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